On February 19, 2026, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the Secretary of War—the Pentagon’s rebranded title under this administration—and other federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed up days later during a stop in Colorado, confirming that the Pentagon was “working on it right now” and would be “in full compliance” with the directive, though he cautioned against expectations about how long the process would take. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted that files would be declassified “soon.”
As of late March 2026, no files have been released.
This is, in miniature, the entire story of UAP disclosure in the United States: periodic surges of political momentum, dramatic promises, institutional mechanisms that grind slowly, and a gap between what’s announced and what’s delivered that is wide enough to sustain both reasonable skepticism and the most elaborate conspiracy theories simultaneously. Tracking what the government has actually said—versus what it has implied, hinted at, or allowed people to infer—requires the kind of close reading that would make a securities lawyer proud.
The institutional machinery
The Pentagon’s current UAP investigation office is the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, established in 2022 under the Biden administration to fulfill a congressional mandate in that year’s National Defense Authorization Act. AARO replaced a series of predecessor programs with progressively less catchy names: the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (2020–2022), the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (2007–2012, though the exact end date is disputed), and before that, various Air Force and intelligence community efforts dating back to Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969.
AARO achieved full operational capacity in 2024. Its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick—a physicist—served from July 2022 to December 2023. Under Kirkpatrick, AARO produced a two-volume historical review of U.S. government involvement with UAP. Volume One, released in March 2024, concluded that AARO had found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology, and no evidence that the U.S. government or private industry had ever possessed or reverse-engineered materials of non-human origin. Volume Two—which was supposed to address historical government programs in more detail—has never been published. The required 2025 annual report has also not been published. Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who now chairs the UAP Disclosure Foundation, has publicly noted that AARO has failed to meet its statutory reporting obligations.
What AARO has released is a November 2024 annual report covering cases from May 2023 through June 2024, which documented 757 new UAP reports. Most were resolved as prosaic objects—balloons, drones, satellites, aircraft. Twenty-one cases were classified as “truly anomalous,” meaning AARO could not explain them. As of February 2026, Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough confirmed that AARO’s total caseload has exceeded 2,000 reports, up from approximately 1,600 in late 2024. Roughly 1,000 of those lack sufficient data for analysis and sit in an active archive.
Those numbers deserve some calibration. Two thousand reports across roughly three years of operation, from a reporting infrastructure that covers the entire U.S. military, intelligence community, and increasingly the civilian aviation sector, is not a large number. The vast majority resolve to mundane explanations. The residual—the cases that remain unexplained after analysis—is a small fraction of a small number. Whether that residual represents genuinely anomalous phenomena, insufficient sensor data, classified programs that AARO isn’t read into, or some combination of the above is precisely the question that nobody in the government has definitively answered.
What the 2024 report actually said
AARO’s November 2024 report is the most recent comprehensive public document, and it’s worth reading carefully because the language does a lot of work. The report states that most UAP sightings were resolved as identifiable objects. It states that 21 cases remain unexplained. It does not state that those 21 cases exhibit characteristics inconsistent with known technology. It does not state that any case involves non-human intelligence. It describes the unexplained cases as requiring further data collection, not as evidence of anything extraordinary.
This is the epistemic position that AARO has maintained consistently: we have cases we can’t explain, and “can’t explain” means “insufficient data,” not “must be aliens.” Kirkpatrick, the former director, told CBS News in early 2026 that he expects the Trump disclosure process to produce “no new revelations” and described the entire exercise as a “distraction.” He characterized some of what his office encountered as Air Force “hazing” and “deceptions” designed to obscure secret defense programs—not evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
The counterargument—advanced by Mellon, by UAP whistleblower David Grusch, and by members of Congress from both parties who have participated in classified briefings—is that AARO’s conclusions are constrained by what it’s been allowed to see. Grusch testified before Congress in July 2023 that the U.S. government possesses materials of non-human origin and has been running crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs for decades. He stated that he was denied access to these programs and that his complaints were suppressed. AARO’s Volume One report addressed Grusch’s claims by stating that the office found no evidence to substantiate them, while acknowledging that its investigation was ongoing.
The gap between Grusch’s testimony and AARO’s conclusions is the central unresolved question in the entire UAP discourse, and it is genuinely unresolvable from the outside. Either Grusch has information that AARO was denied—which would mean the Pentagon’s own investigation office was deliberately kept out of the loop on the most significant programs—or Grusch’s claims don’t hold up under investigation. Both possibilities are troubling for different reasons, and the government has not provided enough information to determine which is correct.
