On November 19, 2024, Dr. Jon Kosloski, the Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, sat before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and walked senators through a set of case slides — declassified, cleared for open publication, posted to AARO's public website. The briefing was, in format, a transparency exercise. In substance, it was something more complicated.
The slides presented AARO's technical resolution of several well-known UAP incidents: the 2013 Puerto Rico infrared video, the 2015 Go Fast event, a 2022 Middle East encounter recorded by an MQ-9, and a 2023 South Asia case involving what the agency described as a "potentially-anomalous atmospheric wake." For each case, AARO offered confident scientific language. For several of them, that language sits in direct tension with what the underlying footage shows — and, in some instances, with what other official documents say.
"potentially-anomalous atmospheric wake."
That tension is the story. Not because AARO is necessarily wrong, but because the agency has not yet resolved the contradiction between its conclusions and its own stated limitations — and because at least two of the videos it analyzed were uploaded to a classified network under circumstances that remain unexplained.
The Cases Where the Analysis Doesn't Fully Close
Start with the Puerto Rico event, which is the most extensively documented case in AARO's public record. On April 26, 2013, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft recorded infrared video over Puerto Rico's Rafael Hernandez Airport. The footage appeared — and the November 2024 AARO briefing slides acknowledge this — "to show an object traveling at high speed, splitting into two objects, and entering and exiting the water."
AARO's conclusion, stated with "high confidence" in coordination with Intelligence Community and Science and Technology partners, is that the object did not demonstrate anomalous speeds or flight characteristics. The agency found two distinct objects airborne in proximity to each other rather than a single splitting object. It attributed the apparent high speed to motion parallax — the faster a sensor platform moves, the faster a stationary or slow-moving object appears to travel. It attributed the fading in and out of the objects to thermal crossover, a known infrared phenomenon. Trajectory reconstruction, the slides say, confirmed the objects traveled at wind speed in a straight line over land during the entire observation period and never entered the water.
Those are defensible technical claims. But the slides also contain a weather data table showing winds between 18 and 19 knots at the time of the event, while a separate analytic factor notation states winds were 7 knots out of the east-northeast — the speed to which the objects' velocity was matched in the reconstruction. The discrepancy between these two wind figures is not reconciled anywhere in the public-facing document. The trajectory reconstruction placed the objects' speed at approximately 3.6 meters per second, which is consistent with the 7-knot figure. Which wind measurement was used in the final model, and why, is not explained.
The Go Fast case presents a different kind of problem. In January 2015, U.S. Navy aircraft recorded an object appearing to travel at high speeds close to the ocean surface off Florida's east coast. The November 2024 briefing slides assess the object's altitude with "high confidence" as approximately 13,000 feet above sea level, at a calculated velocity of approximately 45 miles per hour. Winds at that altitude were approximately 60 knots. The conclusion: the object was likely a balloon or balloon-like object drifting with the wind, its apparent speed an artifact of the observing aircraft's own movement.
The same slide, however, contains a direct acknowledgment that undercuts the confidence framing: "High confidence analysis of the UAP's exact position was not possible given a lack of precise positional data from the observing Navy aircraft." That sentence appears in the same bullet cluster as the high-confidence altitude assessment. The agency is simultaneously claiming high confidence in the altitude and acknowledging that precise positional data — the basis for any altitude calculation — was unavailable. This is not a minor tension. It is a methodological contradiction embedded in the official briefing to the United States Senate.
The April 2023 briefing by then-AARO Director Seán Kirkpatrick — a separate document, also posted to AARO's public portal, cleared for open publication on April 17, 2023 — introduced similar technical claims about the Go Fast event but did not resolve the positional data problem either. Kirkpatrick's briefing also presented a morphology breakdown showing that 52 percent of reported UAP were classified as "Orb, Round, or Sphere" — a figure that had shifted to 31 percent by the time of Kosloski's November 2024 briefing, with "Lights" accounting for 46 percent. The methodological reasons for that shift in the dominant reported morphology across eighteen months are not explained in either document.
