AARO

AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, is the Pentagon's permanent UAP investigation body, established in 2022 by congressional mandate as the direct institutional successor to the informal AATIP program and the formal answer to the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment's call for a dedicated resolution office. Its mandate covers intake of military and civilian UAP reports, sensor and radar data analysis, and — distinctively — a formal historical review of past U.S. government UAP-related activity, the review that produced AARO's 2024 finding of no verifiable evidence for extraterrestrial visitation or crash-retrieval programs in the historical record it examined. AARO's day-to-day casework resolves the substantial majority of reports into mundane categories — weather balloons, drones, birds, camera and sensor artifacts — while explicitly acknowledging it retains a small residue of cases it genuinely cannot explain, a "truly anomalous" category AARO director Jon Kosloski and predecessor Sean Kirkpatrick have both discussed publicly in congressional testimony. The office represents a deliberate institutional design choice distinct from Blue Book's history: unlike the Air Force program that quietly closed after the 1968 Condon Report, AARO reports statutorily to Congress on a recurring schedule, structurally harder to simply wind down the way its 20th-century predecessor eventually was.