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.
Off the coast of Virginia, U.S. Navy crews recorded something the Pentagon’s own investigators had not seen anywhere else all year: roughly 100 unidentified objects moving through the air, and two more, likely uncrewed, tracking across the water below them.
That single encounter is now the only “maritime” case in the newest annual report from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO - the Department of War office charged with running down reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, the government’s neutral term for what the public still calls UFOs. The report, covering June 2024 through May 2025, was posted publicly on July 21, 2026. AARO says the Virginia event is still under active investigation and offers no explanation for it.
The office does not describe the objects as extraterrestrial, and nothing in the report claims they are. What makes the case stand out is simpler and stranger: it is the rare instance in which unknown contacts were logged in the air and on the sea surface at the same time, next to one of the most heavily monitored stretches of coastline in the country.
In the reporting year, AARO logged 319 UAP reports in total, according to the document. It sorts them by “domain,” meaning where the object was observed. The overwhelming majority, 274, were in the air; 44 were in space, above roughly 100 kilometers; and exactly one was maritime. That maritime case is the Virginia encounter.
AARO says it resolved 114 of the 319 reports, tying them to ordinary sources: balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft and drones, plus a single rocket launch and, in one memorable line, a person wearing a manned jet pack. The rest remain open. As of the end of May 2025, the office reported holding roughly 1,870 cases in total.
The office tracks and triages these reports for the entire U.S. government, and its backlog has been growing. Earlier in 2026 its caseload had already climbed past 2,000 open files awaiting analysis.
Most UAP reports come from pilots looking up, or from sensors pointed at the sky. A maritime case is different because it involves the water, and the Virginia report describes activity in both places at once: about 100 airborne objects together with two surface craft that the Navy assessed were probably uncrewed.
Objects that appear to move between air and sea are of particular interest to investigators, because that “transmedium” behavior is hard to square with ordinary aircraft or drones. It echoes the most famous modern Navy encounter, the 2004 Tic Tac sighting off California, in which crews reported an object that seemed to hover over disturbed water before accelerating away.
The Virginia sighting also unfolded close to home. That coast is the location of Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, which makes an unresolved cluster of contacts there more than a curiosity. AARO says it is coordinating with the unit that filed the report to run the case down.
For all the intrigue, AARO is careful about what it is and is not claiming. Across every case it managed to resolve, the office writes, it found no evidence of “advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough technologies,” and no verifiable sign of extraterrestrial activity.
The bigger obstacle, the office says, is not secrecy but data. “A lack of timely and actionable sensor data continues to constrain AARO’s ability to resolve cases,” the report states - meaning many sightings simply are not captured well enough, on good enough instruments, to identify. That is why a case like Virginia can stay open: not because the answer is exotic, but because the evidence is thin.
The report does flag one safety concern. In two instances, aircrews described electronic or avionic interference from a nearby UAP, though AARO says it has not determined what caused it.
Why this matters: annual reports like this one are the main public window into how the U.S. government handles UAP, and Congress has been pushing for more. Lawmakers used the latest defense bill to order the Pentagon to brief them on decades of UAP intercepts, and the new report landed alongside fresh calls on Capitol Hill for greater transparency. For now, the most striking case in it - about a hundred objects over the water off Virginia - remains, in the government’s own words, unexplained.
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.
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