The Department of Defense (DOD) has released, in full, the exact text of the “Verbal Legal Advisement” presented to UFO whistleblower David Grusch and likely other witnesses during All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) interviews. The release, under FOIA case 24-F-1138 filed by The Black Vault in April 2024, answers questions raised in previous disclosures and sheds new light on how AARO sought to address concerns about security, legal liability, and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) for witnesses providing classified UAP-related testimony.

In 2023 and 2024, AARO made numerous documented attempts to interview David Grusch regarding his claims of government involvement with and knowledge about extraterrestrial materials and reverse engineering programs. As detailed in prior FOIA releases (24-F-0266), Grusch repeatedly raised questions about whether AARO was legally authorized to receive highly classified information, including materials covered by NDAs and Special Access Programs (SAPs).

AARO staff responded by providing memorandums from both the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, explicitly affirming AARO’s legal authority to receive all levels of UAP-related information “notwithstanding any nondisclosure agreement you may have signed”.

Despite this, Grusch continued to seek written and verbal assurances and requested further documentation about policies and procedures for handling such information, specifically questioning the limits of AARO’s authority and the protections for those disclosing sensitive material.

FOIA case 24-F-1138, filed in April 2024 by The Black Vault, specifically sought the wording of the “Verbal Legal Advisement” referenced in previous correspondence with Grusch. The DOD’s full release now makes this critical document available to the public for the first time.

The advisement, read aloud to witnesses prior to interviews, sets forth the following key points:

• Voluntary Participation: Witnesses are asked to confirm their participation is voluntary and that they may end the interview or decline to answer questions at any time.

• Privacy Act and Ownership: The interview is conducted primarily to collect historical information, with the understanding that transcripts and materials belong to the U.S. Government, may be shared with Congress, and are subject to the Privacy Act.

• Legal Status of Disclosures: Critically, the advisement states:

  “Do you understand that for the limited purpose of this oral history, and only during the course of our discussion in this Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), that the information you disclose is not subject to any Nondisclosure Agreement you have signed?”
  
  Witnesses are then advised:
  
  “Upon completion of this interview today all non-disclosure agreements remain in full force.”

• Potential Consequences for False Statements: The advisement also warns witnesses that knowingly providing false information can result in criminal penalties under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 and that withholding or falsifying information may negatively affect their security clearance and federal employment.

The entire “verbal legal advisement” is below:

The advisement is grounded in explicit statutory language. Section 1673 of the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides that AARO is “authorized to receive any information related to UAP regardless of classification, and notwithstanding any nondisclosure agreement you may have signed.” This statutory authority is reaffirmed in memorandums from both the DOD Special Access Program Central Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released to Grusch and now public through FOIA:

• “Individuals with current or previous access to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)-related information which is subject to a USG Nondisclosure Agreement are authorized to provide this otherwise protected information to AARO representatives.”

• “The provision of UAP-related information which is subject to a Nondisclosure Agreement to AARO personnel constitutes an authorized disclosure if the information is provided and received for the limited purpose of conducting AARO’s assigned mission…”

Despite these written and verbal assurances, Grusch continued to seek additional documentation, expressing concern that simply citing the law and a DOD memo might not be sufficient protection, particularly given the complex patchwork of security policies and compartmented access involved. In emails, Grusch pressed for further clarification and asked for memos from additional agencies, including the CIA and Department of Energy, to address SAPs and other access restrictions.

AARO’s position, as reflected in both the advisement and supporting memoranda, is that the law provides broad statutory protection for such disclosures, so long as they occur within the scope of an official AARO interview and in an appropriate secure environment (like a SCIF). The advisement makes clear that any protections are limited to the duration and context of the interview itself. After the interview, all NDAs resume full effect.

As indicated by the released official documents and legal advisement, witnesses disclosing information to AARO in accordance with the advisement and in a secure setting are protected by federal law from NDA enforcement for those specific disclosures. Section 1673 of the FY23 NDAA is explicit, and violation of this provision by DOD officials, such as pursuing retaliation or NDA enforcement for authorized disclosures, would be a violation of federal law. Federal employees who act in bad faith or retaliate against whistleblowers may be subject to administrative or legal sanctions, though specific criminal penalties would depend on the circumstances and intent.

Could the DoD be lying to Grusch in order to pursue legal action after his disclosures during the interview? That is highly unlikely, as knowingly misrepresenting the legal status of NDAs or misleading witnesses about their protections could result in administrative or even criminal consequences under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (false statements), or for violation of whistleblower protection laws.

The release of the “Verbal Legal Advisement” resolves a longstanding question about what witnesses like David Grusch were told before being asked to testify to AARO. The advisement confirms that, at least for the duration of the official interview, NDAs do not bar disclosure of UAP-related information to AARO. The law provides specific statutory protection for such disclosures, and the DOD has now placed these assurances on the public record.

But, what if the interview needed to extend beyond UAP-related information?

“The key issue here is that many of these activities have conventional classified and compartmented Security Classification Guides that also cover non-UAP activities as well,” Grusch said in a November 13th, 2023, email to the staff of AARO. “To discuss the UAP-related activities would also expose these conventional SAP mission areas. An oral history interview subject must also be absolved of this obligation to protect this information as well, some of it may be bigoted or WAIVED (lAW DODI 5205.11 and 10 USC Sec 119).”  This was a concern and issue that Grusch never felt was properly addressed, hence why he did not show for a schedule meeting with them that was originally set that next day on November 14th.

The statutory protections granted by the DoD and the AARO apply specifically to “UAP-related information,” as defined by Section 1673 of the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Verbal Legal Advisement and supporting policy memoranda make clear that witnesses can disclose any information directly related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) during official interviews, and that such disclosures are not subject to any nondisclosure agreements for the duration of the interview. Both DOD and ODNI memoranda affirm that these protections apply when disclosures are made in a secure setting and in the context of AARO’s authorized mission.

While these protections do not explicitly extend to information that lies outside the defined bounds of UAP-related topics, the legal advisement provided to witnesses specifically states that participation is voluntary, witnesses may choose not to answer any question, and the interview can be ended at any time. This means that even if there are classified or compartmented matters unrelated to UAPs that a witness feels cannot be shared, all UAP-related information can be disclosed without violating NDAs. If questioning were to extend into areas outside the UAP mandate, the advisement already protects the witness’s right to withhold responses and to withdraw from the interview if necessary.

Given these protections, witnesses are fully authorized to provide testimony and be interviewed on all UAP-related information, without fear of breaching nondisclosure agreements. Any information outside the statutory definition could be omitted, but the law and the DOD’s own procedures make clear that witnesses like Grusch could have participated, disclosed all UAP-related knowledge, and simply declined to answer or end the interview if questions moved beyond those bounds. There is no ambiguity about the legal cover provided for UAP-related disclosures within the formal process.

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Note: This article focuses on the 2023 correspondence and scheduled meeting between David Grusch and AARO. According to reporting by Matt Laslo on July 18, 2025, Representative Eric Burlison stated that “[David Grusch] and I met with AARO. And separately he and AARO had a long conversation.” However, the specific context, content, and details of those meetings have not been independently confirmed. The Black Vault has submitted additional FOIA requests seeking further information.

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The FOIA request targeted emails to and from Yasir Qureshi, identified through sources and publicly available LinkedIn information as a Navy Program Manager who was involved in the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), led by Jay Stratton and later Brennan McKernan. As of December 2024, Qureshi now appears to be at the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security (OUSD(I&S)) (this is solely using openly sourced information that is publicly available via LinkedIn), suggesting possible current involvement in the successor entity, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), though this has not been confirmed. It does state “Deputy Director H&SA” as his current position (also available publicly on LinkedIn), but it is unclear exactly what “H&SA” is in this context.

Although names were redacted throughout the release under FOIA Exemption (b)(6), the Navy mistakenly failed to apply those redactions correctly, inadvertently revealing email addresses, phone numbers, and also Qureshi’s identity in certain parts of the file upon release. The Black Vault chose to re-apply those redactions as originally intended by the Navy to protect privacy and as a courtesy to the U.S. Navy. Although The Black Vault was also going to withhold Qureshi’s name from publication once documents were released and published, a decision was made to publish Qureshi’s name in this, since it was used in the official FOIA response letter by the Navy, which becomes a matter of public record, and this case will be listed in the Navy’s FOIA case log.

FAA Sightings, ODNI Coordination

The 17-page release includes internal discussions and email threads from October through December 2021 between various Navy components and other government agencies, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), addressing a civilian UAP sighting report submitted by an FAA employee.

“I’m thinking I’d probably want to get this to the UAPTF,” the FAA employee wrote in one email, providing dates and times of three separate UAP encounters observed “from the ground,” dating back to Christmas nights in 1991, 1992, and 1993. While noting hesitation in providing full detail, the sender emphasized they would feel more comfortable elaborating if historical radar data confirmed anomalous activity: “If there’s historical radar data that says there was something odd going on… I’d definitely feel a lot more comfortable describing what I saw.”

Emails show that the report was routed to ODNI Public Affairs before being passed along to Navy officials and ultimately to the UAPTF. “Thanks… much appreciated. I have actually spoken to him briefly, and he did pass me his report,” one Navy official wrote in a reply.

Five Eyes Briefings and AARO Transition

These newly released Navy emails also confirm high-level UAP coordination between the U.S. and its Five Eyes allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. On December 8, 2021, members of the UAP Task Force (UAPTF), including its director, were scheduled to meet with international counterparts for a classified discussion on unidentified aerial phenomena.

“Re tomorrow’s UAP briefing, I received confirmation from Australia and Canada they will be here … and of course UK,” one U.S. official wrote.

The meeting, however, was ultimately rescheduled due to a last-minute calendar conflict. That decision prompted frustration from officials within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (OUSD(I&S)). “I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed this did not happen,” wrote a U.S. official, who had encouraged partners to reserve time. A UAPTF counterpart responded, “The last thing we want to do is be dismissive of our allies and their time.”

But, later meetings between the Five Eyes did indeed take place, and were confirmed through U.S. documents also released under the FOIA to Australian researcher Grant Lavac, which listed a Five Eyes “caucus working group” with an explicit goal: “to cultivate shared awareness of allies’ UAP issues, detection, and mitigation activities and challenges.” The agenda included discussions of “networks to share Five Eyes UAP reporting”.

The newly released emails contradict multiple public statements previously made by Australia’s top military leadership. As recently highlighted by The Canberra Times, Air Marshal Robert Chipman — then Chief of Air Force and now Vice Chief of Defence — twice denied that Australia had been briefed by the United States on UAPs. “I’m not aware of any formal discussions that we’ve held with the US,” he told Parliament in 2022. When asked again in 2023 if any Australian defence attachés had received UAPTF briefings, Chipman replied flatly, “No.”

The Canberra Times article, authored by Jamieson Murphy, credited independent UAP researcher Lavac for identifying the significance of the emails and exposing the contradiction. Lavac called the lack of transparency “quite concerning,” adding, “The Chief of Air Force leads all discussions on UAP in Australia, so if there’s one person that needs to know what is happening on this topic in an Australian context and our discussions with allies, it’s him.”

According to Lavac, there are only three explanations: “He’s either uninformed because there is a complete lack of intelligence sharing, or there’s a degree of incompetence, or it’s something more sinister like plausible deniability. Any one of those three scenarios is concerning.”

The email release also occurred in the final weeks before the formal establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the successor to the UAPTF. On November 23, 2021, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks issued a directive for OUSD(I&S) to take over the UAPTF’s responsibilities and create a permanent structure. Her memorandum, included in the FOIA release, emphasized the need to synchronize UAP data collection and analysis across the military and intelligence community, and to collaborate with non-DoD partners, including foreign allies.

The documents confirm that international UAP cooperation was already underway, and they raise questions about why those efforts were denied in official forums. As The Canberra Times noted, the Department of Defence declined to answer when asked whether Australia had attended the Five Eyes briefing.

