Pentagon UFO office received more than 700 reports in past year

The Pentagon's UFO office has received more than 700 reports, a newly declassified assessment reveals.

It's a dramatic increase in witness sightings and accounts that adds to a growing list and comes as former Defense Department officials claim the U.S. has technology far beyond human capabilities.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 757 reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) from May 1, 2023, to June 1, 2024, according to a report declassified on Thursday.

During that time period, 485 sightings or accounts were reported, while the rest were sightings from 2021 and 2022 that were not previously filed.

From May 2023 to June 2024, AARO resolved just 118 cases, attributing them to balloons, birds and drones, while another 174 are queued for closure.

While AARO is investigating a total of 1,652 cases, the office said in the report that it has "discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology," a point officials also made in a sprawling report over the spring that looked at historical cases.

"There are definitely anomalies, but we have not been able to draw the link to extra-terrestrial," said Jon Kosloski, director of AARO, in a Thursday briefing with reporters.

Kosloski said the increase in cases is because of greater engagement and reporting, not necessarily more UAP activity. He also said there is going to be more AARO education so pilots and other witnesses are not reporting the same sightings that can be explained.

AARO says besides balloons and birds, "Starlink and other mega-constellations in low earth orbit" have led to confused reporting.

But the report comes just one day after a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability subcommittee heard from witnesses that alleged the U.S. government is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Luis Elizondo, the former head of the now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that investigated UAPs, told Congress that the government is seeking to "to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos.”

“Advanced technologies not made by our government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe," he said. "Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries."

And journalist Michael Shellenberger told lawmakers that Pentagon sources have told him about a secret program known as Immaculate Constellation that has gathered high-quality images of UAPs.

The testimony adds to sweeping claims made last year by retired Maj. David Grusch, who was formerly part of the Pentagon’s UAP task force and a former intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Grusch alleged the U.S. government has run a secret program to reverse-engineer nonhuman material from crash sites of UAP vessels.

While they have denied any link to alien technology, AARO, which was formed in 2022, is taking a more serious approach to investigating UAP sightings than the U.S. government historically has in the past.

Some of the most crucial sightings remain unexplained, such as the “Tic Tac” UFO sighting in 2004 from Navy pilots flying off the coast of southern California.

Recently there have been sightings near sensitive U.S. military sites, including dozens of UAP in December 2023 at Langley Air Force Base. The Pentagon later said those UAP were unidentified drones.

In the Thursday report, AARO identified 18 reports of UAP sightings near U.S. nuclear weapons sites, with 10 of those involving flights of five minutes over the sensitive area. Two of the sightings involved flights of near an hour and near two hours. All the sightings involved just one or two UAP.

AARO said that so far it is not aware of "advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies."

"We have not been able to correlate any UAP activity to adversarial collection activities or advanced technologies," he said, though adding that AARO would increase global outreach and partnerships in 2025.

But Kosloski said that UAPs harboring breakthrough technologies remain a mystery, describing a breakthrough technology as "beyond state of the art today and beyond where we think that we could get in the next couple of years."

"We don't fully understand the phenomenon enough to say whether or not it's breakthrough technology," added Kosloski. "So it's a very small percentage of our overall cases that, after the initial analysis, still have the anomalous characteristics that one could attribute breakthrough technologies to. It's less than two-and-a-half percent of our cases, and we're still studying those."

Kosloski also addressed criticism from lawmakers that his office has not been transparent enough about UAPs or is classifying too much information.

He said officials are working "to downgrade that material as much as we can," and are implementing efforts to increase declassification, but still have their hands tied because they must work with partners on the cases.

"We need to make sure that we're protecting sensitive sources, methods, vulnerabilities," he said. "So even though that there's nothing inherently classified about the existence of a UAP, we have to protect that information when AARO receives those interesting cases."