Horizon Accord | AARO | UAP Disclosure | Machine Learning
Borrowed Credibility
How the Department of War used AARO's authority while minimizing AARO's conclusions
The Office
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO — was formally established on July 15, 2022, by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, in response to a congressional mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022. Its mandate includes access to UAP-related information dating back to 1945, regardless of classification level or compartment. It is not a fringe program. It is a legislatively created, congressionally overseen scientific and intelligence office inside the Department of Defense.
AARO has had three directors, all credentialed scientists with serious institutional backgrounds. Its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, is a laser and materials physicist who previously served at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the National Security Council. He led AARO from its founding through December 2023. His successor, acting director Timothy Phillips, came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The current director, Jon Kosloski, holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, with doctoral research in quantum optics, and spent more than two decades at the National Security Agency's Research Directorate, including work in cryptomathematics and free space optics.
AARO's mandate covers four operational functions: analysis, operations, science and technology, and strategic communications. It is required by law to provide quarterly classified reports, semiannual briefings, and annual reports to Congress in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Its caseload as of early 2026 exceeds 2,000 UAP reports — the largest since the office was established. This is the institution whose name appears in every PURSUE press statement.
The Findings
Across three directors, across every annual report, across a congressionally mandated historical review covering 1945 through 2023, AARO has reached the same conclusions. Acting Director Timothy Phillips stated at the Pentagon in March 2024: "AARO has found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity. AARO has found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology." The office also stated it found no indications that any information had been illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress.
Director Kosloski reiterated this position in November 2024, confirming his office had "discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology" across its caseload. He also acknowledged genuine uncertainty — stating that some cases resist explanation even after analysis, and that "there are interesting cases that I — with my physics and engineering background and time in the intelligence community — I do not understand and I don't know anybody else who understands." That admission of uncertainty is not an endorsement of extraterrestrial origin. It is a precise scientific statement: the data is insufficient to reach a conclusion.
Of the cases AARO has resolved, all resolved to prosaic explanations: balloons, birds, drones, commercial satellites including Starlink, known optical artifacts in infrared sensor systems. Former Director Kirkpatrick has specifically noted that many viral UAP videos can be explained by how FLIR infrared sensors handle hot objects such as jet engines, which appear as elongated thermal blooms — a camera artifact, not an anomalous craft. The office's own FY2024 consolidated annual report noted that "all investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification."
The Framing
On May 8, 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a statement accompanying the PURSUE launch: "These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation. It's time the American people see it for themselves." He added that the effort reflects "an earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency." The statement made no reference to AARO's documented findings. It made no reference to the office's consistent conclusion that no verifiable extraterrestrial evidence exists across its entire caseload.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described the release as "the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort," framing the process as a comprehensive and unprecedented review of intelligence holdings. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed his agency had delivered its first batch of classified UAP documents to the interagency committee. The Department of War explicitly framed PURSUE as "complementary to the work of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office." AARO's name was present. AARO's conclusions were not.
Each statement in the PURSUE launch followed a consistent structural logic: invoke the historical weight of the material, frame classification as concealment rather than bureaucratic process, position the release as a transparency breakthrough, and close with reassurance about national security. None of the statements engaged with the substantive question of what AARO's investigators have actually determined about the nature of the phenomena in its holdings. The rhetorical function was public amplification, not evidentiary clarification.
The PURSUE release itself acknowledged, in a line that received significantly less attention than Hegseth's statement, that many of the newly released files have not yet been analyzed for anomaly resolution — meaning cases remain officially unexplained not because the government is concealing their nature but because the underlying data is too thin to reach a conclusion. That distinction — the same one AARO has made consistently for three years — was present in the fine print and absent from the press statements.
The Gap
The mechanism operating here is not straightforward contradiction. AARO does not claim to have ruled out extraterrestrial life. What it states, precisely and consistently, is that it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity, technology, or government access to extraterrestrial materials. The political apparatus surrounding PURSUE does not contradict that claim directly. It does something more structurally useful: it amplifies ambiguity while backgrounding the institution's documented conclusions.
The materials released through PURSUE come substantially from AARO's own holdings. AARO's name appears in the coalition of releasing agencies. AARO's institutional legitimacy — three years of congressionally mandated scientific inquiry, a director with NSA cryptomathematics credentials, statutory access to classified records dating to 1945 — is attached to the spectacle. What is not attached is the finding that emerges from all of that work: no verifiable extraterrestrial evidence. The office is cited for its authority. Its conclusions are largely absent from the public framing.
