The Pentagon office said on Thursday that it has received hundreds of UFO reports over the past year.
The Pentagon’s Anomaly Authorisation Resolution Office (AARO) report covers reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) from May last year to early June this year. The report said:
“During this period, the office received 757 UAP reports; 485 of these reports involved UAP incidents that occurred during the reporting period.”
Another 272 reports were related to incidents occurring in 2021 and 2022, but they were not reported to the office until then and therefore were not included in previous reports.
Investigators found explanations for nearly 300 incidents. In many cases, the unknown objects turned out to be balloons, birds, aircraft, drones or satellites. According to the report, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system is one of the increasingly common sources as people mistake chains of satellites for UFOs.
Hundreds of other cases remain unexplained, although the report’s authors emphasise that this is often due to a lack of information to draw firm conclusions. Jon Kosloski, the office’s director, said:
“Reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, especially near national security targets, must be taken seriously by the US government and investigated with scientific rigour.”
The report noted that many cases remain unsolved and analyses are ongoing. It also said:
“It is important to emphasise that to date AARO has found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.”
The office has reviewed more than 1,650 cases since its inception.
The report comes a day after a US House of Representatives subcommittee hearing in which some former government officials said UFOs exist and Americans should know the truth.
During the hearing, former Department of Defence official Luis Elizondo said a select group in the government is hiding “the fact that we are not alone in space.”
Michael Gold, a former NASA official, acknowledged that while most UFO sightings can be explained by conventional means, such as drones or weather phenomena, there remains a percentage of cases that cannot be explained.
Retired Navy Admiral Tim Gallaudet shared his experience with the famous “GoFast” video incident that occurred in 2015, stating that evidence of the encounter mysteriously disappeared from his email account. He also claimed that he was intimidated by the government to suppress discussion of UFOs.
