AARO Historical Record Report, Volume I (February 2024)
AARO reviewed every official UFO inquiry since 1945 and about 30 witnesses' claims of hidden crash-retrieval programs. It found no evidence of off-world technology and traced many claims to AAWSAP and a proposal called KONA BLUE.
The claim that Washington has been hiding crashed spacecraft since the 1940s was put to a formal test in this report. The Pentagon’s own UAP office went looking for the programs, people, companies and documents that witnesses had named, and it reports that it found nearly all of them. None of them turned out to be what the witnesses believed.
What this record is
This is the “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I,” issued by the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and dated February 2024. The copy in the National Archives runs to 63 pages, including a long run of endnotes. The Pentagon’s prepublication review office cleared it for open publication on 6 March 2024, and AARO later re-marked it “Released in Full” under the FY2024 NDAA as case 330UAP000005. Congress ordered the report in Section 6802(j) of the FY2023 NDAA. That provision required a written account of the government’s historical record on UAP. Volume I covers findings from 1945 to 31 October 2023, and a second volume was promised for interviews and research completed between 1 November 2023 and 15 April 2024.
AARO says it reviewed every official investigative effort since 1945, searched classified and unclassified archives with the National Archives and the archives of DIA, CIA, the Department of Energy, NSA and NGA, and interviewed about 30 people. Those people either claimed insight into government exploitation of off-world technology or said they knew of UAP that had disrupted U.S. nuclear facilities.
What it says
The executive summary is blunt. AARO “found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” and it found “no empirical evidence” that the government and private companies have been reverse-engineering such technology. It adds that unresolved cases would mostly resolve as ordinary objects if better data existed.
The historical section walks through about two dozen efforts. It runs from Project SAUCER and Project SIGN, whose alleged 1948 “Estimate of the Situation” the report treats as single-sourced and unsubstantiated, through GRUDGE, TWINKLE’s attempt to photograph the New Mexico green fireballs, the Battelle study behind Special Report No. 14, the CIA study group, the Robertson Panel, Blue Book’s 12,618 cases with 701 left unidentified, the Condon study, and the Air Force Roswell reports of the 1990s. It ends with AAWSAP/AATIP, the UAP Task Force, the 2021 Preliminary Assessment and AARO itself. Each entry ends with the same finding: no evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
The core of the report is its assessment of the interviewees. AARO sorted them into tiers by how they reached the office and identified them only by random numbers. It describes a “primary narrative” that the government and industry partners have held as many as 12 recovered spacecraft since about 1964, or 1947 if Roswell is counted. It also describes a “secondary narrative” from five former Air Force members who served around ICBM sites at Malmstrom, Ellsworth, Vandenberg and Minot between 1966 and 1977, some of whom described launch facilities going offline during UAP sightings.
AARO’s findings on specific claims are all stated with high confidence. It found no UAP-specific nondisclosure agreement and no NDA threatening death beyond the standard espionage-statute language. A named former CIA official signed a memorandum for the record denying any role in moving crash material. An alleged 1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate on UFOs was judged inauthentic because of its formatting, branding and loose style. A story about “aliens” watching a materials test traced to a test unit with an alien-themed nickname. A retired officer said the craft he once described touching was an F-117 stealth fighter. A strange object one witness saw matched a real, unrelated special access program being tested at that place and time. The Northern Virginia “disclosure study” of 2004 to 2007 was real, but the White House had not requested it. Executives of the named aerospace companies denied on the record ever holding such material. A supposed crash fragment of magnesium, zinc and bismuth was, AARO concluded, an ordinary terrestrial alloy.
The section on named programs gives the fullest public account of KONA BLUE. This was a prospective special access program proposed to the Department of Homeland Security by supporters of the cancelled DIA program AAWSAP/AATIP, intended to restart UAP and paranormal research and to reverse-engineer craft they hoped to acquire. DHS leadership rejected it, and no material was ever transferred. AARO also confirmed that one intelligence-community controlled access program was “unnecessarily expanded” in 2021 to include a UAP reverse-engineering mission, recovered nothing, and was later disestablished. Its broadest conclusion is that modern claims come largely from “circular reporting” within a small group tied to AAWSAP/AATIP and a private organization’s paranormal research.
Context
The report appeared after a year of congressional testimony alleging a hidden retrieval program, including the 2023 whistleblower hearing. Its central method, which was to find the named program and then ask what it actually was, is a real investigative test. Its limits are just as plain. Almost every rebuttal depends on classified programs the public cannot inspect, and on denials, signed memoranda and correlations that AARO describes but cannot show. The report also leaves some cases open. On the Malmstrom-era missile claims it says only that research continues. It could not find the alleged film of a UAP downing a reentry vehicle in 1964, though it linked the time and place to an antiballistic missile test.
Status
This is a finished government report, and its conclusions are AARO’s assessments. They are not independently verified findings. Volume I reserves some allegations for Volume II. The copy here came to the National Archives in the Office of the Secretary of Defense series of Record Group 615, which the National Archives began making public in August 2025.