Office of the Secretary of Defense
Records from the Pentagon's newest UFO office, produced after Congress forced the Department of Defense to stand up a formal investigation unit and start filing quarterly reports.
Background
For decades, the Pentagon treated UFOs as someone else's problem. The Air Force closed Project Blue Book in 1969 and the subject went underground. It stayed there until December 2017, when the New York Times revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Congress took notice. By 2022, lawmakers had written UAP investigation into law.
The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and placed it under the joint authority of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist from the Defense Intelligence Agency, took the director's chair in July 2022. AARO was told to catalogue UAP encounters across all military branches, coordinate with the intelligence community, and report to Congress quarterly. The Pentagon, after half a century of deflection, had a UFO office again.
NDAA FY2022 Section 1683 established AARO and defined its mandate: collect and analyse UAP reports from all military services, coordinate with the intelligence community, produce quarterly classified and unclassified reports to Congress, and operate a secure whistleblower intake system. The FY2023 NDAA amended that authority, expanding AARO's scope to include historical programme review and directing the office to assess whether any US government entity had ever been in possession of non-human technology.
AARO published a two-volume historical review. Volume 1, released in March 2024, surveyed US government involvement with UAP from 1945 to 2023 and concluded that no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology had been found. Congressional members and whistleblowers called the review superficial. David Grusch, who had testified under oath in July 2023 that the government possessed retrieved non-human craft, accused AARO of ignoring testimony from programme insiders. Volume 2 expanded on named programmes and specific allegations but satisfied few of the office's critics.
Before AARO, no US law required the Pentagon to report on UAP to Congress. The 2022 NDAA changed that: quarterly reports, whistleblower protections for programme insiders, and public hearings. The July 2023 hearing put David Grusch before the cameras under oath, alleging crash-retrieval programmes that AARO's own review would later dispute. Congress responded by drafting even stronger disclosure legislation.
Collection Context
Record Group 330 holds administrative and policy records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The UAP material occupies a narrow slice of a record group that spans acquisition programmes, personnel policy, and everything else OSD touches. But the UAP slice tells a specific story: a department being dragged, by legislation, into accountability on a subject it had successfully dodged since 1969.
The friction shows in the records themselves. Congressional committees complained that AARO's quarterly reports arrived late and read thin. Senate staff accused OSD of slow-rolling document production. The whistleblower intake process drew criticism from the very people it was supposed to protect. What survives in RG 330 captures both the official output and the bureaucratic resistance that shaped it.
AARO is the newest layer in a long paper trail. The Air Force's official investigation ran from 1947 to 1969: browse the Project Blue Book microfilm viewer. The CIA maintained parallel programmes through the same period and beyond: CIA FOIA releases include the Robertson Panel records and the CIA's own internal UFO assessments. The United States sightings page tracks reported incidents from 1880 to the present. The USS Nimitz encounter of 2004 was the catalyst for the modern UAP investigation programme that eventually became AARO.
Document Inventory
| Category | Source | Date Range |
|---|---|---|
| AARO historical review reports | Office of the Secretary of Defense | 2024 to 2025 |
| Congressional reporting on UAP | OSD / AARO | 2023 to 2025 |
| Policy and inter-agency coordination | OSD | 2023 to 2025 |
