In December 2017, the New York Times published a front-page story that shattered seven decades of official silence. The United States Department of Defense, the article revealed, had been running a secret $22 million program to investigate unidentified flying objects. Accompanying the article were three grainy but extraordinary videos recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots — video recordings of objects that accelerated at impossible speeds, changed direction instantaneously, and displayed technology far beyond anything in the American arsenal. The Pentagon confirmed the videos were real. The objects in them remain unidentified. In the years since, the U.S. government has undergone a seismic shift in its public posture toward what it now calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Congressional hearings have been held under oath. A new Pentagon office — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — has been established to investigate reports. A former intelligence officer has testified before Congress that the government has recovered "non-human" spacecraft and is concealing the truth from the public. And in 2024, AARO released its most comprehensive report to date, reviewing over 1,500 UAP cases. The conclusion? Most sightings have mundane explanations — but some do not.

The story of the Pentagon's UAP investigations is not just a story about UFOs. It is a story about government secrecy, institutional denial, the limits of human knowledge, and the collision between national security and the public's right to know. It involves Navy pilots risking their careers to report what they saw, intelligence officials going public with explosive claims, and a Congress that has grown increasingly frustrated with the Defense Department's evasiveness. It spans from Project Blue Book in the 1950s to the cutting-edge sensor systems of the 2020s. And at its heart is a question that the world's most powerful military has been unable — or unwilling — to answer: What is flying in our skies?

The Videos That Changed Everything

The three Navy videos that went viral in 2017 — known as FLIR, GIMBAL, and GOFAST — remain the most compelling visual evidence the U.S. government has ever acknowledged. The FLIR video (also called "Tic Tac") was recorded on November 14, 2004, by Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood aboard an F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Nimitz carrier strike group, operating approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego. For days before the video was captured, the USS Princeton's advanced SPY-1 radar had been tracking anomalous aerial objects descending from 80,000 feet to sea level in seconds. When Underwood was dispatched to investigate, he encountered a wingless, white, oblong object approximately 40 feet long — resembling a Tic Tac mint — hovering erratically above the churning ocean. The object accelerated away at speeds that Underwood described as "impossible."

The GIMBAL and GOFAST videos were both recorded in January and February 2015 by F/A-18 pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the U.S. East Coast. In the GIMBAL video, a rotating, disk-shaped object flies against the wind, with one pilot exclaiming on the audio: "There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the AESA [radar]." The GOFAST video shows an object skimming low over the ocean at apparently extraordinary speed. In April 2020, the Pentagon officially declassified and released all three videos, stating that they were being released "in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real." The release was extraordinary: for the first time, the Department of Defense was formally acknowledging that it had recorded aerial phenomena it could not identify.

From Blue Book to AARO: A History of Government Secrecy

The U.S. government's relationship with unidentified aerial phenomena long predates the 2017 revelations. In 1948, following the widespread reports of "flying saucers" that began with Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting in 1947, the U.S. Air Force launched Project Sign, the first official investigation of UFOs. This was followed by Project Grudge in 1949 and, most famously, Project Blue Book in 1952, which ran until 1969. Project Blue Book collected and analyzed 12,618 UFO reports over 17 years. The vast majority were attributed to known phenomena — weather balloons, aircraft, astronomical objects, weather anomalies — but 701 cases remained officially unidentified. The project was terminated after the Condon Report (1968), authored by physicist Edward Condon at the University of Colorado, concluded that further study of UFOs was unlikely to yield scientific value. For the next 48 years, the official position of the U.S. government was that UFOs were not worth investigating.

That changed in 2007, when Nevada Senator Harry Reid — a Democrat who had a personal interest in UFOs stemming from his childhood in Nevada near what is now known as Area 51 — secured $22 million in classified Pentagon funding for a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The program, based at the Pentagon and managed primarily by aerospace contractor Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, operated in near-total secrecy for a decade. Its director was Luis Elizondo, a career military intelligence officer who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 in protest over what he described as excessive secrecy and the government's refusal to take the UAP threat seriously. One month later, he went public — and the world changed.

The Whistleblower: David Grusch

In June 2023, a 36-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer named David Charles Grusch came forward with claims that dwarfed everything that had come before. Grusch, who had served as a UAP analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and had been assigned to the UAP Task Force, filed an official whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General — a process that requires verification of the complainant's credibility. Grusch then sat for an interview with NewsNation and testified under oath before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on July 26, 2023.

Grusch's claims were extraordinary. He testified that the U.S. government has operated a multi-decade program to recover and reverse-engineer "non-human" spacecraft, that the program is concealed within classified special access programs that Congress has not been properly briefed on, and that the government has recovered not only craft but also "non-human biologics" — meaning, as he clarified under questioning, dead pilots of non-human origin. Grusch further claimed that people had been harmed or threatened to keep the program secret, and that a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini's government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944-45 with assistance from the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance. Both the Department of Defense and NASA denied Grusch's claims, stating that no such programs exist and that no evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found. Critics noted that Grusch's testimony was based on information he received second-hand, not on direct personal observation. But under oath, before Congress, his testimony carried legal weight — and it galvanized a new wave of legislative action.

AARO: The Pentagon's Official Answer

In July 2022, the Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as the successor to the Navy's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). AARO's mission was expansive: to investigate UAP reports not just in the air, but across all domains — air, sea, space, and under water. The office was tasked with standardizing reporting procedures, analyzing data, and coordinating across the military branches and intelligence community. Its first director was Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence official.

