In July, the Defense Department announced the creation of a new division: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, designed to "to detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security." Included under that investigatory umbrella: reports of what used to be called UFOs in the air, sea, and space. Now, the office is giving its first update to the public on what it's found thus far, with one especially big piece of news for ET hunters.
"I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash, or anything like that," Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said Friday, per Reuters. The "holdings" he referred to are cases of "unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAPs (a more comprehensive term than UFOs), 140 or so that were included in a government report last year. Moultrie and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO, say drones—operated by both hobbyists and foreign entities—are the culprits in many of these cases.
"Some of these things almost collide with planes," Kirkpatrick said at the Friday presser with Moultrie, per the Washington Post. "We see that on a regular basis." Still, the two note that hundreds of reports have come in since the 2021 government report, which are now being investigated, and that AARO will also start looking at reports that stretch back decades. "We are structuring our analysis to be very thorough and rigorous," Kirkpatrick said. "We will go through it all. And as a physicist, I have to adhere to the scientific method, and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes." (More aliens stories.)
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