Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I

The Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I is a report published on 2024-02-01 by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It covers AARO’s findings from 1945 to 2023-10-31,¹ drawing on a review of classified and unclassified archives, approximately 30 interviews with individuals claiming knowledge of US Government UAP programmes, and partnerships with United States Intelligence Community (IC) and United States Department of Defense (DoD) officials responsible for controlled and special access programme oversight.² The report was produced in response to a statutory requirement in Section 6802(j) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, which directed AARO to submit a written history of US Government UAP involvement to congressional defence and intelligence committees.³ It constitutes the first volume of what AARO designates the Historical Record Report (HR2); a companion document, the AARO Historical Record Report (HR2) Volume II, was to cover findings from interviews and research completed after 2023-10-31.

AARO’s central finding is that no US Government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) or UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology.⁴ All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that the vast majority of sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena resulting from misidentification.⁵ AARO found no empirical evidence that the US Government or private companies had engaged in reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology,⁶ and documented approximately two dozen separate official investigative efforts since 1945 to reach this conclusion.⁷ The report addresses a persistent popular narrative holding that the US Government recovered off-world spacecraft and biological remains beginning in the 1940s, concluding that claims involving specific people, locations, and documents alleged to relate to such programmes are inaccurate. Where interviewees named authentic classified programmes, AARO found they had mistakenly associated those programmes with extraterrestrial activity.

The report traces the institutional history of US Government UAP investigations in detail. Project SAUCER investigated one of the first widely reported accounts, the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting of 1947-06-23, in which pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine objects near USA, Washington, Mount Rainier travelling at approximately 2,700 kilometres per hour⁹ and described them as saucer-like, giving rise to the term “flying saucer”.¹⁰ Project SAUCER was formalised as Project SIGN, which evaluated 243 sightings¹¹ before being renamed Project GRUDGE in approximately 1949-02.¹³ A document allegedly drafted by Project SIGN staff, the Estimate of the Situation (1948), reportedly concluded UFOs were interplanetary in origin but was rejected by United States Air Force (USAF) Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg as lacking proof.¹² Project GRUDGE investigated 244 sightings¹⁴ before being reorganised in late 1951-10 under Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who also served as the initial leader of Project BLUE BOOK.¹⁵ Ruppelt created Project BEAR, a contract with the Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI) for scientific support.¹⁶ Project BLUE BOOK, based at USA, Ohio, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, recorded 12,618 UFO sightings between 1947 and 1969,¹⁷ of which 701 remained unidentified.¹⁸ It was terminated on 1969-12-17 by Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Jr. Seamans,¹⁹ leaving approximately a 40-year gap before the next dedicated investigation programme.²⁰ During this period, the CIA-sponsored The Robertson Panel, led by physicist H. P. Robertson and convened after a surge in sightings over USA, District of Columbia, Washington in the summer of 1952, unanimously concluded there was no evidence of a national security threat from UFOs or that they were extraterrestrial in origin.²¹ The University of Colorado study under physicist Edward U. Condon, documented in The Condon Report, concluded that two decades of UFO study had added nothing to scientific knowledge.²² Regarding the Roswell incident (1947), in which metallic and rubber debris from a crashed balloon recovered near USA, New Mexico, Roswell Army Air Field in 1947-07 generated enduring conspiracy claims,²³ the 1995 USAF investigation found no indication of a UFO event, with the debris assessed to be consistent with a Project Mogul balloon.²⁴

The report examines post-2009 investigations in detail. At the direction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 22 million US dollars were appropriated for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to assess foreign advanced aerospace threats, leading to the establishment of the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP), also known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), in 2009.²⁵ AAWSAP/AATIP was terminated in 2012 and subsequently its supporters attempted, without success, to revive it under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the prospective Special Access Programme codenamed KONA BLUE.²⁶ No extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected under KONA BLUE, which was rejected by DHS leadership for lacking merit.²⁷ The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), established by David L. Norquist in 2020-08 under Department of the Navy leadership, was subsequently renamed AARO effective 2022-07-15.²⁸ The UAP Independent Study Team (UAPIST), established by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a subordinate group of its Earth Science Advisory Committee, released its report in 2023-09 focusing on identifying the best data streams for resolving UAP cases.

The report’s findings address two primary narratives that emerged from AARO’s interviews. The first alleges that the US Government and industry partners have possessed and tested off-world technology since approximately 1947 or 1964, concealed from United States Congress and the public. The second concerns UAP sightings near US nuclear facilities allegedly causing malfunctions in intercontinental ballistic missiles, with AARO interviewing five former United States Army and USAF members who served near intercontinental ballistic missile silos at USA, Montana, Malmstrom Air Force Base, USA, South Dakota, Ellsworth Air Force Base, USA, California, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and USA, North Dakota, Minot Air Force Base between 1966 and 1977. In addressing the first narrative, AARO determined that claims were in most cases traceable to a consistent group of individuals with ties to the cancelled AAWSAP/AATIP effort,²⁹ and that company executives and officials named by interviewees denied on the record any involvement in extraterrestrial technology programmes. A physical sample claimed to originate from a crashed off-world spacecraft was analysed and found to be a manufactured terrestrial alloy composed primarily of magnesium, zinc, and bismuth.³⁰ The alleged 1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate on UFOs cited by interviewees as proof of UAP crashes was assessed as inauthentic after consultation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). AARO concluded that most UAP sightings were attributable to misidentification of ordinary phenomena, new technologies, or classified programmes — including experimental aircraft such as the U-2 Dragon Lady, A-12, F-117A Nighthawk, B-2 Spirit, and unmanned systems including the Predator, Reaper, Dark Star, Sentinel, and Global Hawk — and that investigative efforts dating to 1945 had uniformly reached this conclusion.²⁸ AARO’s investigative efforts found that most UAP sightings were the result of misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomena,²⁸ and assessed that if additional, quality data were available, most unsolved cases could similarly be resolved.³¹