As House Republicans continue to struggle to find a new speaker, they might have missed the new report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, or UFOs, once upon a time). The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly-Resolution Office (AARO), which investigates the sightings, received 274 reports from August 31, 2022, to April 30, 2023, and another 17 from previous periods, for 291 sightings in this report and a total of 801 sightings for this overall investigation.
Documents such as this report tend to be boring, but there’s some fascinating stuff as well, though it arises mostly by implication. The report refers to certain “concerning performance characteristics” of UAP and identifies “unusual maneuverability” as one such characteristic. But it assures that “only a very small percentage of UAP reports display interesting signatures, such as high-speed travel and unknown morphologies,” and that none have yet threatened any aircraft. That almost reads like a downplaying of a fascinating fact: Some do display those interesting signatures. Likewise, the assurance that “to date, no encounters with UAP have been confirmed to have contributed directly to adverse health-related effects to the observer(s)” introduces the notion that such a thing might be possible and raises questions concerning how. But other than this — and the fact that its glossary defines “UAP Objects and Material” as “corporeal artifacts of UAP” and the latter as “samples, in whole or in part, of UAP objects (e.g., debris)”: why these definitions? — that’s about as exciting as this report gets.
It also lays out some more-basic information about the sightings. Two hundred and ninety of the encounters happened in the air, and one in the “maritime domain.” Most air-based sightings took place no higher than roughly the height of Mt. Everest (29,000 feet). There was an overall reporting bias toward “restricted military airspace.” About a quarter of the reported objects were categorized as “orb/round/sphere,” 6 percent as “irregular shapes,” 4 percent as oval, and 2 percent as rectangles or disks. More than half had no reported shape. About a fifth of the UAP had lights of some kind; the remainder did not.
Most of the sightings show “ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources,” and the rest lack sufficient data for definitive conclusions. Clearly we need more information. In previous legislation, Congress itself imposed on the Department of Defense and Office of the Director of National Intelligence an obligation to release these reports. The effort to deepen our understanding of these UAP, whether they’re aliens or, as AARO head Sean Kirkpatrick told CNN, possibly the result of “foreign activity” deserves further congressional attention. Something for Congress to work on once it gets its act together.