The Pentagon has released its annual report on UFO sightings, or what it officially calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) — and found 21 particularly curious incidents.
In total, 757 new reports of UAPs were received between May 2023 and June 2024 and investigated by the Defence Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), according to the report by the Defence Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Of those, 485 UAP reports occurred within that reporting period, and another 272 occurred between 2021 and 2022 but hadn’t been included in previous annual UAP reports. Overall, the AARO has received 1652 UAP reports total as of October 24, 2024.
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Forty-nine cases during the reporting period were resolved during the reporting period as objects such as balloons, birds and unmanned aerial systems. Another 243 were recommended for closure as of June, also resolved to be prosaic objects. An additional 444 cases lacked sufficient data for analysis and were placed in the active archive, where they can be re-examined if additional data becomes available.
However, there were 21 cases that the report said “merit further analysis” due to “anomalous characteristics and/or behaviours”.
Still, the report said there’s no evidence, so far, to substantiate life from another planet being involved in these sightings.
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology,” the report said. Further, none of the resolved cases substantiated “advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies.”
Jon Kosloski, the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said in a media briefing Thursday: “There are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the IC [intelligence community], I do not understand. And I don’t know anybody else who understands them either.”
He said those curious cases were spread out over the last year and a half, and there is some video footage for a few of them, but not all.
“But in each of the cases I’m particularly interested in, there were multiple eyewitnesses. And there is additional data to go with them,” Kosloski added.
“It remains to be seen whether or not that additional data is going to be sufficient for us to either resolve the case, understand whether it’s a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), bird or balloon, or say something substantive about the nature of the unknown phenomenon.”
The report was published a day after the second major hearing on UAPs was held in Congress, where leaders called for greater transparency from the Pentagon on UAP knowledge, as well as on whether tax dollars are being spent on UAP retrieval, research or other programs.
Four witnesses testified at the House Oversight Committee joint subcommittee hearing titled, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.
Luis Elizondo, a former Defence Department official and author, testified that the government has conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs with the purpose of identifying and reverse engineering alien craft.
“Let me be clear, UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe,” Elizondo said.
“Furthermore, the US is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.
“Although much of my government work on the UAP subject still remains classified, excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public, all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos,” he added.
Democrat Representative Robert Garcia asked all four witnesses: “Do you believe, just for the record, that the federal government, any part of the federal government, is knowingly concealing evidence about UAPs from the public?” All four answered in the affirmative.
When Garcia asked the witnesses what they believed UAPs could be, Tim Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and chief executive officer of Ocean STL Consulting LLC, said: “Strong evidence that they are nonhuman, higher intelligence.”
The report and the hearing add to what has been an influx of interest in attention on UAPs in recent years that has coincided with increased government transparency around the topic thanks in part to active-duty military members coming forward to discuss their experiences.
That in turn has sparked government hearings in which various former officials have made a wide variety of allegations about the origin of UAPs and about a purported government effort to keep information about them from the public.
Despite that testimony, no hard evidence has emerged concerning UAPs, extraterrestrials or a government cover-up.
The Pentagon report noted a consistent pattern in reports describing the UAPs: unidentified lights and round/spherical/orb-shaped objects made up the bulk of cases in reports that had distinct visual characteristics. Of the UAP reports, 81 originated from U.S. military operating areas. Three reports from US military aircrews described “pilots being trailed or shadowed by UAP.”
Of the new reports, 392 were from the Federal Aviation Administration and make up all of the FAA’s UAP reports since 2021.
The AARO noted that it was able to resolve one report made by a commercial pilot who reported seeing white flashing lights in the night sky that ended up being a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, that same night.
If the AARO does find cases that indicate breakthrough foreign adversarial aerospace capability, it’ll immediately report it to Congress.
“AARO is investigating if other unresolved cases may be attributed to the expansion of the Starlink and other mega-constellations in low earth orbit,” the report said.