United States.AARO · Historical Record Report, Volume 1 (2024)

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), created by the Pentagon in 2022, was tasked by Congress —through the National Defense Authorization Act— to review the historical record of U.S. government involvement with UAP since 1945. Volume 1 of the resulting report was published on March 8, 2024 (with an advance to selected journalists days earlier, and the original sign-off of then-director Sean Kirkpatrick before his departure), covering the 1945 to October 2023 period. Its stated documentary base includes classified and unclassified archives, interviews with people claiming knowledge of programs, and a review of all programs and code names alleged by those interviewees.

Its central conclusion is skeptical and direct. AARO states it found no evidence that any investigation —governmental, academic or private— confirmed the existence of technology of extraterrestrial origin, nor evidence of programs to recover or reverse-engineer non-human craft. More specifically, it holds that the claim that the U.S. government is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of 'circular reporting' originating from a group of individuals who share that belief, with no evidence to support it. The report adds two concrete findings: that none of the companies named by interviewees ever acknowledged having possessed extraterrestrial technology, and that a sample attributed to an alleged crashed craft turned out, on analysis, to be a manufactured terrestrial alloy with no exceptional properties. It attributes the persistence of these beliefs to a combination of misidentifications of real systems (often one's own classified programs misread by observers without access), bureaucratic misunderstandings, and that circular-citation phenomenon. The document explicitly rebuts claims of the kind made by David Grusch. It is deliberately the direct institutional counterpart to the disclosure pole: the same subject, the opposite conclusion.

Volume 2 —meant to cover what the first left out— remains unpublished as of September 2026, but AARO took an unexpected step to feed it. On September 2, 2026, DefenseScoop revealed a Department of War contracting notice on SAM.gov: a notice of intent to award a sole-source, firm-fixed-price contract for a commercial data subscription with the National UFO Historic Records Center (NUFOHRC), the New Mexico nonprofit founded and led by historian David Marler. The subscription would give AARO digital access to the center's proprietary data, metadata and analytical products, with emphasis on pre-1990 material, under a one-year base period with four option years. The sole-source justification holds that the archive possesses the world's largest private collection of historical UAP records, with hundreds of thousands of case files that exist in no other public or private repository. The cost was not disclosed and NUFOHRC declined to comment. It is the first time the office has acknowledged in writing, in a contracting document, that a civilian ufology archive holds material the government itself lacks.

It is the corpus's strongest official skeptical anchor, and therefore indispensable for analytical honesty: it directly counterweights the recent additions from the disclosure pole (Grusch, Immaculate Constellation, plasmoids). A federal agency with access to classified archives reviewed the full 1945–2023 record and concluded in writing, under its name and institutional seal, that it found no evidence of non-human technology or reverse-engineering. That an analysis claiming to be honest includes and weighs this report —rather than dismissing it— is precisely what distinguishes it from single-pole literature. It therefore weighs heavily against the covert-non-human narrative (which now includes reverse-engineering and the treaty narrative): it is the official datum that removes the most pressure from that narrative in the entire corpus.

Its limit, however, is as important as its weight, and it is symmetric to its COMETA counterpart's. First, logical: 'we found no evidence' does not equal 'it does not exist', and the report's scope is bounded by what AARO could or chose to review. Critics —including those who gave congressional testimony— note that AARO did not state it had access to the unacknowledged Special Access Programs Grusch alleges exist, which would leave off its radar exactly the material that matters most to the dispute. Second, methodological: Kirkpatrick and his team, as the press reported, partly reframed Congress's question to answer the one they considered answerable with the available evidence, a defensible decision that detractors read as a narrowing of the mandate. And third, governance: that the same community accused of compartmentalizing the information is the one producing the report that denies the compartmentalization is a structural tension the document cannot resolve from within. None of this invalidates the report; it frames it. As a documented institutional datum, it genuinely lowers the pressure on the covert-non-human narrative and on the derived non-human-entities view, without closing them. Tier A for documentary solidity and impact.

The subscription to Marler's archive (September 2026) adds an instructive irony to that framing: the same report that in 2024 attributed the field's beliefs to 'circular reporting' among ufologists now needs, for its second volume, the archive of a civilian ufologist who gathered what federal records did not preserve. It is not a change of conclusion —a subscription is not an endorsement— but it is an admission of scope: the 'comprehensive' review from 1945 onward could not be done with government papers alone. How AARO uses that material, and whether Volume 2 cites it, is what the corpus must watch.