What happened
Five months after the 2021 intelligence assessment, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) on 23 November 2021 to replace the Navy's UAP Task Force. It sat under the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security, Ronald Moultrie, and was meant to standardize reporting and synchronize detection across the department. Congress wanted more. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio pushed language into the Fiscal Year 2022 defense bill requiring a dedicated office, and on 20 July 2022 the Pentagon announced its replacement: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Its remit spanned air, space, sea and 'trans-medium' objects that move between domains, and its first director was Sean Kirkpatrick, previously chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center. Later laws gave it authority to review records back to 1945 and to receive testimony from people claiming knowledge of secret programs. AARO has since become the main official voice on UAP, issuing annual reports and a historical review.
The original account
The mission of the AARO will be to synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in 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. This includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.
Department of Defense announcement, 20 July 2022 (US government work, public domain)
The official explanation
The department framed AARO as a coordination and threat-mitigation office prompted by congressional mandate, focused on flight safety and possible adversary surveillance. Moultrie told Congress in 2022 he had seen nothing suggesting alien origin and that many reports were likely balloons or drones. AARO's own leadership has repeatedly said it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology. In this view the trans-medium wording simply covers drones and other systems that might operate in more than one environment, and the office's broad historical remit was a response to congressional pressure rather than evidence of hidden programs.
The anomalous case
The language of AARO's charter is striking for a government office: it explicitly covers submerged and trans-medium objects, a category that only makes sense if officials took seriously reports of craft moving between air and sea. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported at the time that the services did not believe the observed performance matched Chinese or Russian capability. Congress gave the office power to examine records back to 1945 and to investigate whether UAP programs had been hidden from lawmakers, which suggests legislators themselves suspected concealment. Gillibrand's original proposal also called for a science plan to explain characteristics exceeding the known state of the art. The very structure of AARO reflects a belief, held by senior lawmakers, that something real and unexplained was operating near US forces.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Pentagon, Under Mandate, Creates New Office to Investigate and 'Mitigate' UFOs newspaper, airandspaceforces.com
Sources
- New DOD Group to 'Synchronize' Efforts to Track Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Air & Space Forces Magazine
- Pentagon, Under Mandate, Creates New Office to Investigate and 'Mitigate' UFOs Air & Space Forces Magazine
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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