Contracting, Budget Questions, and Transition to OUSD(I&S)

Another thread includes internal Navy discussions about whether to proceed with onboarding a knowledge management specialist to support the Task Force — possibly using contractor support. However, with the imminent shift of the portfolio to OUSD(I&S), officials voiced concern over wasting resources if funding was rerouted.

“With OUSD(I&S) taking over the portfolio, this may be OBE [overcome by events],” one official wrote. “I don’t want the company to hire an individual if… there is no money due to a CR [Continuing Resolution].”

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While UFO enthusiasts may have hoped for evidence of extraordinary phenomena, the documents largely revolve around repeated sightings of drones near sensitive nuclear installations.

Nonetheless, these incidents provide an intriguing insight into ongoing challenges relating to these events.

The released materials include several detailed reports from 2022-2024, highlighting a surge of drone-related activity near nuclear facilities. The records reveal a pattern of sightings, as documented by the NRC, which were then sent to AARO to add to their yearly reports.

Here are just some of those incidents:

These records illustrate the growing amount of drone activity over critical infrastructure. Although the released documents primarily focus on drone sightings, they shed light on the broader scope of AARO’s work in addressing potential aerial threats—whether they stem from benign curiosity, commercial misuse, or nefarious intent.

While these incidents released by the NRC do not reveal any groundbreaking revelations about unidentified aerial phenomena, they underscore the critical need to address drone incursions at sensitive sites. This concern was magnified by the December 2024 drone sightings over the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey, along with other sightings at Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Stations.

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I’m going to — in a moment, I’ll turn it over to Dr. Kosloski to provide opening remarks, then we will go to Q&A. I will be moderating and calling on you. Because Dr. Kosloski is — this is his first time with you all, we would appreciate it if you would identify yourself by name and outlet when you ask your question. Please keep it to one question and one follow up. And as we — if we have more time, I will circle back. We have about 30 minutes. All right, Dr. Kosloski.

DR. JON KOSLOSKI: Thanks, Sue. Good morning. I’m Dr. Jon Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. It’s a pleasure to be here today to introduce myself and to provide an update of the work of our office. As you know, I assumed the AARO directorship in August following more than two decades at the National Security Agency where I did advanced research in the areas of optics, computing and crypto mathematics.

By nature, I’m drawn to tough scientific problems, which is what brought me to AARO and the UAP mission. Unidentified objects in any domain pose potential threats to safety and security. Reports of unidentified anomalous phenomenon, particularly near national security sites, must be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the U.S. government.

Since becoming director, I’ve been extremely pleased by AARO’s team and the framework they’ve established for rigorous analysis of UAP reports. AARO has taken meaningful steps to improve data collection and retention, bolster sensor development, effectively triage UAP reports, and reduce the stigma of reporting a UAP event.

In the coming year, AARO will prioritize building partnerships, promoting increased transparency and scaling up the work of the office.

This week, the department delivered its Fiscal Year 2024 consolidated annual report on UAP and had the opportunity to brief congressional staff on the report’s findings.

As of today, over 1,600 UAP reports, 757 of which — I’m sorry, AARO has received over 1,600 UAP reports, over 757 of which came to AARO during the period covered by the report. AARO has successfully resolved hundreds of cases in its holdings to commonplace objects such as balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft.

Meanwhile, over 900 reports lack sufficient data for — scientific data for analysis and are retained in our active archive. These cases may be reopened and resolved, should additional information emerge to support analysis. I want to emphasize that although only a very small percentage of reports to AARO are potentially anomalous, these are the cases that require significant time, resources and a focused scientific inquiry by AARO and its partners.

It is also important to underscore that to date, AARO has discovered no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology. None of the cases resolved by AARO have pointed to advanced capabilities or breakthrough technologies. It is also worth noting that AARO continues to see a geographic bias of UAP reports near U.S. military assets and sensors.

However, this bias has been mitigated somewhat by an increase in commercial pilot reporting in the continental United States. AARO is working closely with the services to implement existing reporting guidance while expanding UAP reporting to more of the interagency. Meanwhile, AARO continues to review the U.S. historical record relating to UAP and will release a second volume of its congressionally directed Historical Record Report.

We welcome any former or current government civilian, contractor or military service member with relevant information to reach out to us at www.AARO.mil. For every UAP report, operational or historical, AARO will follow the science and data wherever they lead. And we are committed to sharing as much information as possible at the unclassified level to inform the public of our activities and findings. With that, I’ll take your questions.

STAFF: Brandi?

Q: Thanks. Thank you so much for doing this. I’m Brandi Vincent with Defense Scoop. One question on the report and then a follow-up. It noted that the next step for Gremlin, the Gremlin capability, is conducting a 90-day pattern of life collection at a national security site. Where is that going to be? How did you pick that location? And what ultimately are you guys trying to accomplish with that?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So it’s currently deployed. We’d rather not say exactly where it is because we want it to be an unbiased test and don’t want to invite folks to come and do flyovers and test against the system. We chose that specific location because of the environment. We expect there to be a lot of variety in the types of things that we’re going to see. And there had been UAP reports in that general area.

And we’re trying to build a baseline. So, right now, we have this geographic bias where we are getting reports near the national security sites. But we also have a bias from pilots and other security personnel. So we want to have a better understanding of what normal looks like near those national security sites. And then eventually we’ll be expanding our baseline investigations to other areas in the U.S. to look at what normal looks like away from national security sites.

Q: And then, after the hearing on the Hill yesterday, lawmakers were saying that they are really keen to meet in a SCIF with AARO officials, other DOD officials, whistleblowers and members of Congress. Is that something you’ve been approached about, have done or are open to doing?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So we’re absolutely open to meeting with everybody. We’ve been meeting with a variety of folks, from whistleblowers through staffers. And we encourage anybody with direct information to come to us, go to our secure reporting mechanism on the website. And when we get that, we’ll reach out to them, schedule a meeting in the SCIF.

And Congress has enabled us to receive all sensitive information regardless of classification or NDAs they may have signed. And we receive that information. And we follow-up on every tip that they provide us.

Q: Thank you.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes.

STAFF: Oren

Q: Two questions. One, I was wondering if you could talk about whether any analysis or data of reports you have received has led you to the foreign adversary conclusion, specifically the UASs — 18 reports of UASs spotted near nuclear facilities? And then I was wondering if you could just talk about the — the — the effort to increase engagement with foreign partners for a better —a broader array of sensors, data analysis information.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Sure. So, firstly, no, we have not been able to correlate any UAP activity to adversarial collection activities or advanced technologies. I also want to make it clear that UAP covers a lot of potential activity by its very nature. The definition is in the name, right? So it’s unidentified and it’s anomalous. Once we know that it’s a UAV or a UAS of some nature, we then hand that responsibility off to one of our partners.

So Langley being a great example. It was known to be UAV activity, so we were there in a supporting role, but it was not our responsibility to address that. So those investigations are conducted by somebody else. And we’re focusing on the truly anomalous where we don’t understand the activity. And then for the foreign engagement, we’re working on increasing our foreign engagement.

We recognize that UAP is not just going to be a domestic issue. The office has focused primarily on U.S. government. And we’re going to be growing to public reporting soon in 2025. And we’re going to be growing our international partnerships hopefully also in 2025. So starting with the group that we have the most familiar — familiarity with and then growing that from there.

Q: Are there any specific countries you can name in terms of who you aim to work with?

DR. KOSLOSKI: We are going to be starting with the traditional allies of the DOD and the IC. And I’ll leave it at that for now until we have those partnerships well established and then we’ll probably come out with more information. Yes.

STAFF: Yes. Nick?

Q: Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour. Thanks very much for doing this. This may be basic and silly, but I just want to read you a quotation from the hearing yesterday and have you respond to it. This is Luis Elizondo, former DOD official. “Let me be clear. UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. The U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies as are some of our adversaries.”

Can you just give us a sense of your perspective on that quotation?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Break that down, so there’s a lot in that quotation. Firstly, absolutely agree. UAP are real. We — as I said, we’ve received 1,600 cases. A large number of those are unresolved, which means we don’t know exactly what they are. Until we know what they are or who they belong to, we can’t attribute intent and understand exactly what the purpose of that phenomenon is. So we’re not comfortable —we at AARO, are not comfortable saying at this time whether or not the UAP are there to collect information or not.

In regards to whether or not AARO, U.S. government or any other government has UAP. We have not found any evidence of that at this time.

Q: …but the bottom line conclusion remains what you said at the top — There is no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

DR. KOSLOSKI: We have not found any, no. There are definitely anomalies. We have not been able to draw the link to extraterrestrial.

STAFF: Phil.

Q: Just to follow up on that.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes.

Q: You know, a lot of people read that or saw — just that hearing. You know, when you said there was no breakthrough technologies. I mean the person seems to be suggesting that, you know, at a minimum these are breakthrough technologies. What leads you to assume that the ones that —the UAP cases that you can’t resolve are not potentially breakthrough technologies? Or is it that you just haven’t been able to conclusively decide either way?

DR. KOSLOSKI: That’s exactly right. So we don’t fully understand the phenomenon enough to say whether or not it’s a breakthrough technology or not. So it’s a very small percentage of our overall cases that after the initial analysis still have the anomalous characteristics that one could attribute breakthrough technologies to. It’s less than 3.5% of our cases. And we’re still studying those with our IC and S&T partners, trying to understand what technologies could be used to provide those characteristics.

But we don’t understand them well enough to say whether it’s a breakthrough technology, a misunderstanding of the sensor performance or something else.

Q: And a skeptic might say that, you know, if you — just because you can’t explain it isn’t a reason to assume that it’s not a breakthrough technology or I mean by the definition of breakthrough technology would be something that you don’t have — if you don’t have it, you can’t explain, right?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Agree 100%. So, we’re not ruling it out. We’re open to that as an explanation for it. But we’re just not attributing breakthrough technology as the explanation to it. We’re — an open mind works both ways. So if we don’t understand what it is, we can’t say that it is or is not a breakthrough technology. So we’re just trying to keep an open mind.

Q: Got it. It’s not a catch 22.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Right.

Q: (inaudible) OK.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes. It — we accept that the explanation could be a misunderstanding of ours in interpreting the data or it could be a breakthrough technology. Until we understand, we don’t know.

Q: Thank you. Brad Dress, for The Hill. Have you found anything that might be a breakthrough technology? I know you’re saying you don’t know if there are breakthroughs yet, but something that might be a breakthrough technology near the military sites, some of those sightings you’ve seen near the military sites, have you found anything that might be that? Or are they all just been drones and UAS?

DR. KOSLOSKI: It’s definitely not all just drones and UAS. So we have several particularly interesting cases. We’re working on within the office, working with our partners to downgrade several of those cases, so we can talk about them publicly. But there are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the IC, I do not understand. And I don’t know anybody else who understands them either.

Q: But those near military sites and facilities?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Until we get the information approved for release, I’d rather not say where those sightings were, but definitely interesting sightings.

Q: OK. Thank you. Tanya Nori with NewsNation. Can you please speak to AARO’s involvement in investigating incidents of drone or UAP, UAV incursions at the U.S. southern border with Mexico?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So we — I’m not that familiar with any specific investigations that we have — that AARO has supported for UAP or sorry, UAS, UAV activity near the southern border. We have had several UAP cases that have been brought to us that were near the border that we’ve investigated. I believe that we have resolved the cases that have been brought to us. And we’re working on downgrading those so that we can share those.

Q: And do you — can you speak to the procedures that are in place for Border Patrol agents to report UFO sightings? And how are those reports handled and investigated by the Pentagon overall and by AARO specifically?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So at this time, I don’t believe we have a formal mechanism for Border Patrol to report to AARO. Right now, the only formal mechanism is through the DOD. And we’re working on expanding that across the government through the interagency and for public reporting. We expect that formally to be in place hopefully in 2025. Right now, we’re getting those cases more through partnerships that those folks have with DOD or counterintelligence members.

STAFF: Luis?

Q: Hi. Luis Martinez with ABC News. Thank you for doing this and welcome.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Thank you for coming.

