AARO'S HISTORICAL RECORD REPORT

WHAT THE REPORT IS

Its full title is the Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Congress ordered it in the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December 2022, which told AARO to review the government's UAP record back to 1945. The Department of Defense made Volume I public on March 8, 2024.

AARO split the job in two. Volume I covers January 1, 1945 through October 31, 2023. A second volume was to cover interviews and research completed between November 1, 2023 and April 15, 2024, plus claims the office had not finished working through.

HOW AARO BUILT IT

The report walks through the government's own investigations in order: the early Air Force efforts known as Projects Saucer, Sign and Grudge, the green-fireball study Project Twinkle, and Project Blue Book, then the modern programs, AAWSAP and AATIP, and the Navy-led UAP Task Force that preceded AARO. It drew on classified and unclassified archives, worked with intelligence community and Defense Department offices, including the offices that control special access programs, and conducted about thirty interviews.

It is also unusually explicit about method. It warns that eyewitness accounts pass "through the filter of their experiences, beliefs, or state of mind," that a sincere witness is not necessarily a reliable one, and that confirmation bias leads people to favour evidence for what they already believe. It makes the point that "UAP" is a misleading category: drones, balloons, satellites, birds and optical effects share nothing except that someone could not identify them at first.

WHAT IT FOUND

The headline finding is narrow and precisely worded: "AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology." It added that AARO "found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology," and that most sightings were misidentified ordinary objects and phenomena, with better data likely to resolve many of the rest.

On the alleged hidden programs, the report's position was that the ones it could trace either did not exist, were real programs misidentified as something else, or led back to an unwarranted program that was later disestablished. Its best-known example was Kona Blue, a proposed Department of Homeland Security special access program intended to reverse-engineer recovered craft, which the report disclosed publicly for the first time. Its advocates believed the government already held such material; DHS leadership rejected the proposal as without merit, and AARO found no evidence for its premise.

THE CRITICISM

The report was contested the day it appeared, and the objections are worth stating at full strength. David Grusch, whose 2023 testimony it most directly answered, argued that the most sensitive programs were never opened to AARO, so the office could not have found what it was never shown. Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, published a long critique accusing it of factual errors, omissions and a distorted history. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who sits on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said its conclusions were "definitely not case closed."

The report also had an awkward timeline. Its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, led most of the work but left the office in December 2023, before publication, and has continued to defend the office's conclusions publicly. That made it easy for critics to frame the report as one skeptic's view rather than the office's.

WHAT IT CAN AND CANNOT SHOW

Read carefully, the report makes a claim about records and access, not about the universe. It says that the programs, archives and people AARO could reach contained no evidence of extraterrestrial technology. It cannot demonstrate that nothing exists outside that reach, and no review of this kind could. That is the same structural limit Spain met when its air force declassified its own UFO archive: a self-administered search cannot prove the absence of what was never filed or never shown.

The limit runs the other way too. The strongest claims against the report are testimony about programs, not documents from them, and in the more than two years since it appeared no such documents have been made public. The honest position is that the report settles less than its defenders say and its critics have proven less than they say. The dispute is about access, and it can only be resolved by records.

WHAT HAPPENED TO VOLUME II

AARO said Volume II would follow on the schedule set by the 2023 law. In November 2024 its director, Jon Kosloski, told reporters it was expected within months and would include historical cases the office had been able to resolve. As of September 2026, Umbra has not been able to find a published Volume II; AARO's own publications page is the authority on that.

The historical review is clearly still under way. In July 2026 AARO announced it intends to buy a multi-year subscription to the largest private UFO archive in the United States, focused on cases from before 1990, which is the most concrete sign so far of what the next installment will draw on.

READING IT AGAINST THE FILES

This is what has changed since 2024. When Volume I came out, readers had to take its summaries of the government's history on trust. Now a growing share of that history is public through PURSUE: Project Sign and Project Blue Book records arrived in Release 04, the 1953 Robertson Panel report in Release 03, and a 1953 Navy film analysis that disagreed with that panel in Release 05. The report and the source material can now be read side by side, which is the test any official history should have to pass.