Susan Walsh/AP
The Pentagon says a new report reviewing nearly 80 years of UFO sightings found no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The 63-page unclassified document released Friday is the most comprehensive report the Pentagon has ever produced on the subject and another rebuttal of claims of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The U.S. Department of Defense's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has published a report covering claims of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) (the military's term for UFOs) from 1945 to October 2023. AARO was created in 2022 to identify and address reports. UAP's
“AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academically sponsored study, or official review panel has identified the UAP sightings as extraterrestrial technology,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Friday.
In all investigative efforts, most sightings have been of common objects and the result of misidentification, Ryder said.
Many of the sightings were found to be drones, weather balloons, reconnaissance aircraft, satellites, rockets and planets, according to the report.
The report dismisses some of the most explosive claims raised at congressional hearings in July. Former military officials have claimed that the government is hiding from the public what it knows about UFOs. In one account, a former Air Force intelligence officer claimed that the government had long been running a secret program to reverse engineer recovered UFO vessels.
“To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have accessed or reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology,” Ryder said in a statement.
The office plans to publish a second volume of the report later this year, covering findings from interviews and research conducted between November 2023 and April 2024.
NPR's Greg Myre contributed to this report.