Q: Yes. I would like to follow-up on that earlier question about incidents you cannot explain based on your, you know, broad experience. A couple of follow-ups on that, please. Were these all within the last year? Were these all at the same location? Were you looking at video evidence? Or what are the metrics that you’re looking at that you cannot explain?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Great question. So of the cases that I’m thinking of, there’s a variety of them. The cases that are top of my mind are spread out over the last year and a half. I’m sure that there’s some other anomalous ones a little further back. But the ones that I’m particularly most interested in are the last year and a half. There is some video footage for a few of the cases, not all of the cases.

So it’s not just eyewitnesses. But in each of the cases I’m particularly interested in, there were multiple eyewitnesses. And there is additional data to go with them. It remains to be seen whether or not that additional data is going to be sufficient for us to either resolve the case, understand whether it’s a UAV, bird or balloon, or say something substantive about the nature of the unknown phenomenon.

So we’re still trying to understand whether or not there’s more data available. Because we get the data that comes in from the witnesses. But we also go through a bunch of other sources. Whether or not we can enrich the data that was brought to us and then build a better case. Still digging into it.

Q: What are some of the characteristics or are there — is there a trend among these things? And are they extended period incidents or are they very, very quick?

DR. KOSLOSKI: In each of these cases, they were not extended. The cases that I’m thinking of, there was no commonality across the different cases, different morphologies, so orbs, cylinders, triangles. In one of the cases, it has been happening over an extended period of time. And it is possible that there’s multiple things happening. There could be some UAV activity in the environment that’s getting confused or conflated with the UAP activity, so we’re trying to tease that out right now.

Q: Just to clarify, earlier, you said Langley was UAVs. This — who — the Langley incidents would not be among what you’re describing?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Correct.

Q: OK.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Correct.

STAFF: Konstantin?

Q: Thanks. Konstantin Toropin with Military.com. So one of the sort of key criticisms, I think, around this issue from the hearing yesterday was government transparency, lack of government transparency. I mean, can you sort of speak to that critique and whether you feel that AARO is being overly secretive? If you guys are working on being more transparent, sort of address this criticism from the Hill that you guys are emblematic of a government that overtly classifies everything and?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes, yes, it’s an understandable concern. And I’m going to make a comment. My wife would like me to share more about the UAP incidents too, but I’ll — I guess it’s on the record now, so.

(Laughter)

The fundamental issue is that AARO receives cases from our partners. And in most cases, to date, because we’ve been working through the services, those partners are providing data that is gathered from sensitive platforms. And we need to make sure that we are protecting sensitive sources and methods not introducing vulnerabilities to their operations.

So even though that there’s nothing inherently classified about the existence of a UAP, we have to protect that information. When AARO receives those interesting cases, the cases that we’re just briefly talking about, we try to identify if the UAP information can be isolated from the sensitive — usually it’s metadata that identifies characteristics of the platform.

And we work to downgrade that material as much as we can. But we can’t do it unilaterally. It has to be in partnership with the folks that brought that information. That is a very deliberate process, as you can imagine, to make sure that we’re not releasing sensitive information. So we have taken significant steps to speed that up. We’ve hired a number of declassification experts.

We’re going to be hosting a declassification workshop, so we can make sure we’re implementing best practices from across the DOD and the IC. All of that takes more time than I think the public would like for it to take, but AARO is working on it. We recognize that the types of cases that I was just talking about are, from my perspective, true anomalies.

And we’re going to need significant scientific rigor to address those. And yes, the U.S. government has a lot of nice scientists, little bias there, but we’re going to need the help of academia and the public to address some of these so we need to build that more transparent partnership.

Q: And just to follow-up sort of on the flip side, you know, is there any — as you look at cases to release for example, you talked about how at least one of the interesting ones is sort of ongoing. Is there a world where you hold back release out of fear of drawing more reports, you know, sort of drawing attention to a location and getting copycats or you know what have you sort of muddying the data?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes, so that concern has been raised to us. Because bad data in gets bad analysis out. However, no data in gets no analysis out. And so, being an NSA guy, I’m a firm believer in big data is going to lead to better conclusions. And I would rather have to filter out some of those copycat cases but have more substantive data. If we’re looking for a needle in a haystack, I’d rather have multiple haystacks to go digging through rather than just one.

Q: Thank you.

STAFF: Brandi.

Q: Just one quick follow up.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes.

Q: I’m sorry if I’ve missed it before, but what is AARO or your definition for breakthrough technology?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So lots of people, lots of organizations have different definitions. And the definition, the working definition that we’ve been using informally inside of our office, and we are working on more formal definitions for the different domains for space, the air domain and the undersea domain. But the general definition is beyond state of the art today and beyond where we think that we could get in the next couple years.

So we keep an eye on the capabilities of ourselves, our partners and everyone else at the academic and the very technical level. And then if it’s beyond that, then we would say that’s a breakthrough technology.

STAFF: Phil.

Q: Just a quick follow-up on your answer to Konstantin.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes.

Q: So, if you need to — I mean, I guess a lot of Americans have this view of the government as kind of all-knowing and being able to ascertain, you know, everything, particularly when they think of NSA and other agencies.

DR. KOSLOSKI: If only.

Q: And so, I guess if you could help us explain to readers, you know, what is it about these phenomena that — that, you know, reach the limits of government of the understanding of the professionals in the government and why it would be necessary to bring in academics? That’d be helpful for us.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Great question. So following on Brandi’s question, if it’s a breakthrough technology by its very nature, we don’t know how it would be done, right? If we knew how to do it, we’d be doing it already and it wouldn’t be a breakthrough technology. And so, usually those breakthroughs are coming from the academics. Historically, either in science or engineering, the breakthroughs come from academia and then they go into industry and then they come into government.

The government’s employing a lot of scientists like myself and others who understand a fair amount about the science. But being able to extend that to something that we could not have imagined when we were in school or when we were in training is a very difficult process. And so we’re going to have to pull in those folks that they spend all day every day just thinking of what is the next possible thing that you could do if you were just to tweak the equations a little bit this way or change the material a little bit that way.

And the government, because of our day jobs we don’t get to spend all day every day doing that as much as I would like to.

STAFF: Nick?

Q: Just two small clarification, so the — what you called interesting cases at the beginning and then Luis asked you more specific spread out over the last year and a half. Just to be clear, those are cases that we don’t know about, right? Meaning, we have not read about these cases that you’re speaking about?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Correct, correct.

Q: You said to Luis, one of the cases has been happening over extended period of time. I think Konstantin said ongoing. Just to be clear, that is ongoing or you just —or was it just happening over extended period of time? And you’re not saying whether it’s extended or not?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Extended period of time. It may be ongoing. But we don’t know if the current activity is just drone activity in the environment. And so, we’re trying to follow-up on that. We had put more energy into it earlier on, something flared up and now we’re checking on it.

Q: OK.

Q: Ellie, CBS. Just a follow-up on the interesting cases. Are the interesting cases that you’re talking about the 21 cases that merit further analysis or are they part of the active archive?

DR. KOSLOSKI: They’re part of the 21, yes, that merit. So the active archive, just so that we’re clear, those are cases where we don’t have enough scientific data to continue the analysis. We’re always looking for more. And then when we do, we’ll pull those into the merit more analysis. Yes.

STAFF: Luis

Q: Last year’s report in the time frame had 281 new, I believe incidents. Now you have 485. What do we owe this really large increase to?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So I just —the new incidents I think to be clear, this — it had 757.

Q: In your report here, you talk about a total of 757, you know, in the period of the reporting period.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes.

Q: Of which 485 were from this year and then the remainder were from previous.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Oh, yes. Yes.

Q: But then, in last year’s report, which was from — and I’m looking at my notes here —

DR. KOSLOSKI: Why the ramp up in reporting?

Q: Yes, I mean an additional 200, I mean in the same reporting period?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes. Engagement.

Q: Right.

DR. KOSLOSKI: So we’re — we have the GENADMIN out. We’re engaged with the services. We’re engaging more with the services, helping them understand what qualifies as a UAP, how to report it. And we’re getting more reports of the anomalous activity. It’s not that there’s —we don’t believe that there’s necessarily more anomalous activity.

It’s just, we’re getting greater, greater reporting. And we expect as we continue that engagement with the services, but also across the IC and the rest of the government to the question earlier, we’re going to see that reporting go up as well. We’re going to follow that with education campaigns, so that for example, the FAA is providing us reports now as well.

So we’re getting reports from the pilots. Some of the reports from the pilots are Starlink flares, so light glinting off of satellites at just the right time of the evening. It looks interesting and potentially anomalous. But we can model that and we can show pilots what that anomaly looks like, so that that doesn’t get reported to us necessarily.

So we’re going to follow up the engagement campaigns with education campaigns so that as we’re increasing the number of accounts that come to us, we’re not just getting more of the noise and trying to keep it focused on the interesting.

STAFF: Oren.

Q: Just a very quick question on the active archive, do you have an instance or instances where you have gotten more information for an event in the active archive and have pulled it out or is that?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Thank you for asking. We do, yes.

(Laughter)

Yes, we do. So it actually was the instance that I’m most familiar with was a Starlink instance. So we had several folks over the period, I think, it was multiple months, where we’re seeing interesting activity in the sky. And we found that when we — because we’re continuously looking back at that active archive and looking for correlations across those incidents, but also new incidents coming in.

We found some of those correlations in time, the direction that they were looking, and the location. And we were able to assess that they were all in those cases looking at Starlink flares. Yes.

STAFF: (inaudible)

Q: How many people work in your office?

DR. KOSLOSKI: We have several dozen folks working in the office, but the power of the office isn’t the number of people who work in it, it’s our partnerships across the IC and the DOD. And hopefully, in the near future academia as well.

STAFF: Luis.

Q: In the historical report from earlier this year, there was mentioned that in the 1950s and 60s as pilots started, commercial pilots started flying, they saw reflections as well off of what were like U-2 aircraft at that time. So this new Starlink seems to be very reminiscent of that. That’s—

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes, very reminiscent. Yes.

Q: So you’re seeing an uptick in that, that might be again, a historical parallel, right?

DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes. And we do see some trends in the morphologies that are reported. So for a while, we were seeing a lot more balloons. And then pilots started understanding what some of the space trash looked like. And now we’re seeing as the mega satellite constellations are increasing, Starlink and there’s others that are going up, we’re seeing an increase in those lights in the sky that look very unusual as those satellites are deploying. And we expect that that trend will also go down eventually. Yes.

STAFF: Ellie?

Q: I have to ask a broadcast specific question, but do you anticipate releasing any video related to any of the cases that were ruled out or that are still unexplained?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So we’re going to be — we have some resolved cases that are of public interest that have been talked about publicly that will be releasing on the 19th. I think those are going to come with videos? Yes. And then, as we downgrade information, the hope is that we will be able to release as much of that content as we can to the public so that we can get help in resolving them. Yes.

STAFF: Mosheh?

Q: Thanks for doing this. Mosheh Gaines with NBC. You said earlier that there wasn’t evidence that the UAP activity was linked to foreign adversaries. But I’m wondering, have you seen any kind of suggestion that foreign adversaries have been trying to capitalize off of this with disinformation or anything else?

DR. KOSLOSKI: We have not. But I am concerned that somebody could use the potential stigma to and take advantage of that. If there is a stigma associated with reporting UAP, then that’s an opportunity for the adversary to maybe conduct collection operations and not have folks report on it. But we haven’t seen evidence of that yet.

STAFF: We’ve got time for one more question. Anybody have one? (inaudible)

Q: So can you speak to any historic incidents like the Phoenix Lights incident in the 1990s, which many who claimed to have been a witness to the event feel the government has never taken seriously?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So, we take those incidents very seriously. And we’re going to be releasing some analysis in the upcoming Volume II Historical Report in the next few months, where we were able to resolve a number of historic cases. There are quite a few cases of public interest where we have resource limitations, either we can’t get enough technical data from — back.

