AARO, explained

Half the post-PURSUE coverage cycle is built on a structural confusion: that AARO and PURSUE are the same thing. They are not. PURSUE is a release mechanism operated by the Department of War. AARO is the executive-branch office that investigates UAP cases and supplies some of its holdings to PURSUE. The distinction matters for every release that follows. This is a primer.

What AARO is

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO — is a Department of Defense office established in July 2022. Its statutory authority comes from Section 1683 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which directs the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to stand up an office to “detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest in, on, or near military installations, operating areas, or training areas… and assess and… mitigate any threats to safety of operations and national security.”

AARO replaced and absorbed two predecessor efforts: the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). Its scope was widened: AARO covers all-domain phenomena — air, space, sea, ground, trans-medium — not just airborne objects.

AARO reports through the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and coordinates with NASA, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the broader Intelligence Community. It has statutory whistleblower protections for personnel who report UAP-related information and is mandated to provide periodic classified and unclassified reports to Congress.

The office’s mandate, in one line: investigate and attribute. Not declassify. Not publish.

Who runs it

AARO’s first director was Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist who came to the office from the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he had served as chief scientist at DIA’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. He led AARO from July 2022 to December 2023.

Kirkpatrick’s tenure was marked by an institutionally skeptical public posture. He testified to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats in April 2023, gave on-the-record interviews to the Washington Post and Politico, and oversaw the staff work for AARO’s first Volume I Historical Record Report, published in March 2024 after his departure. The report concluded that “the overwhelming majority of UAP reports… reflect mistaken identification or misperception of objects, sensor anomalies, or natural phenomena.” That conclusion alienated parts of the disclosure community while building durability with Congress — a trade Kirkpatrick made deliberately.

His acting successor was Tim Phillips, followed by Dr. Jon Kosloski, who was named permanent director in late 2024. Kosloski’s posture has been notably less media-forward than Kirkpatrick’s, with most public communication routed through the Office of the Secretary of Defense rather than direct interview. As of this primer (2026-05-12), Kosloski remains director. Leadership at AARO has had three transitions in four years; assume any specific name in this section may be out of date by the next election cycle and check aaro.mil before citing.

AARO vs. PURSUE

This is the section most coverage is currently getting wrong. The distinction is structural.

AARO is an investigative office. It receives UAP reports from military personnel and intelligence-community sources, conducts analytical work to attribute or fail to attribute the phenomena, maintains a case database, and produces classified and unclassified reports. AARO’s outputs are findings — assessments of specific incidents, methodological documents, and the periodic historical record reports.

PURSUE is a release mechanism. Stood up under the current administration and operated by the Department of War (the Pentagon, post-rebrand), PURSUE — Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — is the publication surface for records the executive branch has decided to declassify. Release 01 was published at war.gov/UFO on May 8, 2026, and drew on 162 records across four agencies including some of AARO’s holdings.

The relationship between the two: AARO is one input to PURSUE. AARO’s case files appear in PURSUE releases, AARO’s framings appear in the document headers, and AARO’s evidentiary rankings — most notably the “among the most compelling within AARO’s current holdings” line on the Western US Event — appear inside the released documents. But AARO does not operate PURSUE. AARO did not “release” the 162 records of Release 01. The Department of War did.

If you remember one thing from this primer: AARO is the investigator. PURSUE is the publisher. They are not the same thing, and conflating them makes Release 02 — and every release after — unreadable.

What AARO has actually done

The honest accounting matters because the discourse will inflate it.

Volume I Historical Record Report (March 2024). An unclassified report covering U.S. government engagement with UAP from 1945 to October 31, 2023. Its central finding: AARO found “no empirical evidence for claims that the U.S. Government and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.” The report did acknowledge that misidentification, sensor artifact, and prosaic explanations account for the substantial majority of UAP reports it reviewed — language that drew sharp pushback from David Grusch and other claimants but established AARO’s analytical baseline.