The 2026 NDAA provisions
Congress has been more aggressive than the executive branch on UAP transparency, and the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act—which authorized $900.6 billion in defense spending and passed the House 312–112 in December 2025—contains three UAP-specific provisions.
First, the NDAA requires the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on any UAP intercepts conducted by NORAD and U.S. Northern Command since 2004. This provision matters because NORAD and NORTHCOM share responsibility for defending North American airspace, and both have confronted a surge in reports of unexplained drone and UAP incursions near military installations and critical infrastructure. The requirement to brief Congress on intercepts—not just sightings but active engagement—is a significant escalation of oversight.
Second, the NDAA requires AARO to issue a consolidated security classification guide for programs related to UAP investigations. Mellon has argued for years that the Pentagon’s classification of UAP materials has been excessively restrictive. He noted that after he provided historic gun camera footage of Navy encounters with UAP to the New York Times and Washington Post in 2017—the videos that essentially launched the modern UAP discourse—”the Pentagon cloaked under order of secrecy virtually everything about its UAP investigation.” A new classification guide could theoretically open up more material for public release, though Mellon has cautioned that AARO would retain substantial discretion to withhold records even under a revised framework.
Third, the NDAA streamlines reporting requirements and reduces barriers to information sharing between federal agencies and AARO. This addresses a structural problem: the intelligence community and military services have historically been reluctant to share sensitive data with AARO, partly because of legitimate classification concerns and partly because institutional cultures within the defense establishment don’t always cooperate smoothly with oversight mechanisms that were imposed on them by Congress.
The AARO workshop nobody noticed
In early August 2025, AARO sponsored an invite-only workshop in the Washington, D.C. area, hosted by Associated Universities, Inc. Approximately 40 government, academic, and independent researchers convened for two days to standardize processes for collecting, sharing, and studying narrative data from UAP reports. The workshop wasn’t announced in advance. Attendees covered their own travel. The results were published in a 17-page whitepaper in early 2026.
The findings are worth noting because they describe the actual state of UAP data infrastructure—which is, to put it charitably, underdeveloped. The whitepaper identified the need for common reporting templates with robust metadata, methods for linking military and civilian datasets while balancing interoperability with privacy and classification constraints, and automated systems for filtering reports to surface the most promising cases for investigation. It also recommended applying AI to large-scale datasets for pattern recognition.
In other words, the U.S. government’s UAP investigation office convened its first workshop on standardizing how it collects and organizes the data it’s supposed to be analyzing. In 2025. Three years after AARO was established. This tells you something about the maturity of the program that all the congressional hearings and presidential directives don’t.
What has actually been confirmed
Sorting through three years of reports, hearings, and directives, here is what the U.S. government has confirmed, on the record, through official channels:
Military personnel—particularly Navy pilots—have encountered objects that exhibit flight characteristics they cannot explain. The 2017 videos (FLIR1, GIMBAL, and GOFAST) are authentic and were captured by U.S. Navy systems. AARO has received over 2,000 UAP reports. Most resolved to prosaic explanations. A small residual remains unexplained. No evidence of extraterrestrial technology has been found by AARO. The Pentagon has acknowledged that UAP represent a potential national security concern, whether or not they have exotic origins, because unidentified objects operating near military installations and in military airspace are inherently a problem regardless of what they are. Congress has passed legislation requiring greater transparency and oversight. The Trump administration has directed the release of files, though no timeline or specific materials have been identified.
Here is what the U.S. government has not confirmed: that any UAP represents non-human technology; that crash retrieval or reverse-engineering programs exist; that any physical materials of non-human origin are in government or private-sector possession; or that the “truly anomalous” cases in AARO’s files exhibit characteristics that are physically impossible for human-made technology.
The space between those two lists is where the entire UAP conversation lives—and where it has lived, in various forms, since Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine unusual objects near Mount Rainier in June 1947 and the press coined the term “flying saucer.” Nearly eighty years of institutional ambiguity. The 2026 disclosure directive is either the beginning of the end of that ambiguity or another cycle of promise, delay, and sustained uncertainty. The pattern, at this point, would suggest the latter. But patterns can break, and the institutional infrastructure—AARO, the NDAA provisions, the classification review, the workshop on data standardization—is more robust than anything the government has previously built for this purpose. Whether that infrastructure produces answers or produces better-organized questions remains to be seen.
We cover the full institutional history of government UAP investigation—from Project Sign in 1948 through AARO’s current caseload—in our Fortean Phenomena course. If you found the gap between what’s been said and what’s been confirmed more interesting than either the believers or the debunkers want to admit, the course goes deep on the epistemology of anomalous claims and the institutions that try to resolve them.