PUBLIC RESEARCH / SOURCE GUIDE
UAP Investigations and Public Records
How to navigate official UAP reporting, declassification and competing explanations.
Quick answer
What does the US government officially say about UFOs (UAP)?
The US government now calls UFOs unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and investigates reports through the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), created in July 2022. Officials acknowledge many sightings remain unexplained, but AARO's 2024 historical review reported no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Earlier investigations, such as Project Blue Book (1952 to 1969), reached similar conclusions.
Start with the original record
An unexplained observation is not itself proof of an extraterrestrial origin.
Open All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office ↗
How to investigate
- Locate the original record and note its author, date and archive identifier.
- Separate what the record states from what later commentators infer.
- Cross-check the claim with independent documents and contemporaneous reporting.
- Record what remains unknown or disputed.
This page is an orientation guide, not an assertion that any specific conspiracy claim is established. The linked official source is an entry point; individual documents have not been exhaustively verified.
Continue your investigation
Key facts and dates
- 1952 to 1969: The Air Force's Project Blue Book logs 12,618 reports. 701 remain officially unidentified.
- April 2020: The Department of Defense officially releases three Navy videos of unidentified objects.
- June 2021: A preliminary intelligence assessment reviews 144 reports and explains only one.
- July 2022: The Pentagon establishes AARO to track and resolve UAP reports.
- July 2023: Former intelligence official David Grusch testifies to Congress under oath about alleged crash-retrieval programs. The Pentagon denies the claims.
- March 2024: AARO's historical report says it found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Common questions
Has the government admitted UFOs are real?
It has acknowledged that unidentified objects are real in the sense that they are observed and not yet explained. It has not confirmed that any are alien. Those are different claims.
Where are the Project Blue Book files?
The Project Blue Book records are held by the US National Archives and can be searched in its online catalog.
What is AARO?
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is the Pentagon office created in 2022 to collect and analyze UAP reports from the military and other agencies. It publishes reports at aaro.mil.
What did David Grusch claim?
In July 2023 he told a House Oversight subcommittee, under oath, that he had been informed of programs recovering non-human craft. He said his information was secondhand, and the Defense Department has denied the existence of such programs.
Stories built on this record
The files below start from this record. Then they keep going. The first pages of every file are free.
Last reviewed 2026-10-13. Facts on this page come from the official sources linked above and the published record. Archive files are dramatized and always marked as files.