AARO Explained: The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office

This article documents widely-reported accounts and historical records of unexplained phenomena. It does not assert supernatural causation.

In July 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense stood up a new office with a name that reads like bureaucratic poetry: the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Its mandate — to detect, identify, and attribute unidentified anomalous phenomena across air, sea, space, and subsurface domains — marked the most ambitious institutionalization of UAP investigation the U.S. government had attempted since the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969. Whether AARO represents a genuine transparency effort or a carefully managed information operation remains, depending on who you ask, an open question. What is documented is what the office has done, what it has found, and what critics say it has missed.

Origins: From Blue Book to AARO

AARO did not emerge from nothing. It is the most recent link in a chain of government UAP structures that accelerated rapidly after 2017, when the New York Times published its landmark investigation into the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the now-iconic “Tic Tac” encounters reported by U.S. Navy pilots.

The immediate predecessor bodies are worth naming precisely, because the lineage matters to understanding AARO’s authority. The UAP Task Force (UAPTF) was established by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security in August 2020, largely in response to pressure from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led at the time by Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner. The task force produced a now-well-known preliminary assessment in June 2021 — nine pages, largely unclassified — that examined 144 UAP reports from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021 and concluded that the majority remained unexplained.

Then came the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, stood up in November 2021 to coordinate across military services. It was short-lived. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 directed the creation of a more permanent, better-resourced successor. AARO formally began operations in July 2022 under the authority of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, with its establishment codified and expanded through the FY2023 NDAA, signed into law in December 2022.

The 2023 NDAA language was significant. It broadened AARO’s scope beyond aircraft and objects in U.S. airspace to include transmedium phenomena — objects or effects reported to operate across air, water, and space — and gave the office explicit authority to receive, assess, and refer whistleblower disclosures related to UAP programs. That last provision would become contentious.

Structure and Leadership

AARO sits within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence. Its stated mission encompasses five functional areas: surveillance and collection, identification and attribution, scientific analysis, mitigation and defeat of UAP that pose safety or security threats, and reporting to Congress and the public.

The office’s first director was Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence officer who had previously served as chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. Kirkpatrick took the helm in June 2022 and brought a firmly analytical public posture to the role. In congressional testimony and public statements, he consistently emphasized the importance of sensor data over eyewitness accounts and argued that the majority of UAP reports, when investigated with sufficient data, resolve into prosaic explanations — sensor artifacts, atmospheric phenomena, adversary drones, or misidentified civilian aircraft.

Kirkpatrick departed in December 2023, publishing a pointed op-ed in Scientific American shortly after leaving office in which he described a “persistent and aggressive effort” by UAP advocates to pressure, undermine, and misrepresent his office’s work. He named no specific individuals but the criticism was widely interpreted as directed at figures in the disclosure advocacy community.

Tim Phillips was named AARO’s director in 2024. Phillips came from an intelligence community background and has maintained a lower public profile than his predecessor, though the office has continued its statutory reporting obligations under his leadership.

AARO operates in coordination with the military services, the intelligence community, and interagency partners including NASA. The office has a public-facing reporting mechanism — a web portal allowing current or former U.S. government employees, contractors, or military personnel to submit UAP-related information, including claims about legacy programs.

The Historical Records Review Team and the 2024 Report

One of AARO’s most scrutinized assignments was the Historical Records Review Team, or HRRT — a dedicated unit tasked with investigating U.S. government UAP-related programs, activities, and investments dating back to 1945. The HRRT effort was mandated by the FY2023 NDAA, which directed AARO to produce a comprehensive historical review and deliver it to Congress.

The first volume of that report was delivered to Congress and released publicly in March 2024. Its central finding drew immediate attention and immediate controversy: AARO stated that it had found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government, or any private entity operating on its behalf, had ever recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft or biological material of non-human origin. The report examined programs and claims reaching back to the Roswell incident of 1947 and specifically addressed allegations that had circulated in the disclosure community for decades — including claims about crash retrieval programs, reverse-engineering efforts, and the existence of deeply compartmented programs hidden from congressional oversight.

The report did not claim that UAP are mundane or that all cases are explained. It documented numerous historical cases and programs — including the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) contract under AATIP, the Skinwalker Ranch research, and various DIA-funded studies — and attempted to trace how rumors of extraterrestrial recovery programs had propagated through the classified community over decades, in some cases through misidentified or embellished accounts of genuine black programs involving advanced U.S. or foreign technology.

Volume II of the historical review, which was expected to address additional classified program information, had been referenced but not publicly released as of early 2025.

