ConceptUAP Task Force (UAPTF)

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was formally established by the U.S. Department of Defense on 4 August 2020, under the operational lead of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the senior reporting authority of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USD(I&S)). The Task Force was the direct successor to the more loosely-organized Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, 2008-2012, formally a DIA program with significant Bigelow Aerospace contract support under AAWSAP) and to the unofficial Navy-led informal working group that had been collating East Coast Roosevelt-deployment encounter data 2014-2019.

The UAPTF’s primary statutory output was the Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, an unclassified report submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on 25 June 2021, in response to a Section 1652 reporting requirement attached to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as committee chairman. The Preliminary Assessment analyzed 144 incident reports from U.S. government sources 2004-2021; of these, 1 was definitively identified (a deflating balloon), 18 displayed unusual flight characteristics, and the remaining 143 required further investigation with no foreclosure of explanation including “advanced foreign technology” or “another explanation”. The Assessment was the first unclassified DoD-side acknowledgment that UAP constituted a flight-safety and counter-intelligence concern requiring systematic study.

David Grusch (then Maj., USAF) served as the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency representative to the UAPTF from 2019 to mid-2022. The Task Force was disestablished on 23 November 2021 and superseded by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), itself superseded by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) on 15 July 2022 (Section 1683, FY2022 NDAA). The 2020-2022 UAPTF period is the institutional bridge between the AATIP/AAWSAP era and the AARO era; the 144-case Preliminary Assessment remains the most-cited single document from the period.