On August 20, 2025, the National Archives approved a nine-page disposition schedule, number DAA-0330-2023-0002, governing how the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office handles its UAP records. Buried in the item-by-item breakdown is a small, telling asymmetry: AARO's public website — its videos, its mission statement, its open-source links — is classified Temporary. The office's file of contact information gathered from potential witnesses is classified Permanent. What the public sees is disposable. What the government keeps on people who come forward is not.
That is not a story about physics. It is a story about paperwork, and it is the clearest evidence yet that the UAP problem, at least as the record currently shows it, is institutional before it is anything else.
Two years earlier, NASA's own Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team had reached a version of the same conclusion. The panel's final report, delivered in 2023 under the chairmanship of Dr. David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, put it plainly: "The negative perception surrounding the reporting of UAP poses an obstacle to collecting data on these phenomena." The report went further, finding that "there is currently no standardized system for making civilian UAP reports, resulting in sparse and incomplete data devoid of curation or vetting protocols." The panel's own accounting found that only 263 reports had been filed in the seventeen years prior to March 2021 — a number so small, by the study team's own logic, that it could not support strong scientific conclusions in either direction.
"The negative perception surrounding the reporting of UAP poses an obstacle to collecting data on these phenomena."
The panel's proposed fix was NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System, the confidential channel NASA administers for the FAA, which the report says "receives approximately 100,000 reports per year." ASRS wasn't built for UAP. The panel recommended bending it toward that purpose anyway, on the theory that a system pilots already trust would produce better data than one built from scratch. NASA followed through institutionally, at least on paper: in September 2023 the agency named Mark McInerney its director of UAP research, tasked with using "artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the skies for anomalies," in the words of then-Administrator Bill Nelson.
One detail worth noting, because it is the kind of thing that gets smoothed over in retellings: NASA's original Terms of Reference for the study team specified "approximately eight to twelve members." When NASA announced the actual roster in October 2022, it had selected sixteen. Nobody in the record explains the gap. It's a minor discrepancy, but it's the sort of small inconsistency that, multiplied across a bureaucracy, is exactly what makes independent verification of any single claim in this space so difficult.
The archive Congress built, and the archive Congress doesn't trust
The institutional apparatus grew considerably after NASA's report. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 118-31, sections 1841 through 1843 — now codified at 44 U.S.C. 2107 note — ordered the National Archives to stand up something new: the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, Record Group 615. The law required that, by October 20, 2024, every federal agency review, identify, and organize each UAP record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.
The first fruits of that mandate arrived on April 24, 2025, when NARA announced it had received records transferred from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in accordance with the 2024 law. NARA's public accounting now lists seven contributing sources under Record Group 615 — the FAA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ODNI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Department of State, and the FBI — with the agency saying it will keep adding records "on an ongoing, rolling basis as they are transferred from federal agencies." It's a genuinely new public archive. It's also, by its own design, incomplete and still being filled in real time, with no fixed end date in the record for when the collection will be considered complete.
That incompleteness is precisely what the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets has been pressing on. The task force operates under the committee's own description of its authority — the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it notes, is the principal oversight committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate 'any matter' at 'any time' under House Rule X. Exercising that authority, the task force wrote that it "has found responses from AARO, when questioned about UAP sightings and provided data, less than adequate." More pointedly, the task force stated that "whistleblowers informed the Task Force that AARO possesses additional video records of potential UAP sightings" — records the office, according to the task force's own account, has not turned over. The task force held a hearing on these concerns on September 9, 2025. Separately, a House Oversight Committee release describes Rep. Anna Paulina Luna corresponding with the Department of War's Secretary, Pete Hegseth, as part of a continuing transparency investigation — though the committee's own materials do not spell out what that correspondence produced.
So the same government that built a new archive is being told by its own legislative overseers that the office running point on UAP analysis isn't giving straight answers. Both things are true in the record simultaneously, and neither claim resolves the other. That is the tension worth sitting with, not smoothing over.
What AARO is actually reporting — and when
AARO's own numbers add a further wrinkle. According to a document review published by The Black Vault — a tier of reporting that deserves its own caveat, since it is not a primary government release but a secondary account of one — AARO's Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report describes 319 newly received UAP reports covering the period from June 2, 2024, through May 30, 2025: 284 incidents from that window and 35 older cases not previously logged. The office says it resolved 114 of those plus 256 previously reported cases, for 370 total resolutions, and that every resolved case traced to a conventional explanation. That FY2025 report, per the same account, wasn't released until July 2026 — well past the statutory clock Congress set, which requires the AARO director to submit an annual report "not later than 180 days after December 23, 2022, and annually thereafter for four years," under 50 U.S.C. § 3373(k)(1)(A). The same account puts the prior year's volume, FY2024, at 757 reports — a sharp drop from FY2025's 319, which The Black Vault attributes partly to a one-time backlog of historical FAA submissions dating to 2021 working its way through the earlier count. Readers should treat both figures as reported by a single outlet rather than independently confirmed.
None of this, on the government's own account, points toward anything exotic. NASA's panel was explicit about the null-hypothesis logic that should govern the search: if unidentified events move at conventional speeds and accelerations, the panel wrote, that likely points toward a conventional explanation. AARO's own FY2025 figures, as reported, are consistent with that framework — a large majority of cases closed as ordinary, a residual handful referred for further analysis. The Pentagon's own reporting infrastructure, in other words, is functioning roughly as designed for the easy cases. It's the residual cases, and the task force's specific claim about withheld video, where the paper trail runs out.
What would move this story forward isn't a new sighting. It's whether AARO actually produces the additional video records the task force says whistleblowers described, whether the National Archives collection under Record Group 615 grows to include material the task force believes AARO is sitting on, and whether AARO's next annual report arrives inside its statutory window rather than months late. Those are documents, not mysteries, and they're the ones worth watching.