In the case of the Phoenix, there’s lots of video. And we can — we’re still working on that. I was actually having a conversation with somebody earlier this morning about additional data we can get for the Phoenix case. But in a lot of the historic cases, we’re going looking for film. And the film has been recycled or destroyed because it’s too expensive to retain.

And so we’re going to museums. And all of that takes a lot of manpower. At the same time, we’re trying to resolve these other interesting cases that are coming in continuously, these 1,600 cases that we have. So we’re trying to balance those. But the historical report that’s coming out will have some of those that you had asked about.

STAFF: All right, folks. Thank you very much.

DR. KOSLOSKI: Thank you very much.

Q: Thank you.

The post Transcript: Dr. Jon Kosloski, Director, AARO, Media Roundtable on the FY24 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP – November 14, 2024 first appeared on The Black Vault.

In 2022, AARO contracted Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to conduct a thorough investigation into the specimen’s origins and properties. According to AARO’s summary on their website, “In 2022, The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contracted with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to conduct materials testing on a magnesium (Mg) alloy specimen. This specimen has been publicly alleged to be a component recovered from a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle in 1947, and purportedly exhibits extraordinary properties, such as functioning as a terahertz waveguide to generate antigravity capabilities. In April 2024, ORNL produced a summary of findings documenting the laboratory’s methodology to assess this specimen’s elemental and structural characteristics.”

ORNL’s investigation involved a series of advanced tests, including isotopic ratio measurements, elemental composition analysis, and structural characterization using microscopy and spectrometry techniques. The findings, as documented in the reports, indicate that the specimen is of terrestrial origin, according to ORNL. The isotopic composition of the magnesium and lead in the specimen falls within the expected values for terrestrial materials, suggesting that it is not extraterrestrial.

“ORNL assessed this specimen to be terrestrial in origin and that it does not meet the theoretical requirements to function as a terahertz (THz) waveguide,” the AARO report states. The analysis revealed that the bismuth layers within the specimen were intermixed with lead, which precludes the possibility of it functioning as a waveguide. The report further explains that “this specimen’s elemental and structural characteristics do not meet the conditions to theoretically function as a waveguide.”

The historical context provided by AARO adds another layer to their analysis. The characteristics of the specimen are consistent with mid-20th-century magnesium alloy research and development projects, which often involved the use of zinc, lead, and bismuth additives for various purposes, including corrosion resistance. The banding and structural features observed in the specimen align with manufacturing techniques from that era, such as vapor deposition.

Despite the conclusive findings, the reports acknowledge the specimen’s long and debated history. While the analysis strongly supports a terrestrial origin, the exact historical origin and purpose of the specimen remain unclear due to its undocumented chain of custody and conflicting personal accounts. AARO’s summary notes that “the specimen’s delamination, oxidation, and structural characteristics are consistent with exposure to environmental and mechanical stresses over time.”

The reports, released by AARO, are now available for download from The Black Vault below.

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Synopsis: Analysis of a Metallic Specimen [10 Pages, 10MB]

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Synopsis: Analysis of a Metallic Specimen [4 Pages, 0.4MB]

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The post AARO Releases Findings on Suspected Extraterrestrial Alloy first appeared on The Black Vault.

Forced perspective and parallax are two optical illusions that can influence the accuracy of UAP reports reviewed by AARO.

Read here for an overview of these illusions and their impact on observers’ perceptions of unknown objects: https://t.co/gya66BLn3H

— All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (@DoD_AARO) May 8, 2024

The paper begins by acknowledging that no single explanation can account for all UAP reports, but it emphasizes that forced perspective and parallax often play a role. According to AARO, “the effects of forced perspective and parallax can frequently explain excessively large sizes or high speeds described in UAP reports.” Observers situated at a distance from the object they are viewing may struggle to gauge its accurate size and speed.

The paper explains forced perspective as a visual phenomenon that causes objects to appear different in size depending on their position relative to a reference point. The technique is familiar to many who have posed for photos where they appear to hold the Eiffel Tower or Leaning Tower of Pisa. In such cases, the distance between the camera and the objects can distort perceived sizes. AARO provides a practical illustration in their paper, emphasizing, “Forced perspective can cause large, faraway objects to appear smaller and closer than their actual size and position – or vice versa.”

Parallax is another visual phenomenon that can mislead observers. It refers to the apparent shift in an object’s position when viewed from different angles. When viewed from a moving vantage point, a stationary object may seem to move. As the paper elaborates, “Parallax effects cause the object to be ‘projected’ against three different points in the background… This projection illusion creates a perception of motion as the object appears to move across the river in the opposite direction of the observer.”

AARO explains how this effect can also be experienced through electronic sensors mounted on airborne platforms. When these sensors move quickly relative to a stationary object, the parallax view can make it appear as though the object is in motion. The faster the airborne observer travels, the more exaggerated the effect becomes.

AARO acknowledges that not all UAP observations are attributable to these phenomena, but highlights that, in many cases, forced perspective and parallax effects can lead to “inaccurate estimations of a UAP’s size, speed, and direction of travel.” Despite these optical challenges, single-observer UAP reports remain invaluable, as they often supplement additional sensor data and provide context for identifying and analyzing anomalies.

Ultimately, AARO’s information paper encourages UAP reporters to describe their observations in detail, noting that understanding these optical effects can aid them in making more accurate estimates of a UAP’s characteristics​​.

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The post AARO Explores Forced Perspective and Parallax in New UAP Analysis Paper first appeared on The Black Vault.

• The Department of Defense released another ‘Briefing Card’ about the AOIMSG, a DoD effort previously studying UFOs.
• This document contains intriguing redactions under exemption (b)(5) and extra information that were absent in previous releases of the same record.
• A question in the ‘Questions and Answers’ section and an entire section under ‘Additional Background Information (Not for release)’ have been redacted, prompting questions about the content and why it’s being withheld in public affairs materials.
• The placement of the “Additional Background Information” section under a question about “extraterrestrials” prompts the questions on whether or not they are related.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has just released another “Briefing Card” pertaining to the establishment of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). The AOIMSG was a DoD entity dedicated to detecting and identifying unidentified objects of interest in special-use airspace.  These newly released records were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release in case 22-F-0381.

The briefing card, possibly a “draft” version, dated December 9, 2021, carries certain intriguing redactions and extra information that were absent in previous documents released by the DoD, which were chronicled on The Black Vault just weeks ago.

Intriguingly, an entire question in the ‘Questions and Answers’ section is blotted out under exemption (b)(5). This exemption is applied to “inter- and intra- agency memoranda which are deliberative in nature,” according to the denial letter from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).

When compared to the previous release by The Black Vault, it appears the redaction was absent, however, it’s unclear if the presumed “draft” version just released holds the same question revealed last time and the redaction was placed in error.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of both releases:

Similarly, an entire section under ‘Additional Background Information (Not for Release)’ is also blanketed with exemption (b)(5), prompting questions about the nature of the redacted content, and its placement within the document itself.

The redactions, and even the entire section about “Additional Background Information” was not included in the May 16, 2023, release to The Black Vault, nor was any information referenced in the denial letter as being entirely withheld.

It should also be noted that the “Additional Background Information” material follows one of the more intriguing sections of the public affairs “briefing card” document; the question about extraterrestrials.

“Has the Department found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology?”, the question reads. The answer set for the public states, “The examinations into incursions by UAPs are still ongoing; we lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations. It is not the purpose of the AOIMSG to look for evidence of extraterrestrials. Other parts of the government do that; for example, NASA looks for evidence of life on other planets.”

What follows is the information exempted from release under the “Additional Background Information” header, but it is unknown if that information relates to the question about extraterrestrials, or if it entirely unrelated.

The redactions raise eyebrows and quite rightfully so. These are Public Affairs records, and their purpose is to chronicle information meant for the public, not to document information to withhold from the public.

There’s a growing public interest in the potential implications of UAP/UFOs on national security and aviation safety. In the spirit of democratic transparency and the need to build public trust, full disclosure of such information is paramount.

Furthermore, the case for transparency is especially strong given the current climate surrounding UFOs/UAPs. With sightings continuing to be reported by military personnel and the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) which replaced the AOIMSG, it’s clear that this topic is not fading into the background.

In response to these questionable redactions, an appeal has been filed by The Black Vault.  During the course of that case, the DoD will  reassess the redactions, consider the immense public interest, and hopefully take a step toward greater transparency on this important subject.

As the saga continues to unfold, it’s crucial that we remember the public’s right to be informed, especially on a topic that has captured the world’s attention. As we seek answers to the questions surrounding UAP/UFOs, it’s clear that the fight for transparency is far from over.

UPDATE: On April 3, 2024, the appeal was finalized and the document was released, with the pertinent redactions lifted. That release is also available below.

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FOIA Case 22-F-0381 Release

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FOIA Appeal 22-A-0381-A

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The post DoD Releases Another AOIMSG Briefing Card: Questions Raised Over Redactions (UPDATED) first appeared on The Black Vault.

These newly released reports, which are accompanied only by visuals inside the PDF files, are available below:

Atmospheric Wake Case Resolution

These reports were submitted after three different missions in the Middle East, and the Mediterranean Sea in 2022 and 2023. The reports were filed due to the potential hazard posed to the mission and because the videos depict a potentially anomalous propulsion signature.

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Southeast Asia Triangles Case Resolution

Six triangular objects in a formation were originally flagged as potentially anomalous and potentially posing a risk to navigation.

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Western United States Case Resolution

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The post AARO Releases Three “Case Resolution” Reports Identifying UAP/UFO Cases first appeared on The Black Vault.

On November 9, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks issued the following statement about the departure of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick:

All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick announced that he will retire from federal service in December.

During his distinguished 27-year career of public service in the Department of Defense and the United States Intelligence Community, and since assuming leadership of AARO, Dr. Kirkpatrick has served the American people with honesty and integrity, tackling an incredibly difficult mission to explain the unknown.

During his tenure, Dr. Kirkpatrick stood up the office and its operations, investigated more than 800 unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) cases, led an extensive search for U.S. Government and contractor programs associated with UAP, and established the department’s first public-facing website, www.aaro.mil, to bring greater transparency to the department’s work.

His commitment to transparency with the United States Congress and the American public on UAP leaves a legacy the department will carry forward as AARO continues its mission.

Our department is stronger and better prepared for future scientific and national security challenges because of Sean’s distinguished service to our country.

We are deeply appreciative of his tenacity, insight, and undying dedication to our national security mission, and wish him the greatest of success in his future endeavors.

The Department of Defense, in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the process of searching for the next AARO Director, and it will publicly announce its selection once made.

The post Statement by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on the Upcoming Departure of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick first appeared on The Black Vault.

During the stated period, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) registered a total of 291 UAP reports. Out of these, 274 were from the aforementioned period, while 17 were from earlier reporting periods that had not been previously submitted. The report outlined:

“Most reports still reflect a bias towards restricted military airspace, a result of reporting from military personnel and sensors present in such areas. This bias has been lessened by reporting from commercial pilots showing a more diverse geographic distribution of UAP sightings across the United States.”

While the AARO has not received any evidence linking UAP sightings to health concerns, several reports do highlight potential safety concerns for military aviation. Specifically, some UAPs reportedly displayed concerning performance characteristics, including high-speed travel and unusual maneuverability. Nevertheless, the report assures:

“While the mere presence of UAP in the airspace represents a potential hazard to flight safety, none of these reports suggest the UAP maneuvered to an unsafe proximity to civil or military aircraft, positioned themselves in flight paths, or otherwise posed a direct threat to the flight safety of the observing aircraft.”

Furthermore, although none of the UAP sightings have been directly linked to foreign activities, investigations into these cases remain ongoing. The AARO emphasizes its dedication to improving domain awareness and understanding of UAPs, stating their belief that as data quality improves, “the unidentified and purported anomalous nature of most UAP will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena.”

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Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena October 2023 [16 Pages, 1.5MB]

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Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder on the Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – October 18, 2023

Yesterday the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence delivered to Congress the Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022, as amended by the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2023.

