What happened
On 14 November 2024, the day after the Exposing the Truth hearing, the Defense Department and ODNI released AARO's consolidated annual report for fiscal 2024. Between May 2023 and June 2024 the office received 757 new reports: 485 from the period itself and 272 older incidents from 2021 and 2022, many from the FAA. That brought total holdings to 1,652 as of late October 2024. Forty-nine cases were resolved as balloons, birds, drones and similar objects, and another 243 recommended for closure. A further 444 lacked enough data and went into an active archive. Twenty-one cases were flagged as meriting further analysis because of anomalous characteristics or behavior. The report said AARO had discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology, and none of the resolved cases showed breakthrough or adversary aerospace capability. At a briefing, new director Jon Kosloski said some cases involved orbs, cylinders and triangles near national security sites, with multiple witnesses and sometimes video, that he did not understand.
The official explanation
AARO's view is that most reports are ordinary objects such as balloons, birds, drones and satellites, and that the large unresolved pool mainly reflects insufficient data rather than anything exotic. Kosloski noted that drone activity may be conflated with some UAP reports. The jump in report numbers was attributed to greater awareness and reporting, especially a backlog of FAA submissions, not more frequent events.
The anomalous case
The Pentagon's own UAP director said publicly that some cases baffled him. Kosloski, a physicist and engineer, said there were interesting cases that he did not understand and that he did not know anybody else who understood them either. He said the 21 flagged incidents involved multiple eyewitnesses, additional sensor data and in some cases video, and were located near national security sites. He told reporters there are definitely anomalies, even though AARO had not linked them to anything extraterrestrial. Hundreds more cases sit in the active archive, not explained but simply short of data. Supporters argue that each annual report steadily confirms a hard core of well-documented, unexplained events in sensitive airspace.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- DoD/AARO Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, November 2024 (PDF) official, archive.dni.gov
Sources
- Pentagon received hundreds of new UAP reports, but says no evidence of extraterrestrial activity NBC News
- No evidence of aliens, but 21 cases need 'further analysis,' Pentagon report concludes Stars and Stripes
- Pentagon's UFO report finds over 700 new cases, with 21 the agency could not explain ABC News (via ABC30)
Witness reports elsewhere
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