On March 8, the Department of Defense published the most significant report on UFOs in at least two generations — a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP.
Unfortunately, the report from the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contains an array of striking omissions and one particularly egregious misrepresentation. The result is a misleading report which, like so much government UFO-related propaganda over seven decades, tells the reader just to move on, nothing to see here.
To start, it makes no mention of how the U.S. government’s official investigation of UFOs began. In a landmark 1947 memo, Lt. Gen. (and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Nathan Twining stated that UFOs are “real and not visionary or fictitious.” He also described their flight characteristics as including “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability…and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”
Nor does AARO’s report mention the earliest surviving intelligence assessment of UFOs — a late 1948 analysis that found many UFO reports came from observers “who, because of their technical background and experience, do not appear to be influenced by unfounded sensationalism nor inclined to report explainable phenomena as new types of aerial devices.”
Citing reports from “trained and experienced U.S. Weather Bureau personnel” from early 1947, the omitted document noted multiple observations of “strange metallic disks” with “a flat bottom and a round top.” (Note that these incidents predated by several months the widely-publicized June 1947 incident that catalyzed the “flying saucer” era.)
Other incidents involved “silver disks or balls” and “balls of fire” that stalked World War II aircrews over the European and Pacific theaters. The Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, Newsweek, Stars and Stripes and the now-defunct International News Service referred contemporaneously to mysterious “silver colored spheres” and “silver balls which float in the air.”
Although omitted by AARO, all of this historical background remains significant because, to this day, images and videos continue to emerge of objects fitting similar descriptions. In fact, AARO’s ex-director openly stated as much during a May 2023 NASA presentation on UAP, that U.S. military personnel are observing “metallic orbs” “all over the world…making very interesting apparent maneuvers.”
Moreover, AARO has not provided a plausible explanation for naval aviators’ more recent encounters — including one harrowing near-collision — with spherical objects exhibiting extraordinary flight characteristics.
Worst of all, AARO’s review misrepresents the most exhaustive, comprehensive historical analysis of UFO incidents, conducted on behalf of the Air Force by the Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1950s. According to AARO, the resulting report found that “all cases that had enough data were resolved and explainable.”
But this is not what Battelle’s analysis found at all, and AARO’s misrepresentation of its conclusions speaks volumes.
Hellbound and Down 