The Pentagon says it found no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft, in a new report reviewing nearly eight decades of UFO sightings.
The 63-page, unclassified document published on Friday is the most comprehensive report the Pentagon has produced on the topic, and yet another instance in which it has batted down claims of alien spaceships.
The Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) issued the report, which covers claims of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) — the military's term for UFOs — dating from 1945 through October 2023. The AARO was created in 2022 to identify and resolve reports of UAPs.
"AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology," Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Friday.
All investigative efforts concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and the result of misidentification, Ryder said.
Many of the sightings turned out to be drones, weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, rockets and planets, according to the report.
The report dismisses some of the most explosive claims made in a July congressional hearing, in which former military officials claimed the government is concealing from the public what it knows about UFOs. In one account, a former Air Force intelligence officer alleged the government has long operated a covert program in which it has reverse-engineered recovered UFO vessels.
"To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology," Ryder said in the statement.
The office plans to publish a second volume of the report later this year that covers findings from interviews and research done between November 2023 and April 2024.
NPR's Greg Myre contributed to this report.
