U.S. Department of Defense Launches Official UFO Website
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) announced this week the launch of a new website devoted to UFOs.
According to a press release from the DoD:
Today the department launched a website on the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to provide the public with information concerning AARO and its efforts to understand and resolve unidentified anomalous phenomena.
This website will provide information, including photos and videos, on resolved UAP (Editor’s note: UAP is the current government nomenclature for UFO) cases as they are declassified and approved for public release. The website’s other content includes reporting trends and a frequently asked questions section as well as links to official reports, transcripts, press releases, and other resources that the public may find useful, such as applicable statutes and aircraft, balloon and satellite tracking sites.
This fall, consistent with Section 1673 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, AARO will launch a secure reporting tool on the website to enable current and former U.S. government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of U.S. government programs or activities to contact AARO directly to make a report. The department is conducting its final reviews to ensure the reporting mechanism complies with the Privacy Act of 1974, the Whistleblower Protections Enhancement Act of 2012, the Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act), and the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995. In the interim, current U.S. service members, U.S. government employees, and civil aviators are encouraged to continue to use the existing reporting mechanisms available to them through their organizations. A mechanism for members of the general public to make reports will be announced in coming months.
The department is committed to transparency with the American people on AARO’s work on UAP. This website will serve as a one-stop shop for all publicly available information related to AARO and UAP, and AARO will regularly update the website with its most recent activities and findings as new information is cleared for public release.
This is the latest development in a series of government actions to seemingly legitimize the study of UFOs and follows a congressional hearing in July during which several former military members testified about their experiences with the phenomenon.
Among them was David Charles Grusch, 36, who said, “I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access.”
Grusch is a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) from 2019 to 2021. Then, from late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representives to the task force.
The UAPTF was later replaced by AARO.
That hearing continued the interest Congress has shown in UFOs over the past several years, beginning back in 2017 when news broke of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO project—known then as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN), who co-leads the congressional investigation into UFOs, told Newsweek earlier this year that he believes “we have recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings.”
“I think that a lot of that’s being reverse-engineered right now, but we just don’t understand it,” he said.
Prior to that statement, Burchett told fellow congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in an interview that he believes the U.S. Government has “recovered craft” that could represent extraterrestrial technology.
And in another congressional hearing held last April, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) expressed concern over the UFO enigma and how much of mainstream society’s dismissal of the phenomenon is affecting its research.
“We don’t know where they come from, who made them, or how they operate,” Gillibrand said of unidentified flying objects reported by military personnel. “[…] Because of the UFO stigma, the response has been irresponsibly anemic and slow.”
The new AARO website would appear to be an attempt by the DoD to address the concerns of politicians like Burchett and Gillibrand, while bringing the Pentagon’s investigation of the UFO phenomenon into the 21st century.
You can see AARO’s new website at https://www.aaro.mil.
