A lengthy Defense Department review of U.S. government activities related to “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more commonly known as UFOs, has found no evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited Earth or that authorities have recovered crashed alien spacecraft and are hiding them from the public.
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The review, publicly released on Friday, covered all official U.S. investigatory efforts from 1945 to the present and examined classified and unclassified government archives.
It was unequivocal in its conclusions, finding “no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.” Reports of flying objects or suspected alien craft usually turned out to have quotidian explanations: They were “ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,” sometimes by well-meaning witnesses who thought they had spotted something otherworldly.
The report is likely to be scrutinized and rejected by independent investigators, former U.S. personnel and conspiracy theorists who appear convinced the government is hiding evidence of alien life and has constructed an elaborate set of classified programs devoted to reverse-engineering their technology. Last summer, a former intelligence officer who had served on a Pentagon UAP task force sparked headlines and speculation when he told Congress that the government has a secret repository of downed alien spacecraft and corpses.
The new report, compiled by the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), directly addressed those allegations.
“AARO determined, based on all information provided to date, that claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology, are inaccurate,” the office stated in a 60-plus page unclassified document.
Read the Pentagon's unclassified final AARO historical report
Even before the report was published, critics of the office had questioned whether investigators would be hamstrung by a lack of access to highly-classified material. But the office devised a “secure process,” according to the report, working with government agencies to review so-called special-access programs that interviewees had identified, either by their supposed code names or description.
The office’s investigators were “granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs,” and when companies and contractors were identified, the office interviewed senior-level executives, scientists and engineers in those organizations, the report stated. Investigators had access to a wide range of government departments and agencies, including the Defense Department and the military services, the intelligence community — including records held by the CIA — the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department and the National Archives.
The investigators seemed to anticipate that their work would face a skeptical audience. They argued that the public’s imagination and misunderstanding about alien visitations has been fueled by an industry of TV shows, books, movies and social media that repeat the same extravagant claims about spaceships in hangers and alien bodies in basements.
“A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the [U.S. government] — or a secretive organization within it — recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains … and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public,” the report stated.
Government personnel are some of the most ardent believers in that idea. The investigators interviewed about 30 people, including some who had worked on official UAP research programs, “who claimed to have insight into alleged [U.S. government] involvement in off-world technology exploitation,” the report said. In some cases, they had stumbled upon actual, highly classified programs that had nothing to do with aliens.
“Many have sincerely misinterpreted real events or mistaken sensitive U.S. programs for which they were not cleared as having been related to UAP or extraterrestrial exploitation,” Tim Phillips, the AARO acting director, told reporters.
Their conclusions were based on a sort of classified game of telephone, in which whispers of secret programs, often based on hearsay, circulated for years in the military and intelligence community.
Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
The review, publicly released on Friday, covered all official U.S. investigatory efforts from 1945 to the present and examined classified and unclassified government archives.
It was unequivocal in its conclusions, finding “no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.” Reports of flying objects or suspected alien craft usually turned out to have quotidian explanations: They were “ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,” sometimes by well-meaning witnesses who thought they had spotted something otherworldly.
The report is likely to be scrutinized and rejected by independent investigators, former U.S. personnel and conspiracy theorists who appear convinced the government is hiding evidence of alien life and has constructed an elaborate set of classified programs devoted to reverse-engineering their technology. Last summer, a former intelligence officer who had served on a Pentagon UAP task force sparked headlines and speculation when he told Congress that the government has a secret repository of downed alien spacecraft and corpses.
The new report, compiled by the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), directly addressed those allegations.
“AARO determined, based on all information provided to date, that claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology, are inaccurate,” the office stated in a 60-plus page unclassified document.
Read the Pentagon's unclassified final AARO historical report
Even before the report was published, critics of the office had questioned whether investigators would be hamstrung by a lack of access to highly-classified material. But the office devised a “secure process,” according to the report, working with government agencies to review so-called special-access programs that interviewees had identified, either by their supposed code names or description.
The office’s investigators were “granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs,” and when companies and contractors were identified, the office interviewed senior-level executives, scientists and engineers in those organizations, the report stated. Investigators had access to a wide range of government departments and agencies, including the Defense Department and the military services, the intelligence community — including records held by the CIA — the Energy Department, the Homeland Security Department and the National Archives.
The investigators seemed to anticipate that their work would face a skeptical audience. They argued that the public’s imagination and misunderstanding about alien visitations has been fueled by an industry of TV shows, books, movies and social media that repeat the same extravagant claims about spaceships in hangers and alien bodies in basements.
“A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the [U.S. government] — or a secretive organization within it — recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains … and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public,” the report stated.
Government personnel are some of the most ardent believers in that idea. The investigators interviewed about 30 people, including some who had worked on official UAP research programs, “who claimed to have insight into alleged [U.S. government] involvement in off-world technology exploitation,” the report said. In some cases, they had stumbled upon actual, highly classified programs that had nothing to do with aliens.
“Many have sincerely misinterpreted real events or mistaken sensitive U.S. programs for which they were not cleared as having been related to UAP or extraterrestrial exploitation,” Tim Phillips, the AARO acting director, told reporters.
Their conclusions were based on a sort of classified game of telephone, in which whispers of secret programs, often based on hearsay, circulated for years in the military and intelligence community.
