All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office

AARO was created inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense to meet requirements in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 (codified at 50 U.S.C. § 3373). It succeeded the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF, 2020–2021) and the short-lived Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG, directed in November 2021). On July 20, 2022, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie announced the office and named physicist Sean M. Kirkpatrick, then chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center, as its first director. AARO’s charge was broader than its predecessors: all domains rather than airborne objects alone, plus historical review of U.S. government UAP activity, coordination with the intelligence community, and a public-facing role.

The office launched its public site, aaro.mil, on August 31, 2023, and has since issued annual UAP reports to Congress and a March 2024 Historical Record Report covering government involvement since 1945. Kirkpatrick left in December 2023; Timothy A. Phillips served as acting director until Jon T. Kosloski was named director on August 26, 2024. Through 2025–2026 AARO continued case resolution (its FY 2025 report, released in 2026, covered hundreds of reports and attributed many to mundane sources such as balloons and satellite flares), hosted a private UAP data workshop in August 2025, and pursued a congressionally directed review of the historical record back to 1945. It remains the Department of Defense’s authoritative office for UAP.