Pentagon Finally Releases Much Anticipated UFO Report, Which Now Covers 510 Cases

After a several month delay, the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) finally released its latest report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), or as most people refer to them, UFOs.

Established in July by the U.S. Department of Defense, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has been investigating hundreds of new UFO reports.

This is a significant jump in reported incidents being tracked by the United States government as there had only been 144 such encounters reported between 2004 and 2021. At least according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Pentagon’s latest UFO report, titled “2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” can be viewed in its entirety here.

In the 12 page report, the AARO and ODNI’s National Intelligence Manager for Aviation claims to have documented 247 new UAP events, plus an additional 119 UAP events that were not included in the ODNI’s original June 2021 report.

Data on these new UFO events were reportedly gathered from various intelligence offices, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Energy (DoE), and NASA.

Space.com reports…

In all, the report covers some 510 cataloged UAP reports gathered from agencies involved in the report and the branches of the United States military. The document notes that the majority of these were gathered from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force personnel who reported them through official channels. Ultimately, the unclassified report concludes that, while UAP “continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat,” many of the reports “lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty.”

Out of these 510 total UAP reports, ODNI assessed 366 that had been newly identified since AARO’s creation. Of these, 26 were characterized as uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, 163 were attributed to balloons or “balloon-like entities,” and six were found to be airborne “clutter” such as birds or airborne plastic shopping bags. 

That leaves 171 reported UAP sightings that remain “uncharacterized and unattributed,” according to ODNI’s report. “Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” the report adds.

“UAP pose a safety of flight and collision hazard to air assets, potentially requiring aircraft operators to adjust flight patterns in response to their unauthorized presence in the airspace, operating outside of air traffic control standards and instruction,” the report reads. “To date, there have been no reported collisions between U.S. aircraft and UAP.”

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement on Thursday, “The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount. We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.”

While it is good that the U.S. government now appears to be taking UFO sightings and encounters more seriously, unfortunately, and rather misleadingly, this new government UAP report provides very little in the way of details regarding the now 510 total UFO events or how they are being investigated.

The general public was led to believe that this new focus and the creation of the AARO would lead to some actual transparency with regard to actual UFO investigations.

Hopefully, the team of scientists that NASA established to participate in a independent study on UFOs will yield more information.

(They have tweeted nothing since.)