Hegseth's phrase — "hidden behind classifications" — implies that classification has been concealing something significant about the nature of the phenomena. AARO's findings and the broader logic of the classification system suggest otherwise. Cases remain classified for reasons that have nothing to do with what was observed and everything to do with how it was observed: sensor capabilities, platform identities, collection altitudes, signal parameters. Releasing an unresolved UAP case can reveal more about American surveillance infrastructure than about the object being surveilled. Classification in this context protects the work, not a conclusion. The framing foregrounds mystery. The institutional reality is considerably more mundane.
The spectacle does not require AARO's conclusions to be wrong in order to function. It requires only that those conclusions remain less visible than the office's name. A public that knows AARO exists and is investigating — but does not know what AARO has consistently found — is a public that can be invited to draw its own conclusions from ambiguous infrared footage. That invitation is the product. AARO's credibility is the packaging.
The Asymmetry
The government is currently running two separate processes around UAP. The first is PURSUE — the rolling public release of footage, images, and case files, with press statements from agency heads and a dedicated government website. The second is AARO's statutory reporting to Congress: annual reports that document what the office's investigators actually found. These are not the same thing. PURSUE shows you material. AARO reports tell you what the material means.
The government has described its releases as "tranches" — a financial term meaning a predetermined portion of a known whole, like installments on a loan. The word implies a controlled, pre-planned process with a defined endpoint. The government's own statements say otherwise: records are still being located, material is being reviewed as it is discovered, and officials have acknowledged they do not yet know the full scope of what they have. These are not tranches. The language of orderly disbursement is being applied to a process the government has described as open-ended.
AARO's reporting cadence through 2024 was consistent: the 2022 annual report delivered in January 2023; the 2023 annual report in April 2023; the FY2024 consolidated annual report in November 2024. As of May 2026, two congressionally mandated documents remain unreleased with no announced timeline: the second volume of the Historical Record Report and the 2025 annual report. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment on either.
An institution that has issued reports on a consistent statutory schedule since its founding does not miss two consecutive mandated deliverables without consequence. The question the public record cannot yet answer is why. The delay may reflect administrative friction inside a reorganized Defense Department. It may reflect a resource or prioritization problem inside AARO itself. Or it may reflect something more structurally convenient. An administration running a high-visibility disclosure operation has little incentive to rush the office that keeps finding nothing remarkable. All three explanations are possible. The record does not resolve between them. What the record does show is the timing — and the direction of the asymmetry.
That gap did not go unnoticed. The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act added new mandatory reporting requirements for AARO, including expanded briefings on UAP intercepts conducted by NORAD and U.S. Northern Command. When an oversight body responds to a reporting gap by legislating additional requirements, that is the oversight process working — and it is also a formal record that the gap existed and that Congress found it significant enough to address through statute.
PURSUE launched on schedule. The coordinated press statements went out. The government URL went live. New batches of files are arriving every few weeks. The mechanism generating public-facing disclosure is running. The mechanism mandated to document findings is behind, with nothing on record to explain when that changes.
Wag the UAP documented the mechanism of PURSUE — the rolling release architecture, the Department of War branding, the empty database at launch, and the structural value of an indefinite attention event during an unpopular ongoing conflict. This piece documents the institution inside that mechanism and the conclusions that mechanism does not quote.
Sources
- U.S. Department of War — AARO Congressional and Press Products (2021–2024)
- U.S. Department of War / DoD — AARO Historical Record Report Volume I Press Statement (March 10, 2024)
- DefenseScoop — New AARO Chief Unveils Pentagon's Annual UAP Caseload Analysis (November 14, 2024)
- DefenseScoop — Top NSA Researcher Tapped to Lead Pentagon's UAP Investigation Hub (August 26, 2024)
- DefenseScoop — Transparency Proponents Meet Trump's UAP Disclosure Tease With Hope — and Caution (February 20, 2026)
- DefenseScoop — Hegseth Doubles Down on Trump's UAP Disclosure Promise as AARO's Caseload Exceeds 2,000 (February 25, 2026)
- The Debrief — Pentagon Launches UAP Transparency Effort With First PURSUE File Release (May 8, 2026)
- AeroTime — US Releases UFO Files in UAP Transparency Push (May 8, 2026)
- Wikipedia — Sean M. Kirkpatrick
- Wikipedia — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
- Congress.gov — FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act — AARO Reporting Requirements
- ODNI — FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP (November 2024)
