Documents / Official release
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, under the Department of War, issued this Fiscal Year 2025 annual report to Congress on unidentified anomalous phenomena. It covers June 2, 2024, to May 30, 2025. In that period AARO received 319 reports and resolved 370 cases in total, all of them attributed to prosaic objects such as balloons, satellites, birds, aircraft and drones. The report also describes a new modeling capability that resolved 238 reports as satellite flaring and 50 drone incidents near nuclear sites, and it states that no evidence of captured UAP materials exists.
5 AARO applied all-source analysis1 techniques and three-dimensional modeling to render a high- confidence assessment for each of these cases as being attributable to satellite flaring. Flaring is a well-documented phenomenon where reflected sunlight from satellite surfaces becomes visible when viewed from specific angles. These flares can appear as intense, bright orbs of light many times brighter than surrounding stars or background light levels that persist from a fraction of a second up to several minutes, depending on the observational conditions. These reports each described morphological features and behavioral characteristics consistent with those of a satellite flare. The flaring phenomenon is responsible for a growing number of AARO’s total case resolutions as the office’s modeling techniques improve and reports increase. The single maritime domain UAP case AARO received involved a report from U.S. Navy assets operating off the coast of Virginia. The report described approximately 100 airborne UAP and two, likely uncrewed, surface systems. AARO is actively investigating this event in coordination with the reporting unit. AARO resolved 114 of the 319 UAP reports, each attributable to various prosaic objects such as balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft, UAS, and a single instance each of a rocket launch and a manned jet pack. Pending review and director authorization, AARO’s analytic team recommends the closure of three additional cases. AARO applied its rigorous, comprehensive, all-source analytic approach and three-dimensional computer modeling to preliminarily resolve these cases with high confidence as attributable to satellite flaring. AARO identified nine reports meriting further analysis by its IC and science and technology (S&T) partners with relevant technical and domain expertise. AARO transferred 191 of the 319 UAP cases to its active archive pending the future discovery of corroborating data sources. The active archive is a category of UAP reports with insufficient data to assess whether the performance characteristics of the underlying event are consistent with those of natural phenomena or exceed the known state-of-the-art for technological systems. UAP cases held in active archive inform AARO’s locational and trend analyses and remain open to future resolution should further information or improved analytical techniques enable a more conclusive resolution. AARO occasionally receives reports from two or more sources which correspond to a single event. When this occurs, AARO merges the corresponding case files into a single incident. AARO performed two such merger actions during this reporting period. None of the cases AARO resolved indicate advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough technologies in any domain. 1 All-source analysis is the process of synthesizing information derived from multiple intelligence disciplines, such as human, signals, or imagery intelligence, to create a comprehensively informed assessment of a situation or event. This process enables more reliable assessments than any single-source method of interpreting unfiltered data.
Official release, from the aaro collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 14 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.