“Truly Anomalous:” AARO’s 2024 Annual UAP Report

AARO’s new director, Dr. Jon Kosloski, got his first moments in the spotlight this week, dropping the newest annual UAP report, hosting a media roundtable, and appearing before the Senate. He confirmed UAP are real, some cases are “truly anomalous,” and discussed some cases they’re investigating. He also shared a pretty unsatisfactory resolution for the 2017 GoFast video.

Recap of Past Year’s UAP Reports

2021: Released Jun ’21

UAPTF preliminary report
Covered 16 years, Nov ’04 to Apr ’21
144 reports, 1 resolved
21 reports of “unusual flight characteristics:” “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.”
Flight safety: 11 reports of near misses, no details
Foreign tech: “We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

2022: Released Jan ’23

First AARO report
Covered 6 months, Mar ’21 to Aug ’22
510 total reports, 366 new, 195 resolved
Flight safety: “UAP pose a safety of flight and collision hazard to air assets, potentially requiring aircraft operators to adjust flight patterns in response to their unauthorized presence in the airspace, operating outside of air traffic control standards and instruction. To date, there have been no reported collisions between U.S. aircraft and UAP.”
Health concerns: “There have also been no encounters with UAP confirmed to contribute directly adverse health-related effects to the observer(s)”
Foreign tech: “AARO will continue to investigate any evidence of possible foreign government involvement in UAP events.”

2023: Released Oct ’23

First report after David Grusch
Covered 8 months, Sep ’22 to Apr ’23
801 total reports, 291 new, ? resolved
290 air, 1 maritime, 0 space, 0 transmedium
Flight safety: “None of these reports suggest the UAP were exhibiting anomalous characteristics, maneuvered to an unsafe proximity to civil aircraft, or posed a threat to flight safety to the observing aircraft.”
Health effects: “To date, no encounters with UAP have been confirmed to have directly contributed to adverse health-related effects to the observer(s)”
Foreign tech: “Although none of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities, these cases continue to be investigated.”

AARO’s 2024 UAP Report

Covered 13 months, May ’23 to May ’24
1652 total, 757 new, 292 resolved
- Kosloski: “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. We don't believe that there's necessarily more anomalous activity. It's just that we're getting greater reporting… The FAA is providing us reports now as well.”
- “AARO determined 21 cases merit further analysis… The remaining 444 cases lacked sufficient data to facilitate analysis and were placed in the Active Archive where they will be held for pattern of life and trend analysis or reexamined if additional data becomes available. Archived cases may be reopened and resolved should additional information emerge to support analysis.”
- Nick Shifrin, PBS defense correspondent: “Today's AARO report acknowledges 21 cases that ‘merit further analysis,’ and Kosloski called some of them ‘true anomalies.’ He said the cases he was particularly interested in were spread out over the last year and a half, some include video, some had multiple eyewitnesses, and they exhibited ‘different morphologies,’ including orbs, cylinders, and triangles. One of the cases has been happening ‘over an extended period of time,’ he added.”
708 air, 49 space, 0 maritime, 0 transmedium
- “AARO notes that none of the space domain reports originated from space-based sensors or assets; rather, all of these reports originated from military or commercial pilots or ground observers who reported UAP located at altitudes estimated at 100 kilometers or higher”
Flight safety: “U.S. military aircrews provided two reports that identified flight safety concerns, and three reports described pilots being trailed or shadowed by UAP… Only one [FAA] report mentioned a possible flight safety issue during the event. In this instance, a commercial aircrew reported a near miss with a ‘cylindrical object’ while over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York. AARO continues its research into, and analysis of, this case.”
Health effects: “AARO received no reports suggesting any observers of UAP suffered any physiological impacts or adverse health effects.”
Foreign tech: “To date, AARO has no indication or confirmation that these activities are attributable to foreign adversaries… None of these resolved cases substantiated advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies.”
Alien tech: “It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.”
Crash recovery: “AARO possesses no data to indicate the capture or exploitation of UAP. AARO is working with mission partners to formalize a process in the event UAP materiel is captured, drawing on current US Government capabilities and operating procedures.”
Nuclear sites: “AARO received a total of 18 reports… regarding incidents near U.S. nuclear infrastructure, weapons, and launch sites, [all categorized] as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). …Two instances involved longer flight times of [1-2 hours]. …[One instance] recovered a crashed UAS that was given to… local law enforcement. AARO has no further information about the crashed UAS.”
Starlink reports: “AARO increasingly receives cases that it is able to resolve to the Starlink satellite constellation. For example, a commercial pilot reported white flashing lights in the night sky. The pilot did not report an altitude or speed, and no data or imagery was recorded. AARO assessed that this sighting of flashing lights correlated with a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same evening about one hour prior to the sighting. This sighting occurred in the known orbital path of the satellites.”
Sensor platforms: “AARO has begun collections using a prototype sensor system, GREMLIN, for detecting, tracking, and characterizing UAP. GREMLIN demonstrated functionality and successfully collected data during a test event in March of 2024. The next step for GREMLIN is a 90-day pattern of life collection at a site of national security.”
- War Zone: “GREMLIN includes 2D and 3D radars, long-range electro-optical/infrared sensors, GPS, satellite communications, aircraft tracking systems and radio frequency spectrum monitoring. It all feeds into a central node where the data can be fused to get a better sense of what’s out there. The system is something of an integrated air defense apparatus ‘in a box,’ allowing for multiple sensor types and open-source data to be captured on single targets within its view.”
- Kosloski: “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.”