Controversies: Grusch, the Wilson-Davis Memo, and Pushback from the Disclosure Community

AARO’s credibility as an investigative body has been contested from multiple directions, but the most prominent challenge came from David Grusch, a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office officer who served as a representative to the UAP Task Force before AARO’s founding. In June 2023, Grusch went public — first through journalists Ross Coulthart and Brynn Tannehill in The Debrief, then in congressional testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security — with claims that the U.S. government possesses recovered non-human spacecraft and biologics, and that this information has been withheld from Congress through improper use of special access programs.

Grusch stated that he had filed a whistleblower disclosure with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which reportedly found his complaint “credible and urgent.” He explicitly stated that he had not been interviewed by AARO before going public, and that the office had not followed up adequately on information he and others had provided through official channels. AARO disputed elements of this characterization. Kirkpatrick testified that the office had processed Grusch’s referral appropriately.

The Wilson-Davis memo entered the public record separately but became entangled in these debates. The document — reportedly a set of notes from a 2002 meeting between Admiral Thomas Wilson, then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and astrophysicist Eric Davis — purports to describe Wilson’s attempts to gain access to a highly compartmented crash retrieval program and being denied. Wilson has publicly denied the memo’s authenticity and denied the conversation occurred as described. Davis has not confirmed or denied the document. AARO’s 2024 historical report addressed the memo, finding no corroborating evidence for the program it describes and noting Wilson’s denial.

Ross Coulthart, the Australian investigative journalist and author of In Plain Sight (2021), has been one of the more persistent critics of AARO’s conclusions. Coulthart has argued in broadcast interviews and public commentary that AARO’s structure — sitting within the very national security apparatus it is tasked with investigating — creates an inherent conflict of interest, and that the office’s access to the most sensitive compartmented programs has been deliberately constrained. He has pointed to the reluctance of alleged program insiders to come forward to AARO specifically as evidence that the office is not trusted by those with direct knowledge.

These are documented criticisms, not confirmed findings. AARO’s own reports acknowledge limitations in its access and note ongoing efforts to obtain security clearances and program access necessary for a complete historical review.

Annual Reporting and Where AARO Stands in 2025

AARO is required by statute to submit annual reports to Congress detailing UAP incidents reported to the office, trends in reporting, and progress on its identification and attribution mission. The office released its first unclassified annual report in January 2023, covering data through the second half of 2022, and has continued producing classified and unclassified versions since.

The reporting data has grown substantially as reporting channels have expanded. As of AARO’s most recent public statistics, the office had catalogued several hundred UAP cases from U.S. military and intelligence sources, with the majority attributed to sensor artifacts, foreign drones or balloons, or ordinary aircraft. A smaller but meaningful percentage remained uncharacterized — lacking sufficient data for attribution rather than confirmed as anomalous in any physical sense.

Congress has continued to apply pressure on the UAP issue through legislation. The UAP Disclosure Act, championed by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds and modeled in part on the JFK Records Act, passed the Senate in 2023 as an amendment to the NDAA but was significantly weakened in the final House-Senate conference version signed into law. Advocates argued the stripped-down provisions left the executive branch with too much discretion over what records would be disclosed and when. The legislative effort signaled that congressional interest in the issue remains active and bipartisan, even as specific mechanisms remain contested.

AARO’s public reporting portal remains operational. The office has emphasized that it wants submissions from current and former cleared personnel with direct knowledge of UAP programs — not secondhand accounts — and that those who submit are protected under applicable whistleblower statutes. How many substantive submissions the portal has received, and what they contain, has not been publicly reported in detail.

As of early 2025, AARO continues to operate under Tim Phillips’s leadership. The office faces a structural tension that has defined it from the beginning: it is a government body asked to investigate government programs, with access defined by the same classification system it is meant to audit. Whether that tension is resolvable within existing institutions — or whether it requires the kind of independent review board some in Congress have proposed — is a question the office itself cannot answer.

What AARO has produced is a documented record: case reports, historical analysis, congressional testimony, and a formal conclusion that no retrieved non-human technology has been verified. What remains unresolved is whether that record reflects the full picture — or the portion of the picture the classification system permits the office to see. That is not a rhetorical question. It is, at this point, a live institutional and legislative one, and it is unlikely to be settled quietly.

Related case files

• The 2023 Congressional UAP Hearings: What David Grusch Said Under Oath
• AATIP: The Pentagon’s $22 Million UFO Program
• Project Blue Book: 17 Years of US Air Force UFO Investigation
• Project Sign and Project Grudge: The Pre-Blue Book UFO Investigations
• The Wilson-Davis Memo: Inside the UAP Disclosure Story