FY2023 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP: 291 New Reports, 801 in All

The most striking sentence in this report is a forecast. The Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote that, with better data, “the unidentified and purported anomalous nature of most UAP will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena and significantly reduce the amount of UAP case submissions.” No earlier official UAP report had said so plainly that it expected the mystery to shrink.

What this record is

This is the unclassified Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, dated October 2023. The Pentagon’s prepublication review office cleared it for open publication on 17 October 2023. It answers Section 1683(h) of the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act, as amended by Section 6802(k) of the FY2023 NDAA. The amendment made the report a joint submission from the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. It was drafted by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and ODNI’s National Intelligence Manager for Military Integration. The coordination list runs to more than thirty offices and agencies, from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to the Space Force and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The National Archives holds two copies. One sits in the ODNI series and is described here. The other is in the Office of the Secretary of Defense series (NAID 499915933). Both are 16-page PDFs with the same text. The OSD copy carries AARO’s 2025 declassification-review stamps and case number 330UAP000001.

What it says

The report covers UAP reports from 31 August 2022 to 30 April 2023, plus any earlier reports missing from previous submissions. AARO received 291 reports in that window: 274 of events within the period and 17 of events from 2019 to 2022 that had not been passed on before. Of the 291, 290 were in the air domain and one in the maritime domain. None came from space and none described transmedium objects. With these added, AARO’s running total as of 30 April 2023 stood at 801 reports.

Charts in the report break down what witnesses described. For more than half of the reports (53 percent) no shape was given at all. Orbs, round objects or spheres made up 25 percent, irregular shapes 6 percent, ambiguous sensor contacts 5 percent, ovals 4 percent, disks and rectangles 2 percent each, and triangles and cylinders 1 percent each. Only 21 percent of reports mentioned lights. The altitude chart and world map are not legible in the archival scan, so they are not summarised here.

The report is frank about collection bias. Most reports still came from restricted military airspace because that is where military personnel and sensors are. More than 100 incident reports from the Federal Aviation Administration were beginning to spread the geographic picture across the United States. The report warns that this also makes the dataset increasingly U.S.-centric. Most of the FAA reports described “unidentified lights without specific shape” at altitudes from under 5,000 feet to 60,000 feet, and none suggested anomalous behaviour or a threat to the observing aircraft.

The report found no adverse health effects. It says some military reports raise safety-of-flight concerns, and “some cases” involve objects that “potentially exhibited” high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability. AARO had checked these against possible U.S. programs and kept investigating. No report had been attributed to foreign activity. AARO’s analysts, the report says, find that “only a very small percentage” of reports show interesting signatures. Most show “ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources,” while a large number stay technically unresolved “because of a lack of data.” It names specific causes of misperception: insufficient radar and electro-optical/infrared data, sensor artifacts such as infrared flare, and optical effects such as parallax.

Program updates describe a sensor calibration campaign that measures balloons, drones and natural phenomena so their signatures can be modelled for pilot training and algorithms. They also cover a new public website and a declassification process the report says was first exercised for “an open congressional hearing held on 21 March 2023.” Appendix A attaches a pilot case resolution, “Western United States,” dated 8 May 2023. It concluded that five equidistant lights seen on infrared by military personnel in 2021 were almost certainly commercial airliners up to 300 nautical miles away. The site covers that case at Western United States (AARO).

Context

This report follows the 2022 annual report, which had catalogued 510 reports and left 171 uncharacterized. The two differ mainly in tone. The 2022 report stressed possible threats and the unknown remainder. This one puts the weight on data quality and says outright that most cases will probably turn out to be mundane. It appeared a few months after David Grusch’s July 2023 House testimony about alleged recovered craft, a subject it does not mention. It was also the last annual report issued while AARO’s first director, Seán Kirkpatrick, led the office. That context matters: the report is a Defense Department statement of method, not a response to the claims then circulating in public.

Status

The report closes nothing beyond its attached example case and gives no count of resolved versus unresolved reports for the period. Its prediction that better data would dissolve most cases was carried forward in the FY2024 consolidated report. That later report raised the caseload again and still found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology, while leaving a set of cases open for lack of data.

Sources

• National Archives catalog: Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, ODNI copy (NAID 493470301)
• PDF file: 576UAP0021.pdf
• National Archives catalog: the same report, Office of the Secretary of Defense copy (NAID 499915933)
• PDF file: 01_2023_Annual_Report.pdf (OSD copy)
• Series: Records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (NAID 493468579)