Analyzing and understanding the potential threats posed by UAP is an ongoing collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies, and the Department thanks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and other contributing departments and agencies for their collaborative efforts to produce this report.

The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount. We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is leading DOD’s efforts, in coordination with ODNI and other government agencies, to document, analyze, and when possible, resolve UAP reports using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach. This year’s UAP report covers UAP reports from Aug. 31, 2022, to April 30, 2023, as well as any UAP report from previous time periods that were not included in an earlier report.  AARO received a total of 291 UAP reports in this time period, consisting of 274 that occurred during this period and another 17 that occurred from 2019-2022 but had not been included in previous annual reports.  This brought the total cases that AARO has been reviewing to over 800 as of April 30, 2023.

The post DoD’s AARO Office Releases October 2023 UAP / UFO Report first appeared on The Black Vault.

Document Archive

DoD Releases Contracts with SANCORP Outlining Work For UFO Office AARO [116 Pages, 20MB] – This is a combined PDF of all documents released. They are marked with ‘bookmarks’ inside of the PDF file for easy reference.

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The post DoD Releases Contracts with SANCORP Outlining Work For UFO Office AARO first appeared on The Black Vault.

SHOW NOTES

• The CLASSIFIED ‘Mosul Orb’ UAP Case: A New Chapter in Government Secrecy Tactics Unfolds
• Two more case denials

LIVE STREAM VERSION

The post Ep. #123 – DoD Makes Major Play To Block Release of UAP Information first appeared on The Black Vault.

The Pentagon has maintained its silence on the leaked image of the so-called “Mosul Orb” depicting an alleged Unidentified Aerial [Anomalous] Phenomena or UAP seen over an active conflict zone in Iraq back in 2016. The case has been left unaddressed and unconfirmed by the Department of Defense (DoD) since the image and case details first appeared online in January 2023, despite the significant public interest UAP have generated, and the fact that the Pentagon has previously offered commentary on past leaks related to the same. The Pentagon would only say that, “We’re not going to comment on remarks by unnamed sources alleging leaks from a classified report,” in a statement received about the “Mosul Orb” by The Black Vault in January.

The “Mosul Orb”, obtained and released by investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, shows what has been alleged as a UAP, captured by an MC-12, medium-to-low altitude, twin-engine turboprop aircraft over Mosul, Iraq, on April 16, 2016.

However, a new response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Black Vault (23-F-0389), may indicate the classified and sensitive nature of the “Mosul Orb” case, which sheds light on why the Pentagon refused to comment. The DoD states in a FOIA denial letter received today by The Black Vault, that information relating to the case is “classified,” and it also relates to an ongoing “law enforcement investigation.”

The refusal was justified under multiple sections of the FOIA, including ones related to national security, intelligence activities, and law enforcement proceedings, among others​. “The Initial Denial Authority, in his capacity, has determined that the records withheld in their entirety pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(1), which pertains to information that is currently and properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 13526…” the denial letter stated.

This decision, coupled with the Pentagon’s silence on the matter, adds another layer to the ongoing secrecy surrounding UAP-related information.

The classified nature of the “Mosul Orb” UAP and the lack of commentary from the Pentagon may further suggest an active investigation into the leaks. The “Mosul Orb” is only one of multiple cases published by Corbell and Knapp, that may compromise classified information.

Another leak published by Corbell and Knapp in March 2023, dubbed the “Baghdad Phantom“, may also encroach into classified territory. Although FOIA requests are still outstanding about this specific case, the footage originally shot of a “cylindrical” shaped UAP, and released in the form of six still frame images, is likely classified. The footage was captured by an MQ-9 “Reaper” drone, and according to the Air Combat Command (ACC) when speaking to The Black Vault, all footage captured by that platform is inherently classified.

“In accordance with general operational security practices and the MQ-9 Security Classification guide, all imagery captured by the MQ-9 is typically classified unless mission requirements dictate the need to sanitize any video footage for lower classification or public release purposes,” the emailed statement said. “The MQ-9 Security Classification guide and the details within is not releasable or available to the public in accordance with its own level of security classification.”

The Black Vault further pressed for the classification level of the footage, but that would not be answered by the ACC as they stated, “Per the MQ-9’s SCG, we are unable to provide additional clarity into what kind of level of classification video footage is by default other what was mentioned previously.” ACC further stated, “Air Combat Command is unable to verify the validity of the [Baghdad Phantom imagery]… but U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM] may be a better point of contact.”  When The Black Vault contacted CENTCOM for comment, they stated, “We have nothing for you on this.”

These types of responses indicate the recent leaks of both the “Baghdad Phantom” and the “Mosul Orb” are classified in nature, and that an investigation was, is, or will be, underway given the reaction by the DoD to other recent classified leaks.

The Black Vault has asked the Pentagon about investigation(s) into the leaks referenced above on UAP related imagery, yet the request for comment, and all subsequent follow-ups, have been ignored.

One other aspect of the “Mosul Orb” denial letter was the use of an exemption yet to be seen in UAP related requests to the DoD: (b)(7).

The use of Exemptions (b)(7)(A) and (b)(7)(E) by the DoD in response to a FOIA request for records related to the “Mosul Orb” highlights the DoD’s growing concern when in comes to their involvement in UAP-related matters. The exemptions point towards an ongoing “law enforcement investigation” and reveal an intent to protect the “techniques” used in such investigations. Is this in relation to the leak of material relating to this case? Does that indicate that investigation(s) is/are ongoing? Or is this a broad-stroke attempt to exempt ALL information relating to UAP and/or AARO, essentially thwarting any effort to get this type of related information via the FOIA? That has yet to be seen. However, two related in subject matter request denials from the DoD came within 60 seconds of the “Mosul Orb” denial, which may further shed light on the tactics now employed by the DoD to withhold all UAP-related documentation and AARO-related material. 

These FOIA cases by The Black Vault shed light on the continuing struggle for transparency when it comes to UAP investigations. It highlights the tension between public interest, potential national security concerns, and the ongoing mysteries surrounding these phenomena that have been documented for decades.

Despite the Pentagon’s silence on the “Mosul Orb” case and the UAP issue as a whole, the quest for transparency in UAP investigations remains. The conversation is far from over, as The Black Vault continues to probe and question the nature of these unexplained phenomena and the role of our government in investigating and communicating about them. It remains to be seen how this saga will unfold, but one thing is clear: the call for transparency will continue to grow louder. Or at least, it should.

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The post The CLASSIFIED ‘Mosul Orb’ UAP Case: A New Chapter in Government Secrecy Tactics Unfolds first appeared on The Black Vault.

Full Transcript

Note from The Black Vault: The below may have errors. Please report any via the CONTACT page.

Kirsten Gillibrand  00:12

Hearing will come to order. I’d first like to thank our witness, Dr. Shawn Kirkpatrick for testifying here and in today’s earlier closed session, and for as long and distinguished career, both in the intelligence community and in the department defense, Dr. Kirkpatrick is the director of the all domain anomaly resolution office or arrow, Congress established this office in law to get to the bottom of the very serious problem of unidentified anomalous phenomenon or UAP. Dr. Kirkpatrick has a very difficult mission. While we have made progress, there remains a stigma attached to these phenomenon. There is a vast and complex citizen engagement. And there’s also very challenging scientific and technical hurdles. So we appreciate the willingness of Dr. Kirkpatrick to lean in on this issue and the work that he has accomplished thus far. And we look forward to both his opening statement and his presentation of examples of the work arrow has done. In late 2017, m edia reports surfaced about activity set in motion. By the late long serving Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid more than a decade ago, we learned that there was strong evidence of advanced technology reflected in the features and performance characteristics of many objects observed by our highly highly trained service members operating top of the line military equipment. We learned that for at least the past eight years, military pilots frequently encountered or unknown objects in controlled airspace off both the east and west coast across the continental United States. In test and training areas and ranges. We don’t know where they are, they come from who made them or how they operate. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist observed had any of these objects had the label made in China, there will be an uproar in the government and media, there would be no stone unturned and no efforts spare to find out what we were dealing with. We can look at the recent incursion of the unidentified PRC high altitude balloon for as an example, because EPA because of the UFO stigma, the response has been irresponsibly anemic and slow. Congress established arrow we made it clear that we expect vigorous action we added very substantial initial funding for the office. But despite our best efforts, the President’s budget for fiscal was 23 and 24, requested only enough funding to defray the operating expenses of arrow. It included almost no funds to sustain the critical research and development necessary to support a serious investigation. It took a letter to Secretary Austin from Senator Rubio and me and 14 other senators to get the office temporary relief for the current fiscal year. In this hearing, I tend to probe a series of specific issues. And the recent incidents where multiple objects were shot down over North America, it seems that Pentagon leadership did not turn to arrow office. To play a leading role in advising the combatant commander, we need to know whether this will continue. We need to know whether the leadership and DOD will bring arrow into the decision making process in a visible way. And we need to know what role arrow will play in inter agency coordination after the NSC Working Group disbands. In the fiscal year 2023. national defense and intelligence authorization acts Congress established a direct reporting chain from the arrow director to the Deputy Secretary of Defense the role of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security is limited to providing administrative support, we need to know how this direction is being implemented. UAP are frequently observed flying in extremely high or very low speeds and come in various sizes and shapes. During the recent shutdowns over North America. DOD disclosed disclosed that filters on radar systems were adjusted to allow for detection and tracking of diverse sets of objects for the first time. While opening the aperture can overload the real time analytic process. We cannot keep turning a blind eye to surveillance data that is critical to detecting and tracking UAP. We need to know whether Dr. Kirkpatrick can achieve the necessary control over sensor filters and the storage and access to raw surveillance data to find UAP anomalies. Finally, one of the TAs congress set for Arrow is serving as an open door for witnesses of UAP events, or participants in government activities related to UAPs to come forward securely and disclose what THEY KNOW without fear of retribution. For any possible violations of previously signed non disclosure agreements. Congress mandated that arrow set up a publicly discoverable and accessible process for Safe Disclosure. Well, we know that arrow has already conducted a significant number of interviews, many referred by Congress, we need to set up a public process that that and we need to know where that effort stands. With that I’d like to turn to Senator Ernst for her opening statement.

Joni Ernst  04:32

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you Dr. Kirkpatrick for your testimony today. I’ll keep these remarks very brief so that we have maximum time for your briefing. The recent downing of the Chinese surveillance surveillance balloon and three other objects underscores the need for Domain Awareness. Adversaries like China and Russia are working to hold us interests including our homeland at risk. That’s why your testimony is so important. So look forward to a progress update on the establishment of your office. As members know your office evolved from the Navy led unidentified aerial phenomena task force to the all domain anomalous resolution office known as arrow. Dr. Kirkpatrick, your extensive background in science and technology, research and development and space makes you well suited to discuss these emerging challenges. My priority is that we understand the full range of threats posed by our adversaries in all domains. That is what the joint force needs to be prepared to fight and win in defense of our nation. This committee needs to know about Chinese or Russian advanced technology programs to exploit our vulnerabilities and it needs to know whether your office along with the IC has detected potential Chinese or Russian capabilities to surveil or attack us. Finally, we need to ensure efficient interagency coordination. multiple elements of the DOD and I see own a piece of this mission to add value arrows efforts cannot be redundant with others. Thank you again, we look forward to your testimony.

