The Pentagon's UAP investigation office has 2,000+ active case files - and its own director says 40% remain without a conventional explanation. But AARO has not published its legally required 2025 annual report, raising questions about what the office is finding.
The office charged with tracking every reported UFO sighting across the U.S. military now holds more than 2,000 case files. Four in ten of those cases have no satisfying conventional explanation, according to the office’s own director. Yet the agency has not published its legally required 2025 annual report, and has barely communicated with the public in more than a year.
That gap is shaping how UAP transparency - the government’s new term for the broader conversation about what is and is not being disclosed about unidentified flying objects - actually looks in the summer of 2026.
AARO - the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, pronounced “arrow” - was created by Congress in 2022 and given a specific mission: receive, investigate, and when possible resolve reports of unidentified objects seen in military airspace, underwater, and in space. It is staffed by career government scientists, analysts, and intelligence professionals, and it reports to both the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence.
As of February 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that AARO’s caseload had grown past 2,000 individual reports - an increase of at least 400 cases since late 2024, when the office reported approximately 1,600 files on hand. About half of those cases, according to the Pentagon, lack sufficient sensor data or corroborating information to draw any conclusion at all. Those sit in an “Active Archive” - open files that remain pending until new evidence arrives.
In a document dated June 5, 2026, and included in the Pentagon’s third public release of UAP records, AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski stated that of the cases where investigators did have sufficient data to analyze, roughly 40% “lack reasonable explanation and remain unresolved.” That figure represents sightings where analysts found enough information to study the object - but the data did not match any known aircraft, drone, satellite, weather phenomenon, or other conventional source.
That figure does not mean those cases involve something extraordinary. Investigators working with incomplete sensor data often cannot rule out mundane explanations that simply are not confirmed by available evidence. But it does mean thousands of reported encounters with unknown objects remain on the books as officially open questions.
By law, AARO is required to submit an unclassified annual report to Congress covering its caseload, its investigative methods, and its findings for the previous year. That report for 2025 has not been published.
The office is also required to produce a second volume of a congressional mandated historical review examining U.S. government involvement with UAP records going back decades. That volume has also not appeared. Since late 2024, AARO has held no unclassified press briefings and the office’s deputy director position remains vacant.
When reporters have pressed the agency on its findings and its timeline, AARO officials have said they had nothing to announce.
Defense Secretary Hegseth acknowledged the gap in February 2026, telling Congress the Pentagon would be “in full compliance” with President Trump’s transparency directive and that “expectations are going to be high.” Critics and transparency advocates noted that AARO’s combination of overdue reports, a vacant leadership post, and a year of silence amounted to a credibility problem the office had not yet addressed.
The difficulty in reading this situation is that it sits alongside a separate initiative that has been visibly active: PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, launched at war.gov/ufo on May 8, 2026.
PURSUE published three batches of declassified records - on May 8, May 22, and June 12 - and the portal has recorded more than 1.7 billion hits worldwide. The releases include genuine curiosities: Apollo mission transcripts in which astronauts describe unexplained lights, military infrared footage, FBI field investigation files tracing years of orb sightings near military installations, and a 2023 AARO report describing an orange “mother orb” observed launching smaller red orbs.
Those materials are compelling as historical documents. But they are historical - files reviewed and released from government archives, not reports of what AARO’s investigators are finding right now in the office’s current caseload.
The distinction matters. PURSUE releases what the government recorded in the past and has now cleared for public viewing. AARO’s annual report is supposed to account for what the office is discovering in the present: the pattern of current reports, trends in the data, and what the agency has been able to explain or not explain.
As of early July 2026, nearly three weeks have passed since the third PURSUE release with no fourth batch announced and no confirmed schedule for the next drop.
Congress has also taken steps to expand what it can compel. The fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act - the annual defense policy bill - requires AARO to brief lawmakers on every UAP intercept conducted by NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) and U.S. Northern Command since 2004, covering the number, location, and nature of those intercepts and any data collected. That provision targets a category of encounters that has never been publicly quantified: active military intercepts of objects that were tracked or engaged by U.S. or Canadian aircraft but never definitively identified.
For anyone trying to assess what is genuinely known about UAP, the picture as of mid-2026 looks like this: the archival disclosure program is real and has produced material worth examining. The office responsible for investigating the current flow of new reports has more than 2,000 cases, its director says four in ten remain without a conventional explanation, and the office has not yet told Congress - or the public - what pattern, if any, that adds up to.
AARO's annual report on unidentified phenomena, missing for months, arrived this week. Of 319 new sightings, the office resolved 114 - balloons, satellites, birds, one rocket and a single jetpack - while a shortage of sensor data left most cases open.
It is the only maritime case in the Pentagon's newest UAP report, which logged 319 sightings in a year and could resolve only about a third. AARO says the Virginia encounter is still unexplained.
The Pentagon's fourth PURSUE release dropped July 10 - 40 newly declassified files including a lockdown at America's nuclear warhead factory, a star-shaped object tracked over the Yellow Sea, and a 1949 meeting of atomic scientists stumped by mystery lights.