Media Round Table

After the report was released, Kosloski held a media round table and answered questions for reporters. Most of what he said was just a variation of what’s in the report, so I won’t waste your time with it, but there was one very interesting bit. Someone asked him to respond to Lue’s opening statement at the Congressional hearing, where he said “Let me be clear. UAP are real.”
Kosloski: “Absolutely agree. UAP are real. We've received 1,600 cases. A large number of those are unresolved, which means we don't know exactly what they are… It's definitely not all just drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems… There are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the Intelligence Community, I do not understand. And I don't know anybody else who understands them either.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris #UFODaddy Mellon: “The fact that we now have a federal requirement to report UAP to an office led by a brilliant and open-minded scientist—a scientist willing to admit that some UAP appear genuinely inexplicable and anomalous—is a huge step forward. However, we clearly have a long way to go before we can assume that AARO itself, much less Congress or the American people, is receiving all the relevant UAP data collected by America’s numerous cutting-edge air and space surveillance systems.”

Senate UAP Hearing

Funny exchange between Matt Lazlo of AskAPol and Sen Gillibrand:
- Matt Laslo: “…are you watching the UAP hearing in the House at all?”
- Kirsten Gillibrand: “No, what are they doing? Tell me the topic!”
- ML: “They have Lue Elizondo, like, four whistleblowers. UAPs, kind of broadly…”
- KG: “Did they say, like, the government has a program and they’re hiding it or…?”
- ML: “Yeah. That’s what some of the testimony is. You'll have to go back…”
- KG: “Any new details?”
- ML: “Well, they keep saying ‘we can only answer that in a classified setting.’”
- Gillibrand lets out a disappointed laugh.
Sen Gillibrand: “We're doing [the hearing] specifically focused on what happened at Langley and some of these massive drone strikes we're having all across the country. And some of the information that's been publicly available about those is very concerning… We don't know whose they are. We don't know what propulsion they use. We don't know the tech. We don't know it. It's not off the shelf stuff… So that's what I'm very focused on.”
- Kosloski at media roundtable: AARO doesn’t investigate drone incidents: “Once we know that it’s a UAV or UAS of some nature, we then hand that responsibility off to one of our partners. 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. Those investigations are conducted by someone else, and we’re focusing on the truly anomalous.”
- Gillibrand’s opening statement: “As incidents at Langley and elsewhere have demonstrated, unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, continue to pose significant threats to our national security. In addition to safety of flight issues these UAS create for our own pilots and air crew, the UAS present clear and undeniable counterintelligence concerns around some of the most sensitive airspace. While standard UAS are not part of AARO's mission, your work on sensors at military installations across the country will be critical to making sure that we have the domain awareness necessary to accurately identify and track these objects. I expect your office to also pay close attention to any anomalous characteristics that these systems could present in the future.”
Kosloski’s opening statement: “Last year AARO worked with the DOD's joint staff to issue guidance to defense personnel worldwide on how to report UAP observations, and is working with the military services regarding implementation. AARO has also launched a public website that features UAP imagery, case resolutions, material analysis, archival records, and more. These are only a few examples of AARO's recent progress, and we're just getting started.”
Kosloski: “The public reporting mechanism that we've decided to go with is going to look similar to the reporting mechanism that we currently have for historical events where we're going to ask folks to go to our website, download a PDF form, put in the narrative for their account, and then email that to us with accompanying media. Usually it'll probably be imagery. We went with that option because we thought, one, we could do it rather quickly, we could do it efficiently, make it very cost effective for the taxpayer. But also, we think we can gather all the data that we're going to need to conduct our analysis, and then we're going to have that feed into an automated processing system that will cross-correlate that against all the other public reported cases as well as the US government cases.”
Kosloski: “Our partnership with universities… is lacking right now. We have some one-off associations with university professors However, that's our fault. And it's largely because of the need to declassify data. We need to give the professors something to work on before we can really engage them. So we're working significantly on declassification effort. We've hired a number of declassification experts, and we're going to be trying to get cases… declassified, so that we can engage with the universities on a regular basis and provide them the data. Talking to a scientist without data is going to be rather disappointing. So hopefully in 2025, we'll be increasing those efforts.”

