In November 2024, Dr. Jon Kosloski stood before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and introduced himself as a mathematician and physicist who had spent most of his career at the National Security Agency working on optics, computing, and cryptographic mathematics. He was there, he said, because he is drawn to tough scientific problems — and UAP qualified.
That resume detail was not incidental. It was, in a quiet way, the whole story.
The office Kosloski now leads — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO — is frequently described in public as a transparency mechanism: a place where the government's UFO problem gets sorted, explained, and shared with the public. What the paper trail actually shows is something more architecturally complex. AARO sits at the center of a web that connects the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy and its national laboratories, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the FBI, DHS, NASA, the FAA, the State Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That is not a disclosure office. That is an integration hub for some of the most sensitive collection equities in the U.S. government.
Understanding how that hub came to exist requires going back further than most coverage of AARO does.
Understanding how that hub came to exist requires going back further than most coverage of AARO does.
A Plan That Worked
In October 2020, journalist Alejandro Rojas reported for Open Minds that two unnamed intelligence community insiders, unable to get what they considered credible UFO-related data in front of the Secretary of Defense through normal channels, devised a plan to route the issue through Congress instead. That plan, Rojas reported, worked: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence responded by requesting that the Director of National Intelligence organize formal research into unidentified aerial phenomena. The specific methods the insiders used, and their identities, remain unconfirmed in any primary record available to the public. But the legislative consequence is documented. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, Section 1683, created the statutory requirement that eventually became AARO's founding mandate. The FY 2023 NDAA amended that mandate, and the two laws together are cited as the legal basis for the Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, jointly issued by DoD and ODNI.
The lineage matters because it explains AARO's peculiar institutional position. The office was not built from within the defense bureaucracy as a straightforward analytical cell. It was, at least in part, legislated into existence by a Senate committee that had been deliberately cultivated by people who believed the existing system was failing to surface information to senior decision-makers. Whether that assessment was correct, and whether AARO has corrected it, are questions the public record does not yet answer.
Seán Kirkpatrick, AARO's first director, laid out the office's scope in a January 2023 briefing to the Transportation Research Board — a document cleared by DoD public affairs and posted on AARO's own website. The mission statement he presented was precise: minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection, identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified, anomalous objects in the vicinity of national security areas. The vision statement added that such objects should be detected, tracked, analyzed, and managed through normalized DoD, Intelligence Community, and civil business practices, with adherence to the highest scientific and intelligence-tradecraft standards.
What that briefing also showed — in a single slide cataloguing stakeholders by threat category — was the breadth of the institutional machinery AARO was meant to coordinate. Near U.S. territory and military operating areas, the key partners listed were DoD, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Justice, NASA, and the FAA. Near strategic capabilities and critical infrastructure, the list shifted to DoD, the IC, the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, DoJ, and DHS. For foreign territory and operating areas, the relevant partners were DoD, the IC, the State Department, and international partners. The Department of Energy's appearance in the strategic-capabilities column — alongside the NNSA, which manages the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile — was not elaborated on in the public version of the briefing.
Oak Ridge and the Aluminum Specimen
The DoE connection became concrete in a different document: a technical analysis prepared by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for AARO, posted on AARO's public website, examining a metallic specimen claimed to be associated with a UAP event over central Ohio in the mid-1990s. Oak Ridge is one of 17 DoE national laboratories; it was AARO's chosen science and technology partner for this particular investigation.
The results were unambiguous. ORNL's analysts used inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray computed tomography, and gamma spectroscopy on drill shavings and a bulk piece of the sample. They found an aluminum-silicon alloy with approximately 12 percent silicon by weight, standard casting pores, features consistent with slow cooling in a mold, and no abnormal gamma emission. The sample, they concluded, most closely matched ASTM designations A413.1/369.1 — a grade of casting alloy that has been in widespread industrial production since at least the 1970s. The ORNL synopsis states flatly that nothing in the data suggests novel physics or exotic origin, and that the evidence points to ordinary, terrestrial industrial metallurgy consistent with parts used in automotive, aerospace, and consumer applications in the late twentieth century.
That is a clean, well-documented result. It is also the kind of result that prompts an obvious follow-on question: what other materials are in AARO's holdings that have not yet been sent to a national laboratory, and what criteria determine which specimens receive that level of analysis?
By the time Kosloski testified in November 2024, AARO held over 1,600 UAP reports from across the U.S. government. His statement for the record noted that many resolve to commonplace objects — birds, balloons, unmanned systems — while others lack sufficient data for comprehensive analysis. Only a very small percentage, he said, are potentially anomalous, and those require significant time, resources, and focused scientific inquiry. He was careful on the central public question: it is important to underscore, Kosloski told the subcommittee, that to date, AARO has discovered no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.
The FY 2023 annual report, covering the period from August 2022 through April 2023, covered 291 UAP reports. It states that none of those reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities, and none suggest UAP maneuvered to unsafe proximity to civil or military aircraft. The report also states that some reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability — but declines to specify what those characteristics were beyond that formulation, or how many cases fell into that category.
The report does name the agencies that coordinated on its drafting, and the list is itself informative: the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the DoD Joint Staff, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and NASA, among others. The breadth of coordination on a single annual report underscores how many collection equities are implicated in the UAP problem set.
The Transparency Tension
Kosloski's November 2024 testimony included a commitment that the department is committed to declassifying and publicly sharing more information on UAP, while protecting sensitive sources and methods. He also told the subcommittee that AARO is working closely with the National Archives and Records Administration to make UAP-related documents publicly available in a digitized collection.
Both of those commitments sit in tension with documented institutional realities. AARO's own public statements acknowledge that it routinely accesses classified information collected by U.S. government systems to complete its review of UAP reports. Declassification requires working with the originator of each record — and the originator of a record collected by, say, the National Security Agency or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has every institutional incentive to protect sources and methods indefinitely. The commitment to public release is real; the constraint on it is structural, not a matter of will.
There is also a timing problem that the record does not explain. The FY 2023 report was filed; the FY 2025 report, per the statutory deadline established under 50 U.S.C. § 3373, has not been publicly confirmed as filed on time. The office has not offered a public explanation for any delay.
None of this is proof of concealment. AARO's institutional footprint — NSA-trained director, DoE laboratory partnerships, coordination spanning a dozen intelligence and regulatory agencies — reflects the genuine complexity of what the office is attempting. Kirkpatrick said in his 2023 briefing that the potentially ubiquitous presence of UAP defines the national-security implications and drives the broad range of stakeholders. He was right about the stakeholder breadth. The question his framing leaves open is whether an office designed to integrate that many equities can also, simultaneously, be the mechanism through which those equities are made transparent.
The document that would most clarify that question is the FY 2025 annual report — specifically whether it accounts for how many of AARO's over 1,600 case files have been formally de-conflicted against U.S. programs, and what the outcomes of those de-conflicts were. The 2023 report says AARO has de-conflicted cases with potential U.S. programs, but names neither the programs nor the results. Until that accounting is public, the office's role as gatekeeper — of data, of classification decisions, of what Congress and the public are ultimately permitted to know — remains the central unresolved question of the UAP institutional story.