According to a statement released by the US Department of Defense on July 20, 2022, the Pentagon will soon open a special branch (office) dedicated exclusively to investigating UFO sightings.
This office, called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), will serve as a central hub that collects, investigates, and processes UFO sighting reports from the US Army, Navy, and Air Force.
According to the statement, the branch will synchronize the efforts of the federal government “to locate, identify and attribute objects of interest … and, if necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to the security of operations and national security.”
It is also stated that “this includes anomalous, unidentified space, air, underwater and transmedial objects.”
Over the past few years, the U.S. government has renewed interest in UFOs following the “leak” in 2017 of three videos showing mysterious wingless UFOs (so-called Tic-Tac-shaped UFOs) moving at hypersonic speeds alongside U.S. aircraft carriers.
The US Navy officially confirmed and declassified these videos in April 2020, but did not provide any explanation as to what the mysterious objects might be.
In 2020, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called for an investigation into UFOs—or Unidentified Air Phenomena (UAPs), as the U.S. government now prefers to call them—citing concerns that there was no single government approach to collecting and analyzing reports of such sightings.
In June 2021, the Pentagon published a report of more than 140 UFO sightings by US Navy pilots – and concluded that none of these cases had evidence of alien activity.
Also, at the request of interested activists, more than 1,500 pages of archival UFO-related material have been released in the US, including bizarre reports that some UFO encounters left radiation burns on the bodies of eyewitnesses, and some women were suddenly pregnant.
The new office will be led by Sean M. Kirkpatrick, chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Center for Space and Missile Intelligence, according to the statement.