Kirsten Gillibrand  06:16

Dr. Kirkpatrick, you can give your testimony.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  06:20

Thank you, Chairwoman geo brand, Ranking Member Ernst, and distinguished members of the subcommittee. It’s a privilege to be here today to testify on the defense defenses efforts to address unidentified anomalous phenomena. First, I want to thank Congress for its extensive and continued partnership as the department works to better understand and respond to UAP. In an effort to minimize technical and intelligence surprise, unidentified objects in any domain pose potential risks to safety and security, particularly from military personnel and capabilities. Congress and DOD agree that UAP cannot remain unexamined or unaddressed. We are grateful for sustained congressional engagement on this issue, which paved the way for the DoD establishment of the old domain anomaly resolution office in July of last year. Though arrow is still young office, the spotlight on UAP in recent months underscores the importance of its work and the need for UAP to be taken seriously as a matter of national security. All leadership that I’ve had the pleasure of working with whether dod i see DOD, civil, scientific or industrial view Congress as a critical partner in this endeavor. Arrow has accomplished much in the last nine months since it was established. The Aero team of more than three dozen experts is organized around four functional areas operations, scientific research, integrated analysis and strategic communications. And the nine months since arrows establishment, we’ve taken important steps to involve and improve UAP data collection, standardize the department’s UAP internal reporting requirements, and implement a framework for rigorous scientific and intelligence analysis, allowing us to resolve cases in a systematic and prioritized manner. Meanwhile, consistent with legislative direction arrow is also carefully reviewing and researching the US government’s UAP related historical record. Arrow is leading a focused effort to better characterize, understand and attribute UAP with priority given the UAP reports by DOD and IC personnel in or near areas of national security importance. DOD fully appreciates the eagerness for many quarters, especially here in Congress and in the American public to quickly resolve every UAP encountered across the globe from the distant past through today. It’s important to note however, arrow is the culmination of decades of DOD intelligence community and congressionally directed efforts to successfully resolve UAP encountered first and foremost by US military personnel, specifically navy and air force pilots. The law establishing aero is ambitious, and it will take time to realize the full mission. We cannot answer decades of questions about UAP all at once, but we must begin somewhere. While I assure you that arrow will follow scientific evidence wherever it leads. I ask for your patience as DoD first prioritizes safety and security of our military personnel and installations in all domains. After all, a UAP encountered first by highly capable DOD and IC platforms, featuring the nation’s most advanced sensors are those UAP most likely to be resolved by my office, assuming the data can be collected. If arrow succeeds in first improving the ability of military personnel to quickly and confidently resolve UAP they encounter. I believe that in time we will have greatly advanced the capability of the entire United States government including its civilian agencies to resolve UAP However, it would be naive to believe that the resolution of all UAP can be solely accomplished by the DOD and ice alone. We will need to prioritize collection and leverage authorities for monitoring all domains within the continental United States. Arrows ultimate success will require partnerships with the interagency industry partners, academia and the scientific community as well as the public. AARO is partnering with the services intelligence community, DOD as well as civil partners and across the US government to tap into the resources of the interagency. The UAP challenge is more an operational and scientific issue than it is an intelligence issue. As such, we are working with industry, academia and the scientific community which bring their own resources, ideas and expertise to this challenging problem set. Robust collaboration and peer review across a broad range of partners will promote greater objectivity and transparency in the study of UAP. I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous. The majority of unidentified objects reported to arrow demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons unmanned aerial systems clutter natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources. While a large number of cases in our holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases. Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close the case that I cannot defend the conclusions of. I recognize that this answer is unsatisfying to those who in good faith assume that what they see with their eyes with their cameras and worth their radars is incontrovertible evidence of extraordinary characteristics and performance. Yet time and again with sufficient scientific quality data, it is fact that UAP often, but not always, resolve into readily explainable sources. Humans are subjected to deception and illusions sensors to unexpected responses and malfunctions, and in some cases, intentional interference. Getting to the handful of cases that pass this level of scrutiny is the mission of Arrow. That is not to say that UAP once resolved are no longer of national security interest. However, on the contrary, learning that a UAP isn’t of exotic origin, but is instead just a quadcopter, or balloon leads to the question of who is operating that quadcopter and to what purpose? The answers to those questions will inform potential national security or law enforcement responses. Arrow is a member of the department’s support to the administration’s tiger team effort to deal with stratospheric objects such as the PRC high altitude balloon. While when previously unknown objects are successfully identified, it is Arrow’s role to quickly and efficiently hand off such readily explainable objects to the intelligence law enforcement or operational safety communities for further analysis and appropriate action. In other words, arrows mission is to turn UAP into SCP, somebody else’s problem.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  13:21

The US government the DOD and the IC in particular has tremendous capabilities to deal with those encountered objects. In the wake of the PRC hab event. The interagency is working to better integrate and share information to address identifiable stratospheric objects, but that is not all arrows lane. Meanwhile, for the few cases in all domains space, air and sea that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, Arrow exists to help the DoD IC and interagency resolve those anomalous cases. In doing so AARO is approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity, and analytic rigor. This includes physically testing and employing modeling and simulation validate our analyses and underlying theories, then peer reviewing those results within the US government, industry partners and appropriately cleared academic institutions before reaching any conclusions. I should also state clearly for the record that in our research arrow has found no credible evidence thus far of extra terrestrial activity offworld technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data wherever obtained, that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin. We are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA, to appropriately inform us government’s leadership of its findings. For those few cases that have leaked to the public previously and subsequently commented on by the US government. I encourage those who hold alternative theories or views to submit your research to credible peer reviewed scientific journal. US arrow is working very hard to do the same. That is how science works, not by blog or social media. We know that there is tremendous public interest in UAP and a desire for answers from Arrow. By its very nature, the UAP challenge has for decades lent itself to mystery, sensationalism, and even conspiracy. For that reason, Eero remains committed to transparency, accountability and to sharing as much with the American public as we can, consistent with our obligation to protect not only intelligence sources and methods, but US and allied capabilities. However, arrows work will take time if we are committed to do it, right. It means adhering to the scientific method, and the highest standards of Research Integrity. It means being methodical and scrupulous. It means withholding judgment in favor of evidence, it means following the data where it leads wherever it leads. It means establishing scientific peer reviewed theoretical underpinnings of observed data. An arrow is committed to all of those standards. I’m proud of arrows progress over the last nine months, months, much remains to be done, but the hard work is underway. Thank you for your continued support. And before we turn to questions, I’m going to walk you through some of our analytical trends in a couple of cases that we’ve prepared. So one of the things that arrow does is high integrity analysis. As I’ve said, This chart represents the trend analysis of all the cases in arrows holdings right to date. What you’ll see on the left is a histogram of all of our reported sightings as a function of altitude. So most of our sightings occur in the 15 to 25,000 foot range. And that is ultimately because that’s where a lot of our aircraft are. On the far right upper corner, you’ll see a breakout of the morphologies of all of the UAP that are reported. Over half about 52% of what’s been reported to us are round, or spheres. The rest of those breakout into all kinds of different other shapes. The gray box is essentially there is no data on what its shape is either it wasn’t reported or the sensor did not collect it. The bottom map is a heat map of all reporting areas across the globe that we have available to us. What you’ll notice is that there is a heavy what we call collection bias both in altitude and in geographic location. That’s where all of our sensors exist. That’s where our training ranges are. That’s where our operational ranges are. That’s where all of our platforms are. In the middle, what we have done is reduce the most typically reported UAV characteristics to these fields, mostly round mostly one to four meters, white silver, translucent metallic 10,000 30,000 feet. With apparent velocities from stationary to Mach two, no thermal exhausts usually detected, we get intermittent radar returns, we get intermittent radio returns, and we get intermittent thermal signatures. That’s what we’re looking for, and trying to understand what that is. Next slide. So I’m going to walk you through two cases that we’ve declassified recently. This first one is an MQ nine in the Middle East, observing that blow up which is an apparent spherical object vo EO centers those are not IR if you want to go ahead and click that and play it you’ll see it come through the top of the screen, there it goes and then the camera will slew to follow it. You’ll see it pop in and out of the screen field of view there. This is essentially all of the data we have associated with this event from some years ago. It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video. Now what we can do and what we are doing is keeping that as part of that group of 52% to see what are the similarities, what are the trends across all these do we see these in a particular distribution? Do they all behave the same or not? As we get more data, we will be able to go back and look at these in a fuller context. How are we going to get more data, we are working with the joint staff to issue guidance to all the services and commands that will then establish what are the reporting requirements, the timeliness, and all of the data that is required to be delivered to us and retained from all the associated sensors. That historically hasn’t been the case. And it’s been happenstance that data has been collected. Next slide. This particular event, South Asia MQ nine, looking at another MQ nine, and what’s highlighted there in that red circle is an object that flies through the screen. Unlike the previous one, this one actually shows some really interesting things that everyone thought was truly anomalous to start with. First of all, it’s a high speed object, it’s flying in the field of regard of two MQ nines, second appears to have this trail behind it. All right, which, at first blush, you would think that looks like a propulsion trail. In reality, if you want to play the first slide, we’ll show you what that looks like in real time, first video. So we’re looking at that, there it goes. Once you play it again, and then pause it halfway through, right there. Alright, you might be able to see that trail there behind it. That’s actually not a real trail that is a sensor artifact. Each one of those little blobs is actually a representation of the object as it’s moving through. And later in the video as the as the camera slews, that trail actually follows the direction of the camera, not the direction of the object. We pulled these apart frame by frame, we were able to demonstrate that that is essentially a readout overlap of the image it’s a it’s a shadow image, right? It’s not real. Further, if you later, follow this all the way to end, it starts to resolve itself into that blob that’s in that picture on the top of that, right. And if you squint, it looks like an aircraft, because it actually turns out to be an aircraft, go ahead and put that on. So you’ll see the tail sort of pop out there. And so what you’re looking at is this is in the infrared. This is the heat signature off of the engines have a commuter aircraft that happened to be flying in the vicinity of where those two MQ nines were at.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  22:50

Why am I showing you this? So the first one that I showed you, we don’t have resolved yet, right, that is an unresolved case, we are still studying this one we can resolve. But this is the kind of data that we have to work with, then the type of analysis that we have to do, which can be quite extensive when you have to pull these apart, frame by frame. Further, we’re now matching all of this with the models of all of those imaging sensors so that I can say, I can recreate this, I can actually show how the other sensors going to respond. All of these sensors don’t necessarily respond the way you think they do, especially out in the world and in the field. And I believe that’s all I have. And I will open it up for your questions. Thank you

Kirsten Gillibrand  23:42

so much. Dr. Kirkpatrick, can you just give us some raw numbers of how many UAPs you’ve analyzed? How many have been resolved and sort of in what buckets and then how many are still left to be resolved just an update from your January public report where it was 366 or something and about 150 were were balloons and about two dozen were drones. You know, just give us an update if you have one

