AARO'S FY2025 UAP ANNUAL REPORT

WHAT THE REPORT IS

AARO — the Department of War's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — files this report under Title 50 U.S.C. §3373k, a requirement created by the Fiscal Year 2023 Intelligence Authorization Act. It's the third Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, after FY2023 and FY2024, drafted with the military services and the wider intelligence community. It's the unclassified public version; the underlying reports run from June 2, 2024 through May 30, 2025 — the document's official "information cut-off" date — plus a batch of older reports the office hadn't previously logged.

THE HEADLINE NUMBERS

AARO received 319 UAP reports in the period — 284 tied to events that happened during the reporting year, and 35 from earlier periods, some dating back to 2010, that hadn't made it into a report before. That brings AARO's total case holdings to 1,870 reports as of May 30, 2025. By domain, the 319 new reports split 274 air, 44 space, and one maritime. AARO resolved 114 of those 319 outright — but it also closed 256 older cases carried over from previous reporting periods, for a combined 370 resolutions during the year. Of what's left: 191 cases went into AARO's "active archive" (real reports, but with too little data to assess), 9 were flagged for deeper analysis by intelligence and science-and-technology partners, and 3 more are recommended for closure pending the director's sign-off. Two separate reports turned out to describe the same event and were merged into a single case file.

THE SATELLITE-FLARE BREAKTHROUGH

The report's biggest methodology story is a new AARO analytic capability — three-dimensional modeling and simulation software — built to identify satellite flaring: sunlight glinting off a satellite's surface, which can look to an observer like a bright, colorful, slow-moving orb lasting anywhere from a fraction of a second to several minutes. The tool let analysts resolve 238 previously reported UAP as satellite flares, a big share of why this year's total resolutions (370) run so far ahead of this year's new reports (319). Within the current year's batch specifically, the same approach resolved all 44 space-domain reports — 42 sourced from FAA civilian pilots, 2 from ground-based U.S. Space Command sensors — as satellite flares, with none of AARO's space-domain conclusions drawn from space-based sensors.

WHAT ELSE GOT RESOLVED

Outside of satellite flares, AARO attributes its resolved cases to balloons — everything from party balloons to tethered research balloons — along with birds, conventional aircraft, drones (UAS), one commercial rocket launch, and one manned jet pack. Civilian pilot reports routed through the FAA made up 21 percent of everything AARO received; despite being less detailed than most military reporting, AARO says they're often specific enough to drive high-confidence resolutions, especially for flare-like sightings. For what's still unresolved, AARO's explanation hasn't changed since its first report: "a lack of timely and actionable sensor data continues to constrain AARO's ability to resolve cases."

THE CASE AARO IS STILL INVESTIGATING — OFF THE VIRGINIA COAST

The report's single maritime-domain case is also its most striking unresolved one. AARO describes a report from U.S. Navy assets operating off the coast of Virginia, involving approximately 100 airborne UAP and two — likely uncrewed — surface systems. Unlike the great majority of the year's cases, AARO explicitly says this one remains under active investigation, in coordination with the Navy unit that reported it. The report gives no further detail on when the incident occurred, what the objects were doing, or when — or whether — it expects to reach a conclusion.

STILL NO SIGN OF FOREIGN OR NON-HUMAN TECHNOLOGY

On the report's central mandate — assessing whether UAP activity can be attributed to a foreign adversary — AARO's finding is unchanged from prior years: none of the cases it resolved indicate advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technology in any domain. The report also notes AARO received no reports of UAP-related health effects and no reports raising flight-safety concerns during the period. One narrower thread stayed open: two reports described possible electronic or avionic interference near an operating aircraft, and AARO says it has not yet determined whether, or to what extent, UAP were responsible.

A FEW MORE DATA POINTS

Reported shapes skewed toward lights (33 percent of reports with a clear description) and spheroidal or orb-like objects (40 percent); the rest ranged from "cross-shaped" to "an elongated diamond ... like two inverted pyramids" to a "flaming object that fell from the sky," and 24 percent of all reports lacked enough detail to characterize a shape at all. Reports of UAP above 45,000 feet fell sharply, from 27 percent of cases in the FY2024 report to just 4 percent this year — AARO attributes the swing to a reporting-mix quirk in the prior year rather than any real change in what's being seen. Separately, and outside the UAP count entirely, AARO logged 50 drone-incursion reports near U.S. nuclear infrastructure — up 178 percent from 18 the year before — and says none of them were classified as UAP. AARO's public whistleblower channel, open to current and former government employees, contractors, and service members with first-hand knowledge of a UAP-related program, took in 262 contacts during the period; 255 were out of scope, and 7 led to a request for a follow-on interview.

FY2025 VS. FY2024 — FEWER NEW REPORTS

Report volume dropped hard year over year. AARO's FY2024 report logged 757 total reports (708 air domain, 49 space) and 292 resolutions — several times FY2025's 319 reports and 114 direct resolutions (370 counting older cases closed this year). The FY2025 report doesn't explain the drop in new-report volume directly; AARO does note that its case mix is shaped by a collection bias toward the continental U.S., its coastal waters, and areas with heavy U.S. military sensor coverage, where more sensors tend to produce more reports.