The ODNI Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the 2021 Pentagon UFO Report)

For years the rumours ran ahead of the paperwork. Navy videos of unidentified objects surfaced in December 2017 and were officially released on April 27, 2020. On August 14, 2020, the Navy-led UAP Task Force was established. Congress wanted answers. Senate Report 116-233 gave the intelligence community 180 days to deliver an assessment.

May 16, 2021. About six weeks before release, 60 Minutes put Navy aviators on camera. Commander David Fravor went back to November 2004, about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. He saw "this little white Tic Tac-looking object." "It was aware we were there," he said. As he closed in, "it just disappears. Like, gone." Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich said four of them watched it for roughly five minutes.

Lt. Ryan Graves flew in restricted airspace off Virginia Beach. How often did they see the objects? "Every day. Every day for at least a couple years." Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon intelligence official, claimed they showed "no obvious signs of propulsion." Yet the report named no one. It never confirmed that these incidents were among its cases.

June 25, 2021. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, led by Avril Haines, sent nine unclassified pages and a classified annex to Congress. The dataset held 144 reports, "mostly from U.S. Navy personnel." Of these, 80 involved multiple sensors. They clustered around U.S. training and testing grounds, which the report said "may result from a collection bias."

In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers saw unusual movement. Some UAP "appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion." A few cases involved radio frequency energy. A small amount of data suggested signature management. Pilots reported 11 near misses.

One case was identified with high confidence. It was "a large, deflating balloon." The other 143 remained unexplained. UAP, the report concluded, "clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."

The report was careful. The strange flight characteristics "could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception." UAP "probably lack a single explanation." It offered five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry programs, foreign adversary systems, and "other." It also named the stigma that keeps people from reporting. A senior official said there were "no clear indications that there is any nonterrestrial explanation." Then: "we will go wherever the data takes us."

Senator Mark Warner called it "rather inconclusive." Senator Marco Rubio called it "an important first step." Mick West argued that "UAPs are unidentified because of limited data." Robert Sheaffer was blunt: "There are no aliens here on Earth." Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies saw "a scientific problem that deserves serious attention."

November 23, 2021. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group to replace the task force. It later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The 2022 annual report, released January 12, 2023, counted 510 reports in total. Of 366 new reports, 163 were balloon or balloon-like. 171 remained "uncharacterized and unattributed." AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick spoke of "interesting flight dynamics."

The 2021 report joined a long line of official inquiries, from Project Sign and Project Blue Book to the Robertson Panel and the Condon Committee. Nine pages. One balloon. And 143 cases the government could not explain.