OSD/AARO UAP Records

The 62-page AARO Historical Record Report Volume 1, released in March 2024, is the first formally published US government history of the federal UAP investigation programmes. It covers 1945 to 2023, eight decades of federal activity across Air Force Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, the CIA's Robertson Panel and subsequent intelligence community involvement, the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP / BAASS programme, the Navy's recent reporting framework, and AARO's own establishment under the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

The report's headline conclusion is that AARO found no evidence that any US government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed extraterrestrial or interdimensional technology. The conclusion was reached, the report states, after AARO interviewed personnel from each of the named programmes, reviewed the surviving classified files, and conducted technical analysis of physical specimens including the ORNL metallic specimen analysis in this same release.

Whistleblower David Grusch had testified to the House Oversight Committee in July 2023 that the United States possessed non-human craft and biologics under compartmented programmes. The Historical Record Report Volume 1 is, in part, AARO's institutional response to that testimony. The report does not name Grusch directly but its framing addresses the categories of claim he made. Whether the report's conclusions persuade depends on the reader's prior position on the underlying classification of any successor programmes that may exist outside the AARO chain of access.

The seven case resolution cards in this release represent AARO's structured analytical methodology applied to specific incidents. Each card follows the same format: the original incident, the available data, the analytical hypotheses considered, and the AARO determination. The methodology privileges multi-modal sensor correlation, witness reliability classification, and the explicit naming of residual uncertainty.

The 2015 Go Fast Navy F/A-18 ATFLIR case is the most consequential of the seven. The Go Fast video had been one of the three publicly acknowledged Navy UAP videos since the Department of Defense formally confirmed their authenticity in April 2020. AARO's 25-page resolution with appendix proposes a parallax explanation: the apparent fast motion against the ocean surface results from the aircraft's own motion combined with the camera's tracking behaviour. The hypothesis is testable against the underlying telemetry, which the appendix reproduces.

The Atmospheric Wakes, Southeast Asia Triangles, Western United States, Pensacola, Puerto Rico, and Senate Armed Services Committee open hearing cases each follow the same structured approach. AARO does not always reach a confident determination. Where it does not, the cards say so explicitly, identifying the data gap that would close the case. The methodology is the analytical model the office has been working to establish across its first three years.

The FY2023 and FY2024 Consolidated Annual Reports on UAP are AARO's principal accountability mechanism to Congress. The reports are required by the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act and submitted jointly with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Each runs to fifteen or seventeen pages of structured reporting on case intake volumes, dispositions, outstanding investigations, and the office's resource posture.

The FY2023 report, the first under the AARO mandate, established the format. It documented 274 new UAP reports during the reporting period, of which AARO assessed approximately half as case-closed via mundane explanations (commercial aircraft, balloons, weather phenomena), approximately a third as carrying insufficient data to resolve, and the residual unresolved category as warranting continued analytical attention. The FY2024 report extended the same framework to the following reporting period.

The Annual Reports are the public-facing accountability document for the office that operates the case resolution cards, commissions the technical papers, and prepares the congressional briefings included in this same release. Read together, the documents form a coherent picture of how the US government's modern UAP analytical work is structured. The picture differs in substance from what David Grusch's testimony alleged, in ways the AARO Historical Record Report addresses directly.