InvestigationAARO (2022–present)

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on 15 July 2022 under Section 1683 of the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act. It is the latest and most broadly-chartered link in a fast-moving chain of offices: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the UAP Task Force gave way in late 2021 to the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), which AARO absorbed in 2022, inheriting a continuous paper-record custodianship that traces back through the Sign/Grudge/Blue Book lineage to 1947.

Unlike its predecessors, AARO’s mandate is explicitly ‘all-domain’ — covering anomalous objects in air, sea, space, and transmedium regimes (objects crossing between them) — and, crucially, it carries a statutory charter to investigate historical claims of legacy U.S. UAP programs. This is the first time Congress directed the executive branch to investigate itself on the UFO question. AARO also stood up a public reporting portal and an intake pipeline for current and former government personnel with firsthand knowledge.

Its first director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick — a career intelligence official with a PhD in atomic and molecular physics and prior service as chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center — led the office from July 2022 until his resignation effective 1 December 2023, after which Tim Phillips served in an acting capacity. Kirkpatrick became, in effect, the public face of the government’s skeptical institutional position during the most intense disclosure pressure of the modern era.

AARO’s defining public moment was its collision with the testimony of David Grusch. On 27 July 2023, the day after Grusch told a House Oversight subcommittee under oath that the United States operated a concealed program to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of nonhuman origin, AARO’s standing position — that it had found ‘no verifiable information’ substantiating the past or present existence of any such program — became the government’s formal counter-pole to the most serious disclosure claim of the era.

AARO formalized that position in its Historical Record Report Volume 1 (March 2024), which concluded, after interviewing more than thirty witnesses claiming knowledge of alleged extraterrestrial-materials programs, that no evidence supported the existence of recovered-nonhuman-craft programs and that many such claims traced to misidentified authentic (and often still-classified) terrestrial programs. The report drew immediate criticism — including from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, AARO’s own statutory sponsor, who called it ‘incomplete.’ The unresolved tension between AARO’s categorical denials and the sworn testimony it has been unable either to confirm or to close out is the live edge of the contemporary record.