Congressional testimony. Sean Kirkpatrick’s April 19, 2023 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats remains the office’s most cited public appearance. It established AARO’s case-volume metrics (roughly 800 cases under review at the time, with 2–5% described as “anomalous”) and Kirkpatrick’s posture on the historical record. Subsequent classified briefings to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are documented in committee public statements but not in transcript form.

Public reporting portal. AARO operates a submission page at aaro.mil where current and former U.S. government personnel can submit UAP-related observations. The portal is not open to the general public — civilian reports continue to route through NUFORC and other private archives, which is why the on-site sightings map at /map/ draws from those sources rather than AARO.

Methodology baseline. AARO’s 2025 UAP Workshop Paper (PDF) lays out the analytical framework the office now uses to evaluate cases. PURSUE Release 01 reads as the operationalization of this document — the categorization scheme used on war.gov mirrors the Workshop’s typology.

What AARO has not done: declared any case extraterrestrial in origin, identified any non-human craft, or confirmed any element of the “non-human biologics retrieval” claims made in 2023 congressional testimony by David Grusch. AARO’s public position is that it has found no such evidence within its remit. Whether that’s because the evidence doesn’t exist or because the relevant programs sit outside AARO’s authority is the heart of the ongoing controversy.

What AARO can’t do

AARO’s authority is narrower than its name suggests. Three significant limits.

Special Access Programs. AARO’s authority to investigate UAP allegations within Special Access Programs (SAPs) requires SAP read-in. SAP read-ins are granted by the program’s controlling agency, not by AARO. If a hypothetical SAP related to UAP retrieval or analysis existed and the controlling agency declined to read AARO in, AARO would have no statutory means to compel access. This is the structural reason Grusch’s allegations — that such programs exist outside AARO’s read-in — cannot be resolved by AARO itself. They can only be resolved by the program’s controlling authority or by Congress using its own oversight powers.

Declassification. AARO does not have declassification authority. Records related to UAP that AARO holds remain at whatever classification level they were assigned by the originating agency. AARO can recommend declassification, package material for review, and supply records to higher-authority release processes — including, now, PURSUE — but the declassification decision sits elsewhere. PURSUE is one path that decision can take; FOIA litigation and direct congressional request are others.

Civilian cases. AARO’s intake is limited to U.S. government and military sources. Civilian sightings — the substrate of the public UAP record from NUFORC, MUFON, and academic archives — are outside AARO’s investigative mandate. Civilians can submit observations through aaro.mil only if they are current or former U.S. government personnel. The 150,000 sightings on our map are not AARO’s record. They are the public’s.

AARO is best understood as the executive branch’s internal UAP analytics office. The U.S. government’s UAP disclosure office — structurally — is what PURSUE is becoming.

Recommended further reading

Four primary sources do most of the work for this beat. Bookmark them.

• AARO official site (aaro.mil) — the office’s public face. Statute, mission, reporting page, and links to all published reports.
• Volume I Historical Record Report (March 2024) — AARO’s foundational public document; navigate to it from aaro.mil’s reports section. Unclassified, comprehensive on the 1945–2023 record.
• 2025 UAP Workshop Paper (PDF) — AARO’s methodology baseline. PURSUE Release 01 reads as the operationalization of this document.
• Senate Armed Services Subcommittee testimony, April 19, 2023 — Kirkpatrick’s first congressional testimony. The transcript is on the committee’s public records page; it remains the office’s most cited public appearance.

For ongoing coverage of AARO’s congressional dynamics, Politico’s national-security desk and The Debrief are the most consistent. For the disclosure-skeptical read, Mick West’s commentary at Metabunk and Steven Greenstreet’s reporting at the New York Post offer the strongest counter-current readings. Read both sides to triangulate.

A note on this primer

This is a primer, not a profile. AARO leadership, authority, and posture change over time. Where this document hedges with “as of” markers, that is deliberate — the underlying facts may shift before we next update it. We will keep the document current as the office evolves and PURSUE matures. Corrections and additions: tips@littlegreenman.net.

—The Editor