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  24:08

or so as of this week, we are tracking over a total of 650 cases. Now, the report in January basically said about half of the ones at that time about 150 were balloon were likely balloon like or something like that. That doesn’t mean they’re resolved. Oh, I see. So what let me when we walk everyone through what our analytic process looks like. We have a essentially a five step process right? So we have we get our cases and with all the data we create a case for that event. Might team does a preliminary scrub of all of those cases as they come in just to sort out do we have any information that says this is in In one of those likely categories, it’s likely a balloon, it’s likely a balloon, bird, it’s likely some other object, or we don’t know. Then we prioritize those based off of where they are. Are they attached to a national security area? Does it show some anomalous phenomenology that is of interest, if it’s just if it’s just a spherical thing that’s floating around with the, with the wind and it has no payload on it, that’s going to be less important than something that has a payload on it, which will be less important than something that’s maneuvering. Right. So there’s, there’s sort of a hierarchy of just binning the priorities, because we can’t do all of them at once. Once we do that, and we prioritize them when we take that package of data in that case, and I have set up two teams, think of this as a Red Team Blue team or a competitive analysis. I have an intelligence community team made up of intelligence analysts. And I have an s&t team made up of scientists and engineers, and the people that actually build a lot of these sensors are physicists, because you know, if you’re a physicist, you can do anything, right. And, but they’re not associated with the intel community. They’re, they’re not Intel officers. So they they look at this through the lens of the sensor of that what the data says, we give that package to both teams, the intelligence community is going to look at it through the lens of the intelligence record, and what they assess, and their intel tradecraft, which they have very specific rules and regulations on how they do that scientific community technical community is going to look at it through the lens of what is the data telling me? What is the sensor doing? What would I expect a sensor response to be? And back that out? Those two groups give us their answers. We then adjudicate if they agree, then I am more likely to close that case, if they agree on what it is, if they disagree, we will have an adjudication. We’ll bring them together, we’ll take a look at the differences will adjudicate What Why do you say one thing and you say another, we will then come to a case recommendation that will get written up by my team. That then goes to a Senior Technical Advisory Group, which is outside of all of those people, made up of senior technical folks and Intel analysts and operators from retired out of the community. And they, they essentially peer review what that case recommendation is. They write their recommendations that comes back to me, I review it, we make a determination, and I’ll sign off one way or the other. And then that will go out as the case determination. Once we have an approved web portal to hang the unclassified stuff, we will do, you know, we would downgrade and declassified things and put it out there. In the meantime, we’re putting a lot of these on our classified web portal, where we can then collaborate with the rest of the community so they can see what’s going on. That’s in a nutshell, that is the process. Right? So because of that, that takes time. So of those over 650, you know, we’ve prioritized about half of them to be of of anomalous interesting value. And now we have to go through those and go, How much do I have actual data for? Because if I all I have is a is a operator report that says I saw XY or Z, my assessment is A, B, or C, that’s not really sufficient, that’s a good place to start. But I have to have data, I have to have radar data, I have to have EEO data, I have to have thermal data, I have to have overhead data. And we need to look at all that. Now, from a big picture perspective, I still have that’s all they’re still very valuable data. And we’re looking at applying a lot of things, new tools, analytic tools, like natural language processing. So I can go across all of those reports and look for commonalities how many of them are being described as round spherical objects that are maneuvering, how many of them are not maneuvering, how many of them seem to have plume to it or note that’s also going to be very valuable to give us more of a global picture and a trends analysis of what are we saying and help us get to the determination. So go back to your question, ma’am. We have Have this next quarterly report, we’ll be coming out here pretty soon. Our next annual report, you all have given us moved it up to two June, July, we’re going to be having that done about that timeframe. And we will have a, we’ll be combining a whole number of reports into that one. I think well, we’re currently sitting at around. If I remember correctly, we’re around 20 to 30 ish are about halfway through that analytic process. A handful of them have made it all the way out to the other side, gone through peer review, we’ve got case closure reports done and signed. We’re gonna get faster as we get more people on board. And we get more of the community tools to automate some of the analysis that has to be done.

Joni Ernst  31:00

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. And Dr. Kirkpatrick, the ODNI annual Threat Assessment states that China’s space activities are designed to erode US influence across military, technological, economic and diplomatic spheres. Likewise, Russia will remain a key space competitor. In the course of your work, have you become aware of any Chinese or Russia technical advancements to surveil or attack us interests?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  31:32

So that’s a great question. Part of what we have to do as we go through these, especially the ones that show signatures of advanced technical capabilities, is determine if there’s a foreign Nexus that’s really hard if what we observe doesn’t have a Chinese or Russian flag on the side of it. Now, I think it is prudent to say, of the of the cases that are showing, you know, some sort of advanced technical signature of which we’re talking single percentages of the entire population of cases we have. I am concerned about what that nexus is, and I have indicators that some are related to foreign capabilities. We have to investigate that with our IC partners. And as we get evidence to support that, that gets then handed off to the appropriate ice agency to investigate. Again, it becomes an SVP at that point,

Joni Ernst  32:47

somebody else’s problem. Right. Good. Thank you. Yes. Is it? Is it? Is it possible that the Chinese or Russian advanced technologies could could be causing some of these anomalous behaviors? And and you said, there seems to be some indicators. So just for us today, could you describe a potential threat that might exist out there if they are foreign? Sure. Nexus

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  33:19

you know, order to do this research appropriately. We have to also be cognizant of what is the state of the art and development across the s&t community? What is What are the DARPA’s of the world doing? What are? What’s the horizon scanning of emerging technologies appropriate to this subcommittee? What is happening out there? And if somebody could accelerate that capability? How would that manifest itself? And what would it look like? And do those signatures match what we’re seeing? There are emerging capabilities out there that that, in many instances, Russia and China, well, China in particular, are on par or ahead of us in some areas? Right. So previously, I used to be the Defense Department’s intelligence officer for science and technical intelligence. That was our job was to look for what does all that look like? And then, you know, my last several years of course, in Space Command doing space. The, the adversary is not waiting. They are advancing and they’re advancing quickly. If I were to put on some of my old hats, I would tell you, they are less risk averse at technical advancement than we are. Right? They are just willing to try things and see if it works. Are there capabilities that could be employed against us? send both an ISR and a weapons fashion. Absolutely. Do I have evidence that they’re doing it in these cases? No, but I have concerning indicators.

Joni Ernst  35:14

Thank you. I appreciate that. And that’s, that is why it’s so important that you are working with the intelligence community as well. Because you you have the science, the data background, but you also need to know, from various sources, what adversaries may be working on. Correct, correct. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Jacky Rosen  35:39

Well, thank you, Chair jelibean. Ranking Member Ernst, this is a really important hearing. I’d like to thank you Dr. Kirkpatrick for your service to the country. And as a former systems analyst, myself, I really appreciate your flowchart the description of the process, and particularly the trends analysis going forward, how that’s going to help us and he’s talked about language, the large LLM is a large language models of artificial intelligence that’s really going to help us in the hunt forward, predictive analysis, I think, to some of your point, but we’ve been worried about but I want to focus on Nevada because I want to talk about the impact of UAPs on aviation safety. So when it comes to identify unidentified aerial phenomenal phenomenon, excuse me, one of my first concerns is really about the safety of Nevada’s military aviator. So we have airmen stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, naval aviators flying at Naval Air Station falen, and service members across from across the world training at the Nevada test and training range. I know you know all this and unfortunately, the existence of advanced UAPs in the US airspace, and over US military installations, not a new phenomenon. The Navy’s officially acknowledged that between 2004 and 2021 11, near misses occurred involving UAPs that required pilot action and follow up reports. As a result in 2019, the Navy establish a protocol for pilots to report on their dangerous encounters. So could you speak to any ongoing efforts within DOD to ensure the safety of our aviators with a potential UAP encounter? And what’s your relationship with NORTHCOM NORAD space comm when it comes to this immediate real time response? And how they’re there? They’re right there in the moment, right?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  37:30

That’s a great question. So let me start with my relationship with the commands are very good. I just came back from sitting down with with General van Herk. And all the all the J staff at at North COMM A couple of weeks ago, talking through exactly what we need to do to help them get their arms around this. We are also working very closely with joint staff and the Joint Staff has just been very outstanding in helping work through policy and guidance issues to the forces and to the services. And I would like to just make sure that we we message back to all of the operators the importance of their reporting, and the fact that you’re about to get, you know, a bunch of new requirements that we’re issuing through the joint staff, on all of the data that we’re going to need you to save and report back to us. It is invaluable. And we are working to try to take the most advantage of that to learn what it is that we’re trying to mitigate. To get directly to your question. First thing that we’re doing is we’re normalizing our reporting. Right, we’re standardizing our reporting and the requirements associated with that guidance from the joint staff I think goes out maybe this week. Maybe next week on that we’ve been working with them for some months, that does exactly what I just said. It’s it gives them timelines, it gives them requirements it gives them here’s all the data you have to have. And you got to retain it. The next thing that comes after that is a plan ord that will go out to the commands for mitigation and response. So there’s a couple of things that we have to do. One, I need to work with the commands and with the IC and with our outside of our DOD and IC partners to extend our collection posture targeted at some of these key areas that you saw on that heat map that have a lot of activity, so that we can turn on extra collection when an operator sees something. So part of this is generating it as a response function and what we call a tactic technique and procedure for an operator when he sees something calls back to the operations floor. They can turn on additional collection. What does that collection look like? How do I bring all that together so I can get more data on what is that thing?

Jacky Rosen  40:02

Can Can I ask really quickly Drew, have the authorities you need to extend your collection posture between agencies or branches of the military? Because that seems to me to maybe be a sticking point. I know my time is just about up. I’d love to follow up about your risk management methodologies for some of these, but do you have need any authorities that you don’t have to get

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  40:25

get the data or some authorities that we need? We currently are operating under Title 10 authorities, but we have good relationships across the other agencies but having additional authorities for collection tasking, counterintelligence, something, those are all things that would be helpful. Yes.

Jacky Rosen  40:42

Thank you to follow up. Dr.

Kirsten Gillibrand  40:43

Kirkpatrick, will you help us write that language so we can put it in the defense bill this year, so that we know what authorities you need?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  40:50

We can do that.

Kirsten Gillibrand  40:51

Thank you. We’re gonna start second round. So if you want to stay you can ask another round. I have at least three more questions. So do you want to do you want to go right now? So you in case you have to leave? Yeah, go ahead. I’m gonna stay

Jacky Rosen  41:17

the Chinese spy balloon it did crosser the US airspace shut down by a sidewinder missile, fired from an F 22. Sidewinders costs us close to half a million dollars each. So given the cost of these missiles, the cost per flight, all of these other things, like I said, Follow up on the authorities, your methodologies, the data collection, they can help us in other ways. But how do you think we can develop a sustainable, affordable response to UAPs where we need to that may that will definitely violate our airspace, not may definitely violate our airspace every chance that they can get, because there are adversaries, they want this information. So what do you think some cost effective measures might be that we can get what we need out of that or take them down whatever is appropriate, whatever the appropriate measure is? Let’s put it that

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  42:08

that is actually wrapped into the plan or that we’re working with joint staff to send out what are the commands need from both a capabilities perspective for kinetic and non kinetic engagements? What are the response functions of the of the particular wings or, or navy, what have you? And then what authorities do they need? So one of the one of the challenges that we’ve seen is, is you know, there’s an authorities issues with the with the owners, operators of those ranges that they need to work through. And we’re working that with joint staff and OSD. So big picture, we need to do all that. If you want to get down to the specifics for you know, there are non kinetic options to engage pretty much everything, right? Whether it’s electronic warfare, whether it’s laser technologies for this

Jacky Rosen  43:02

data. That’s right, good data collection, predictive analytics, you can, in simple form, make some assumptions on possibilities.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  43:11

That’s right. And we will inform recommendations back to the department on here’s what could work. Here’s what we’ve seen work. Here’s what doesn’t work.

Jacky Rosen  43:19

Thank you so much. Thank you, Madam Chair. Appreciate it.

Kirsten Gillibrand  43:22

Thank you very much. I just wanted to just talk a little bit about your logistics, who you report to how that’s going. Whether you need different reporting lines. By congressional legislation. Your office is administratively located with the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence security, but you’re not substantively subordinate to the undersecretary. Rather, you are a direct report to the deputy secretary, are you taking direction directly from the deputy secretary? Are you able to meet and brief the deputy secretary is the office of USD ins working with you to have the right framework?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  43:58

So USDA ins the I currently report to USDA ins until they come up with the plan for how they’re going to implement legislation. DOD and DNI are working through that now. I’d have to refer you back to Usdi ins on what their plan is.

Kirsten Gillibrand  44:27

Do I need to update your reporting structure in the next defense bill? Or is this something that you think will work its way out? Or does it need further clarity?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  44:35

I think they’re planning on coming back to you with an answer on what that plan is. And I think at that time that will inform what you want to do.

Kirsten Gillibrand  44:44

Okay, thank you. As you know, Dr. Kirkpatrick, Congress has mandated that your office establish a discoverable and accessible electronic method for potential witnesses of UAP incidents and potential participants in government UIP related activities to contact your office and tell their stories. Congress also set up a process whereby people are subject to non disclosure agreements preventing them from disclosing what they may have witnessed or participated in could tell you what they know that risk of retribution from the or violation of their NDAs. Have you submitted a public facing website product for approval to your superiors? And how long has it been under review?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  45:24

I have we submitted the first version of that before Christmas.