The South Asia 2023 case is perhaps the most striking. An MQ-9 observed an object apparently tailed by what the April 2023 Kirkpatrick briefing described as a "potentially-anomalous atmospheric wake." AARO offered two simultaneous explanations for the visible trail: it "appears to be cavitation, similar to those caused during propulsion," and it is "a camera-software artifact" caused by video-compression algorithms overlaying a captured image on a previous frame. These are not the same explanation. Cavitation implies a physical phenomenon in the medium through which an object is traveling. A compression artifact implies the trail does not physically exist. Both descriptions appear on the same slide, attributed to the same analysis. The case was labeled "pending peer-review of mission-partners' analytic findings" in the April 2023 briefing — meaning the formal conclusion had not yet been reached at the time it was presented to the Senate.
The Chain-of-Custody Problem
While AARO was conducting these analyses, a separate and less-discussed thread was developing around the origin and integrity of the underlying video materials themselves.
On March 6, 2026, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records allegedly held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. AARO identified a collection of responsive materials held on a classified network. The agency's own description of what it found is arresting: "Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody."
Two of those materials have now been released publicly on the Department of War's UAP portal. The first, titled "4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water," is assessed by AARO as likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within CENTCOM's area of responsibility in 2022. A user uploaded it to a classified network in June 2024. The second, titled "Syrian UAP instant acceleration," covers a 2021 CENTCOM-area event and was uploaded to the same classified network in the same month — June 2024. The Syrian video is additionally flagged as having been "digitally altered prior to its upload."
The alterations are documented in the video itself: the file includes black-screen title cards announcing "white edge threshold enhancement in attempt to highlight UAP shape," slowdown replays at 50 percent and 25 percent speed, and a black-and-white inverted version. AARO presents this as received, without editorial judgment about why the alterations were made or by whom.
The combination of elements here — materials uploaded simultaneously to a classified network in June 2024, lacking substantiated chain-of-custody, one of them digitally altered before upload, both now released in response to a congressional request — raises questions that AARO's public materials do not address. Who uploaded these videos? Under what authority? What was the original classification level, and what was the original sensor platform? The agency has confirmed the likely sensor type and operational theater. It has not confirmed the uploader, the chain of custody, or whether the alterations affected any analytical conclusions.
The Joint Staff J3 GENADMIN message from May 2023 — a separate document released through AARO's FOIA reading room — establishes the formal framework under which UAP materials are supposed to move through the system. The message directs Combatant Commands and Services to report UAP to their respective counterintelligence element and to transfer UAP and UAP-related material to AARO. If those procedures were followed for the Syrian and Iran videos, the chain-of-custody record should exist. AARO says it largely does not.
This is not a peripheral discrepancy. AARO's stated mission, as articulated in the Kirkpatrick-era briefing document released under FOIA request 23-F-0922, is to "minimize technical and intelligence surprise, by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection, identification, attribution, and mitigation" of anomalous objects. An office charged with attribution that cannot establish the chain-of-custody for materials in its own archive has a foundational problem — regardless of whether the objects in those videos turn out to be mundane or not.
The reporting trends data compounds this picture. The November 2024 Kosloski briefing covers the period January 1, 1996 through October 10, 2024. It shows that 75 percent of closed UAP cases are resolved as balloons, 16 percent as unmanned aircraft systems, 6 percent as birds, and 1 percent each as conventional aircraft and satellites. Those figures, taken at face value, suggest a program that is resolving most of what it sees. But the briefing does not disclose what percentage of total cases have been closed versus remain in the active archive — a number that would be essential to evaluating whether the resolution rate is meaningful or whether the closed cases are simply the easiest ones.
What has not yet appeared in public is the second volume of AARO's Historical Records Report, which the agency indicated was forthcoming and which is expected to address the specific question of whether legacy UAP retrieval programs actually existed within the U.S. government. That document — and the testimony of whoever can authenticate the chain-of-custody for the Syrian and Iran videos — is what this story is waiting for.