AARO Historical Record Report, Volume 1 (2024)

The law came first. Section 6802(j) of the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act called for "a written report detailing the historical record of the United States Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena." The job went to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO.

Volume I would cover 1945 to 31 October 2023. AARO searched The National Archives, the CIA, DIA, the Department of Energy, NSA, NGA, the military services and the combatant commands. The finished report ran to 63 pages. It is dated February 2024.

Then came the interviews. About 30 people claimed knowledge of alleged government involvement in off-world technology, or of UAP incidents at nuclear facilities. The report named none of them.

What they described was extraordinary. That the government and industry held "12 spacecraft recovered from different crash events prior to 1970", some of them "intact". That a senior military officer had touched the surface of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. That US Special Forces loaded containers onto one during a humanitarian operation abroad in 2009. Five former US Air Force members from Malmstrom, Ellsworth, Vandenberg and Minot described UAP near ICBM silos. Launch control systems, they said, were disrupted.

March 6, 2024. Acting AARO Director Tim Phillips briefed reporters in private. That same day Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's former director, published an op-ed in Scientific American. On March 8 the report went public.

Its central finding was blunt. "AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology." Interviewees had named real classified programs but "mistakenly associated" them with alien activity. The claims were "in large part, the result of circular reporting." The officer who touched a craft denied saying so. He suggested he may have meant an F-117 Nighthawk. "Aliens" turned out to be a test unit's nickname. A purported 1961 intelligence estimate was judged inauthentic. A metal specimen called "Art's Parts", publicly claimed as 1947 Roswell debris, was "mostly of magnesium". The report also described KONA BLUE, a proposed program to reverse-engineer recovered craft. Supporters of the cancelled AAWSAP and Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program efforts had proposed it. It was never funded.

For the sightings themselves, AARO pointed to secret aircraft. Project Mogul balloons near Roswell. The U-2, cruising at about 60,000 feet and still lit by the sun after it had set for airline pilots far below. The A-12, the F-117, the B-2, the Dark Star drone. "More than half of the UFO reports investigated in the 1950s and 1960s were assessed to be U.S. reconnaissance flights," the report said.

The critics answered quickly. FOIA records showed that AARO had repeatedly invited David Grusch, whose 2023 congressional testimony made claims the report answers, to an interview. He declined. Phillips would not say whether Grusch or Luis Elizondo had been interviewed. Christopher Mellon replied with about 16,000 words in The Debrief. On X he called it "perhaps the worst government report I've ever seen." He listed what it skimmed or left out, from the 1952 Washington flap to Rendlesham in 1980 and Nimitz in 2004. He also noted that Jacques Vallée was never consulted. Rep. Tim Burchett called it "Classic self-fulfilled prophesy."

Oak Ridge National Laboratory later called the metal "likely a test object, a manufacturing product or byproduct." A second volume was promised. Its status remains unclear. For the Pentagon, Volume I is the official answer to decades of crash retrieval claims. For its critics, the argument is far from over.