In late February 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed during a press cycle that the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office had active cases exceeding two thousand reports. The number had been climbing visibly across AARO’s quarterly briefings for the preceding eighteen months, but it crossed the round threshold publicly for the first time in February, in the context of Hegseth’s reaffirmation of the Trump administration’s stated commitment to UAP transparency. The contrast with the AARO of the Kirkpatrick era — which closed reports faster than it opened them — is structural rather than rhetorical.
What two thousand means depends entirely on what AARO is counting. The office’s working definition of an open case is a report that has been received from a credentialled reporting agency, has not been dispositively explained by mundane attribution, and has not been formally closed by the office. Military pilots, air traffic controllers, NORAD personnel, and certain intelligence-community personnel can route incident reports through the AARO intake. The two-thousand figure does not include reports from civilians or from outside the routing-credentialled population. It does not include legacy cases inherited from prior programmes. It does include incidents from the United States, allied nations sharing data through liaison arrangements, and forward-deployed personnel anywhere those personnel are operating.
The Kirkpatrick-era AARO closed cases at a rate of roughly seventy percent disposable as conventional or instrumental, with the remainder either still in process or formally categorised as anomalous. The Phillips-era AARO has shifted the disposition rates. Cases are being held open longer, classified as anomalous in higher proportions, and routed back for further data collection rather than closed on insufficient information. The change is consistent with the office’s stated 2025 reform commitment to apply different evidentiary standards to ambiguous cases. Critics argue the change is statistical inflation. Office defenders argue it is the first honest count.
The two-thousand figure should be read alongside the December 2025 FY2026 NDAA provision that requires the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on every NORTHCOM-aligned UAP intercept since 2004. The NDAA mandate, if it survives conference, would generate a separate historical accounting that will likely produce a number considerably larger than two thousand and will cover a structurally different population — actual intercept actions rather than reports. The two numbers are not redundant. They map different things. A pilot encountering a UAP and reporting it generates one case in AARO’s count. An air defence command actively scrambling against a UAP and recording the intercept generates an entry in the NDAA-mandated count even if no report was filed.
The Spooky Valley archive currently indexes significant historical incidents across more than seventy-five years. The AARO two-thousand figure is the contemporary equivalent — what the official, credentialled, post-AATIP intake of the United States Department of Defense is currently tracking. The number was 144 in 2022, 510 in 2023, 1,170 in 2024, 1,654 in 2025, and crossed two thousand in early 2026. The slope is not noise. Either the reporting infrastructure is improving and finally registering activity that had been previously under-reported, or the underlying activity itself is increasing. AARO publicly takes no position on which it is.
The substantive question — what does a credentialled population of military and intelligence personnel see in roughly two thousand incidents in the contemporary North American and forward-deployed operating environments — is the one neither AARO nor any subsequent reporting has yet answered to the satisfaction of the Congressional oversight community. The 2025 annual report attempted a partial answer; the Historical Record Report acknowledged for the first time that some programmes the office had been asked about could not be ruled in or out, which was a quiet repudiation of the prior office posture.
The two-thousand mark is significant as the visible accumulation of a curve that is no longer plausibly attributable to noise. Whether the inflection produces substantive answers from the office, or further deferral, is the question of the next AARO annual report. The Spooky Valley disclosure tracker follows the institutional movement in real time.