Kirsten Gillibrand  45:31

And do you have an estimate from them when they will respond? Or when you’ll have feedback on that?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  45:37

No, I don’t. Okay,

Kirsten Gillibrand  45:39

we will author a letter asking for that timely response to your superiors. When When do you expect that you will establish a public facing discoverable and access portal for people to use to contact your office as the law requires?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  45:57

So I would like to first say thank you all very much for referring the witnesses that you have thus far to us. I appreciate that we’ve brought in nearly two dozen. So far, it’s been it’s been very helpful. I’d ask that you continue to do that until we have an approved plan. We have a multi phased approach for doing that, that we’ve been socializing and have submitted for approval, some time. Once that happens, then we should be able to push all that out and get get this a little more automated. Great. What I would ask though, is as you all continue to refer to us and refer witnesses to us, I’d appreciate if you do that. Please try to prioritize the ones that you want to do, because we do have a small research staff dealing with that.

Kirsten Gillibrand  46:53

Thank you. And then do you have any plans for public engagement that you want to share now that you think it’s important that the public knows what the plan is?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  47:03

So we have a a number of public engagement recommendations, according to our strategic plan, all of those have been submitted for approval, they have to be approved by USDA and s. We are waiting for approval to go do that. Okay, I

Kirsten Gillibrand  47:22

will follow up on that. And then my last question is about the integration of departments UAP operations, research, analysis and strategic communications. During the recent UAP incidents over North America, it didn’t appear that you were allowed to play that role. Do you agree that the public perception is generally that you and your office did not appear to play a major role in the department’s response to the detection of objects over North America? What can you tell us that’s going on behind the scenes from your perspective? And in the after action assessment process? Is there awareness that there is a need to operate differently in the future and a commitment to doing so

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  48:03

when the when the objects were first detected, I got called by joint staff leadership to come in late one night to review events as they were unfolding unfolding, and to give them an assessment based on what we knew at that time. I did that worked with the director, Joint Staff, the j two and the J three. That night and over the couple of following days on? What are the types of things that we are tracking from a unidentified object perspective? What databases do we use those sorts of things for, for norm for known objects known tracking? Beyond that, the response I would have to, I would have to refer you back to the White House for the decision on how they did the response. We did not play a role and what you would respond other than that initial, you know, advice on what we are seeing and how we are seeing

Joni Ernst  49:10

came out. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Kirkpatrick, I know that your office has gotten a lot of attention recently. And of course, any new agency there tends to be a push to increase size and funding. We want to make sure that you’re able to meet your goals. But what I also need to ensure is that we’re not duplicating or replicating existing functions, and creating redundancy within DOD and the interagency so What steps are you taking right now to make sure that your particular office and function is is unique to any of the other agencies that might be involved in these types of cases?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  50:00

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. So I would like to lay down, here’s, here’s what am I, you know, sort of my mission and my goal and my vision here. And so the vision is, at one point, at some point in the future, you should not need an arrow. If I’m successful in what I’m doing, we should be able to normalize everything that we’re doing into existing processes, functions, agencies and organizations, and make that part of their mission and their role. Right now that niche that we form is really going after the unknowns. If you I think you articulated it early on, this is a hunt mission for what might somebody be doing in our backyard that we don’t know about? All right, well, that that that is what we are doing, right. But at some point, we should be able to normalize that that’s why it’s so important. The work we’re doing with Joint Staff, normalize that into power, DOD policy and guidance. We are bringing in all of our interagency partners. So NASA is providing a liaison for us. I have FBI liaison, I have OSI liaison, I have service liaisons, the ice and a half of my staff come from the IC, half of my staff coming from other scientific and technical backgrounds, I have doe. And so what we’re trying to do is ensure, again, as I make UAP into Sep, they get handed off to the people that that is their mission to go do so that we aren’t duplicating that I’m not going to go chase the Chinese high altitude balloon, for example. That’s not my job. It’s not an unknown. And it’s not anomalous anymore. Now it goes over to them.

Joni Ernst  51:48

Very good. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Kirsten Gillibrand  51:52

I want to just to follow up on the filters for surveillance. outside observers have speculated that DOD sets filters on certain sensors to eliminate objects that are moving really fast or slow, because what we are looking for militarily or conventional aircraft and missiles UAP doesn’t fit into these programs with thereby be weeded out and never noticed. The specialist speculation was proven to be true during the UAP incidents over North America, where DoD publicly acknowledged that we were able to start seeing these ups only when we opened up these filters. Obviously, our military operators cannot be overloaded with objects that are not conventional aircraft or missiles, can you nonetheless make sure that the raw data is being captured and subsequently processed? As your office knows what’s really out there? And is that going to cost money will you expect to pay for that money out of arrows budget?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  52:46

One of the key tenants that we’re trying to do in our science plan is understand what those signatures are. So we get all the raw, for example, radar data, prior to the scrubbing and filtering to allow it to enter into our weapons systems and our detection systems. We are now taking all that data and cross correlating it to what pilots are saying they’re seeing or other observations from other operators. What that allows us to do is then see if there are any, any signatures in that data that I can pull out, generate, what we’ll call automatic target recognition algorithms that allow us to then use that signature associated with a observed UAP. Whatever that UAP. May be. We will then make those recommendations of what those changes should be back to the department. So the Deputy Secretary asked me last October to make those recommendations. What changes do we need to make the radars to plat platforms to detection systems and algorithms to pull on those those algorithms make those changes? That’s going to take some time. That’s where the research and development comes in. Right? It’s not it’s not instantaneous right? Now, a lot of the I won’t say, you know, a lot of the the things that fall outside of the ranges of those filters have been identified by people in the loop. And you can’t have people in the loop all the time. You can it’s just not cost effective. So part of our budget is working through what is what does that look like? And then making those recommendations back to the big program offices for them to put into changes in acquisition.

Kirsten Gillibrand  54:43

My last question is about the academic community. Can you give us an update on sort of how you collaborate with the academic community? And whether how the independent study being done by NASA complements arrows work?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  54:56

Sure. Two questions, so I’m willing to try To make it quick the 1979 Carl Sagan said Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I would go one step further. And I would say it’s extraordinary claims require not only extraordinary evidence, but extraordinary science. And so how do you do that you do that with the scientific method. Right. And so as arrow is developing and implementing its science plan, it has to do so grounded in a solid foundation of scientific theory across the entire range of hypotheses that had been presented for what UAP are. That range spans adversary breakthrough technology on one hand, known objects and phenomena in the middle, all the way to the extreme theories of extraterrestrials. All of that has physics based signatures associated with it, whether it’s theoretical from the academic community, known from things like hypersonic weapons, or adversary breakthrough technologies, as we’ve talked about before, or the known objects that we have to go measure. The idea is across that entire range, you have to come up with peer reviewed, scientific basis for all of it. The academic community plays a very big role on the one end of the spectrum, the intelligence community on the other end of the spectrum, and then measurement in the middle, once I have those signatures identified in in validated peer reviewed documents, then I have something 2.2 For all that data, because all that data is going to match one of those signatures, right? And then I can go well, it’s that and not that, or it’s that. And that helps us go through all that. Where NASA comes in and and the study that they’re doing, which I’m supporting, is really looking at the unclassified data sources that might be used to augment our classified data sources. To understand if there’s a signature there, we can pull on so very similar to the radars, but civil capability. So for example, we have a lot of climate science satellites, for example, that look at Earth, lots of them, how many of those is the data valuable in seeing these kinds of objects? The challenge in that is those those platforms don’t necessarily have the resolution you need. So if you remember the slide I put up there with the trends, the size of the objects we’re looking for, are typically reported to be one to four meters. Well, the resolution of many of the climate science, civil science, civil satellites, is much larger than that, which means you’d have a hard time picking out something that’s smaller than a pixel on the imagery on the data. That’s not to say all of it’s not useful. And there are ways of pulling through that data and go into that is what NASA is focused on right now. What is, what are some other data sources that could be used? In addition, things like open source and crowdsourcing of data, we’re exploring public private partnerships, ma’am, as you know, we’ve talked about in the past to look at, is there a way to smartly crowdsource additional data that might be useful to augment some of my classified sources? And what does that look like? And how would we do it so that we’re not overwhelmed by you know, everybody who wants to take a picture of everything?

Kirsten Gillibrand  59:11

Like to tell the committee before we close out, you have another round. Yes. Do you have anything else you’d like to tell the committee before we close?

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick  59:17

Thank you very much for allowing us to come and share a little bit of insight into what arrows up to and what we’re doing. I hope to be able to share a whole lot more in the future. We have a lot of work to do. So if you don’t hear from me outside. It’s because we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Kirsten Gillibrand  59:35

Thank you so much. Dr. Kirkpatrick, thank you for the hearing. Thank you

The post Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Public Hearing – In Full – April 19, 2023 first appeared on The Black Vault.

Although the information disclosed in the document is extremely minimal, it paves the way for further FOIA requests by The Black Vault and provides a glimpse into the work done by AARO and its organizational structure. The list does not include crucial details such as dates, times, or locations of the events, nor does it indicate whether the cases remain unidentified.

The number of cases listed in the index reflects close to the number revealed in the 2022 UAP report, indicating that from the 30 August 2022 data cut-off point as indicated in the report, to the 6 December 2022 data cut-off point of the list released under the FOIA, AARO logged one additional case worthy of cataloguing:

AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, was established to investigate, analyze, and assess UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) incidents and reports. The office’s primary goal is to determine any potential threats these phenomena may pose to national security, as well as to identify their origin and nature. Despite the limited information released in the document, it highlights the fact that the Pentagon is actively addressing the UFO / UAP issue.

The Black Vault will utilize the case serial numbers to file new FOIA requests in pursuit of additional details regarding specific cases. While the lack of information may be disheartening, the release of the document is a small, but positive step toward greater transparency and understanding of UAP encounters and how investigations of those are handled.

As new information is uncovered and released, the public’s understanding of these mysterious phenomena will hopefully continue to grow. In the meantime, researchers and enthusiasts are left to speculate about the full contents of the 511 cases listed as everyone awaits further disclosure.

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Newly Released Document Reveals Index of UFO Cases at the Pentagon’s AARO [3 Pages, 1.5MB]

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The post Newly Released Document Reveals Index of UFO Cases at the Pentagon’s AARO first appeared on The Black Vault.

“Unidentified anomalous phenomena,” is anything in space, in the air, on land, in the sea or under the sea that can’t be identified, and which might pose a threat to U.S. military installations or operations.

“We have an important and yet challenging mission to lead an interagency effort to document, collect, analyze and when possible, resolve reports of any unidentified anomalous phenomena,” said Sean M. Kirkpatrick, the director of AARO.

Since the AARO office stood up this summer, Kirkpatrick said his team there has made significant headway in setting up its mission.

The post DOD Office Moving Ahead in Mission to Identify ‘Anomalous Phenomena’ first appeared on The Black Vault.

According to the CBO:

The bill would
• Authorize the appropriation of $650 million for fiscal year 2023 for the Intelligence Community Management Account (ICMA)
• Establish an Office of Global Competition Analysis to analyze technology and innovation sectors critical to national security
• Establish a secure system to collect information about unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena (UAP)
• Enhance whistleblower protections
• Allow people to sue the United States government for compensatory and punitive damages
• Void some provisions of nondisclosure agreements that would prevent reports from being filed with the Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office and prohibit private-sector entities from seeking damages in federal court from individuals who file reports

Estimated budgetary effects would mainly stem from
• Authorizing appropriations for the ICMA
• Establishing an Office of Global Competition Analysis
• Establishing a secure system to collect information on UAP
• Enhancing whistleblower protections
• Allowing people to sue the United States government for compensatory and punitive damages

Areas of significant uncertainty include
• Predicting the number of people who would obtain monetary awards through the judicial system and the amounts of such awards

Below, you can find the report released by the CBO.

Note: One of the first to report on this story was space journalist Leonard David.

Document Archive

CBO Releases Cost Estimate for UAP Reporting Systems and the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 [7 Pages, 0.3MB]

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The post CBO Releases Cost Estimate for Secure UAP Information Systems and the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 first appeared on The Black Vault.