AARO shared 3 unresolved cases

“The first one was brought to us by a law enforcement officer out west where he observed a large orange orb floating several hundred feet above the ground… When he got closer, the area was well lit, and he saw a blacker than black object. He said it was about the size of a Prius, four to six feet wide… It tilted up about 45 degrees and then it shot up vertically, he says 10 to 100 times faster than any drone he's ever seen before. And it did that without making a sound… It emitted very bright red and blue lights that illuminated the inside of his vehicle as brightly as… fireworks… or street flares. So that's anomalous because of the size of the vehicle with the great acceleration.”
“Another one comes to us from the Southeast U.S.… Two cars of government contractors were leaving the facility around nine o'clock in the morning. They looked up in the sky and saw a large metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airplane, and it was stationary. They observed that there was a very bright white light behind or around the object. They saw it stationary for 15 to 20 seconds, and then it disappeared. Obviously, an object that large, stationary, unless it's a blimp, is unusual, but then disappearing, we can't explain how that would happen.”
“And then the last case was interesting. We had an aircraft that was flying parallel to another aircraft and it was capturing imagery of it, and a small looking object appeared to fly between the two of them much faster than them… We think that the object might've actually been further away than the object that it was videotaping, but it requires very careful analysis to come to those conclusions, and we don't have the metadata to support that yet.”

AARO shared 3 resolved cases

“A case that we thought would be a transmedium case as it was reported, is well known on the outside, known as the Puerto Rico case, was data collected in 2013 when a Customs and border patrol aircraft observed an object flying near an airport in Puerto Rico… In this case, it looks like it goes from the air into the water and then back into the air. We assess that it was actually flying over the airport the entire time. And this video was taken with infrared and what appears to be the transmedium part where it goes into the water is actually where the temperature of the water is equal to the temperature of the object, and the camera can no longer distinguish between the two. It's not that the object actually goes into the water. And so we assess that the object, likely a pair of balloons or sky lanterns was floating at about seven knots over the airport and descending to about 200 meters.”
- Kosloski: “To be clear, AARO does not believe every object is a bird, a balloon, or a UAV. We do have some very anomalous objects. It's just the nature of resolution. We can only resolve things that we understand.”
“An interesting case, which I don't believe the public is familiar with, was captured in 2018 from a UAV flying in the Mediterranean watching Mount Etna as it was erupting. And it appears that that object is flying through the plume of superheated gas and ash. This was a rather difficult case to resolve. We had to pull in support from a number of Intelligence Community and Science & Technology partners and even reach out to a volcanologist. And through very detailed 3D modeling and pixel by pixel analysis of the object as it's traversing across the clouds, they assessed that the object was actually 170 meters away from the plume and not flying through it.”
“The GOFAST captured the public attention and congressional attention when it was made public in 2017. Looks like an object flying very fast over the water, very close to the water. Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the app object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet. The diagram here shows as the platform is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called parallax makes it look like the object is moving much faster. And so we've written a detailed paper on parallax released on our website so that the public can literally check our math on this analysis.”
Gillibrand’s opening statement: “I look forward to your presentation of three case studies demonstrating cases that AARO has resolved, including the GoFast, which is one of the most prominent UAP cases. However, I believe it is important to acknowledge ongoing public interest in the Nimitz incident, the Gimbal video, and other prominent UAP cases, and for AARO to share what it can about those cases as well.”
Former Marine Corps intelligence analyst Sean Munger: “From the presentation at yesterday's Senate hearing by Dr. Kosloski, it appears to me that AARO did not resolve the UAP event commonly known as ‘Go Fast’. Unanswered questions remain: What was the object, where did it originate, where did it go, etc? Instead, AARO simply addressed the name of the file, ‘Go Fast’, and concluded it was not going fast per se. Furthermore, it is my understanding that AARO did not communicate with the flight crew that took the video, which implies the AARO investigators lack a full situational awareness of the incident. In any proper investigation, it is imperative for the fact finder - in this case AARO - to know the totality of circumstances leading up to the recorded video as well as the events that occurred following.”
Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves: “I spoke to the Weapons Systems Officer, who recorded the video, a couple of weeks ago and he confirmed no one from the AARO spoke to him. I think it’s important to raise the point that the AARO’s lack of conversation with witnesses on videos they are attempting to resolve indicates they are simply finding technicalities to ‘resolve’ video evidence versus looking for the truth.”
Graves: “Specifically the Go Fast video itself was never really interesting because it was going fast. The pilots certainly didn't say that, nor did they name the video. If anything, the Pentagon simply debunked their own naming for that video. What IS interesting, what's anomalous is that that video was captured within minutes of the Gimbal video, and it just goes to further show that there were many more objects operating in that area than the first video shows. I don't think everything is being taken into account. I think if the AARO office actually spoke with the pilots that were involved in that incident, they would know the objects were part of a larger formation of objects and thus, very anomalous to be operating 300 miles off the coast and within 50 miles of a U.S. aircraft carrier."

References

Episode 60, posted on November 25, 2024