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.
For months, one of the most anticipated documents in the UFO world was simply missing. The U.S. military’s office for investigating unidentified phenomena owed Congress an annual report, and it had not appeared. This week it did - and its most memorable finding is almost disarmingly ordinary. One object that a service member had flagged as a possible unknown turned out, on analysis, to be a person flying a jetpack.
The report was published by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, pronounced “arrow.” It covers June 2, 2024 to May 30, 2025. Over that year the office received 319 new reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena - the government’s clinical term for UFOs - from military and civilian aviation sources. It closed 114 of them as ordinary objects, found no sign of alien or breakthrough technology, and left most of the rest open, largely for a mundane reason: it did not have data good enough to say what people saw.
Of the 114 cases AARO resolved, the culprits were resolutely earthly. The report lists balloons of every kind, birds, satellites, ordinary aircraft and drones, plus a single commercial rocket launch and that single “manned jet pack.” A new analysis tool, using three-dimensional modeling, let the office attribute hundreds of sightings to satellite flaring - sunlight glinting off a satellite, which witnesses often describe as bright, colored orbs of light.
“None of the cases AARO resolved indicate advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough technologies in any domain,” the report states. It also says there is no evidence that any government or private entity has ever captured or exploited material derived from UAP.
But resolving a third of the caseload still leaves most of it open. AARO moved 191 of the 319 reports into an “active archive” - a holding category for cases with too little data to judge whether the object was natural, man-made, or genuinely unusual. Nine reports, the office said, merit further analysis by intelligence and technical experts.
The recurring obstacle is not exotic physics. “A lack of timely and actionable sensor data continues to constrain AARO’s ability to resolve cases,” the report says. Many sightings amount to a pilot’s eyewitness account with no radar track and no calibrated video - nothing an analyst can measure. That is why so many encounters stay officially open rather than confirmed as anything at all.
The gap this document fills is itself part of the story. Earlier this summer, we reported that AARO’s legally required annual report had not appeared, even as the office’s caseload passed 2,000 files and its director acknowledged that a large share remained unexplained.
AARO - the Pentagon office Congress created in 2022 to investigate objects seen in military airspace, at sea and in orbit - is required by law to account for its work each year. This edition brings its public numbers current. As of May 30, 2025, AARO’s total case holdings stood at 1,870 reports. Of the year’s new reports, 274 came from the air domain, 44 from space, and just one from the sea.
That single maritime case is the one now drawing headlines: a U.S. Navy report of roughly 100 airborne objects and two apparently uncrewed vessels operating off the coast of Virginia. AARO says it is still actively investigating that event, according to DefenseScoop.
One number in the report is hard to ignore. AARO received 50 reports of drones - unmanned aerial systems - near U.S. nuclear weapons, infrastructure and launch sites, a 178% jump from the 18 logged a year earlier. None were classified as UAP; all were identified as drones. But most occurred at night, roughly between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., and a handful lasted more than an hour, with the longest persisting about three hours.
The office was careful about the harder cases near sensitive sites. Some narrative reports, it said, described performance “exceeding the known state-of-the-art” - but “no technical data accompanied these reports,” so AARO drew no conclusion. Meanwhile, Congress is pressing for more: a provision in the fiscal 2026 defense bill directs AARO to brief lawmakers on military intercepts of unidentified objects over North America, according to MeriTalk.
For a subject that runs on speculation, the report is a study in restraint. The office logged hundreds of sightings, explained the ones it could with balloons and satellites and a lone jetpack, and was honest that it often simply cannot say. What it could not do - a year late, with thousands of cases still on the books - is close the gap between what witnesses report and what instruments can actually prove.
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.
Rep. Eric Burlison arranged White House-level access to classified UAP material, toured a key naval test facility, and says the intelligence officials who briefed him cannot identify the glowing, plasma-like objects he consistently sees on restricted footage.