In March 2024, AARO released its Historical Record Review, Volume 1, covering U.S. government involvement with UAP from 1945 to the present. The report, based on interviews with witnesses and analysis of classified and unclassified records, delivered a blunt conclusion: there was no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or non-human intelligence in any of the investigated cases. The report specifically addressed claims of government programs to recover and reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, stating that "all investigatory efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification." In November 2024, AARO released its FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report, revealing that it had reviewed over 1,500 UAP cases. The report found that the majority of resolved cases involved ordinary objects: balloons, drones, birds, weather phenomena, optical illusions, and sensor artifacts. A number of cases remained unresolved — but AARO attributed this to insufficient data rather than extraordinary technology.

The Fight for Disclosure: Congress vs. the Pentagon

The UAP issue has produced some of the most unusual political alignments in modern American history. The push for disclosure has been led by a bipartisan coalition including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), and others. In July 2023, Schumer introduced the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 — an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have established an independent review board with the authority to declassify UAP records, modeled on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The bill had broad bipartisan support and passed the Senate but was significantly weakened in conference committee after reported pushback from the Defense Department and intelligence community. The final version retained some reporting requirements but stripped the independent review board of much of its authority.

The legislative battle revealed a fundamental tension at the heart of the UAP issue. On one side are members of Congress who argue that the American people have a right to know what the government has learned about UAP and that any technology of unknown origin recovered by the government should be subject to public and scientific scrutiny. On the other side are defense and intelligence officials who argue that the information is properly classified for national security reasons and that declassification could compromise sensitive programs and sources. The question of what remains classified — and why — is the most contentious unresolved issue in the UAP debate.

• Foreign adversary technology — Some UAP sightings may represent advanced aircraft or drones from China or Russia. If a rival nation has achieved breakthrough propulsion or stealth technology, it would represent a severe intelligence failure — and a powerful incentive for secrecy. Several AARO officials have stated privately that they consider foreign adversary technology the most likely explanation for the truly anomalous cases.
• Misidentification of mundane objects — The majority of UAP reports, by AARO's own analysis, involve balloons, drones, birds, optical illusions, sensor glitches, and other ordinary phenomena. Pilots and radar operators, despite their training, can misidentify objects under stressful conditions.
• Natural atmospheric or optical phenomena — Temperature inversions, radar propagation anomalies, plasma phenomena, and other natural effects can create the appearance of solid objects moving in ways that appear to defy physics.
• Extraterrestrial technology — The most extraordinary and most controversial explanation. Proponents argue that the performance characteristics of the objects described in the Nimitz and Roosevelt encounters — instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic speeds without visible propulsion, trans-medium travel from air to water — cannot be explained by any known technology, human or otherwise.
• Unknown classified U.S. programs — Some sightings may involve highly classified American technology that even the military officers who reported the sightings were not cleared to know about. If the objects are secret U.S. aircraft, the government would have every reason to deny their existence.

NASA Weighs In

In September 2023, NASA released the findings of its Independent Study Team on UAP, established in 2022 to examine UAP from a scientific perspective. The 16-member team, led by astrophysicist David Spergel, concluded that there was "no reason to conclude that existing UAP reports have an extraterrestrial source" but also that the current data collection efforts were woefully inadequate. NASA's key recommendation was to deploy new, systematic data collection methods — including satellite observations, ground-based sensors, and citizen science reporting — to replace the current ad hoc system of military pilot reports. NASA also announced the appointment of a Director of UAP Research to coordinate the agency's efforts. The NASA report was significant because it represented the first formal scientific engagement with the UAP question by the world's premier space agency — a stark contrast to decades of scientific dismissiveness.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AARO and what does it do?

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established by the Department of Defense in July 2022 to investigate Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena across all military domains — air, sea, space, and underwater. AARO collects and analyzes UAP reports from military personnel, standardizes reporting procedures across the armed forces, and coordinates with the intelligence community. As of late 2024, AARO has reviewed over 1,500 UAP cases and concluded that most involve mundane objects, with no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

What did David Grusch testify under oath?

Former intelligence officer David Grusch testified before the House Oversight Committee on July 26, 2023, that the U.S. government operates classified programs to recover and reverse-engineer "non-human" spacecraft, that the government possesses "non-human biologics" (remains of non-human pilots), and that individuals have been threatened to keep these programs secret. Both the Department of Defense and NASA denied these claims, stating no such programs exist.

What are the Pentagon UFO videos?

The three Pentagon UFO videos — FLIR (November 2004, from USS Nimitz), GIMBAL (January 2015, from USS Theodore Roosevelt), and GOFAST (February 2015, from USS Theodore Roosevelt) — are declassified recordings from Navy F/A-18 targeting cameras showing objects with flight characteristics that cannot be explained by known technology. The Pentagon officially released the videos in April 2020 and confirmed their authenticity.

Is there evidence of alien spacecraft?

There is no publicly confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft. The objects in the Navy videos remain unidentified, but "unidentified" does not mean "alien." AARO's official position is that no UAP case has been confirmed as extraterrestrial technology. However, whistleblower David Grusch claims that evidence of recovered non-human craft exists within classified special access programs that have not been made available to AARO or the public.

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