The Department of Defense (DoD) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released an unclassified report documenting Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) sightings and the characteristics of the devices spotted by witnesses.
The DoD All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) received 291 UAP reports from Aug. 31, 2022 to April 30, 2023, including 274 that occurred in the reporting period and another 17 that occurred in prior reporting periods but had not been conveyed in submissions, the DoD report states. The AARO has received a total of 801 UAP reports for its investigation as of April 30, 2023, with a bias towards military airspace. (RELATED: New Data Reveals Which State Is The Top UFO Hotspot)
READ THE REPORT:
“Most reports still reflect a bias towards restricted military airspace, a result of reporting from military personnel and sensors present in such areas. This bias has been lessened by reporting from commercial pilots showing a more diverse geographic distribution of UAP sightings across the United States,” the document reads.
Some of the sightings reported by military personnel have led to concerns about the characteristics of the UAPs and flight safety.
“During the reporting period, AARO received no reports indicating UAP sightings have been associated with any adverse health effects. However, many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability,” the document adds.
The potential hazard from UAPs comes from their presence in the airspace, but no UAPs have posed a direct threat to the flight safety of the observing aircraft. For example, none of the UAPs maneuvered themselves into close proximity of civil or military aircraft and none of them were positioned in flight paths, the report asserts.
The AARO continues to investigate whether any of the cases can be explained by foreign activity. None of the existing cases have been “positively attributed” to foreign activity, according to the report.
Only a small portion of the reported UAP sightings had unusual characteristics, and many of the unsolved cases can be attributed to a lack of data, the report indicates.
“AARO’s analytic efforts are confirming that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display interesting signatures, such as high-speed travel and unknown morphologies. The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources, while a larger number of cases in AARO’s holdings remain technically unresolved because of a lack of data,” the document explains.
The annual report from DoD and ODNI was required by the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by Congress. The AARO drafted the report alongside the ODNI’s National Intelligence Manager for Military Integration and coordinated with various government agencies to generate the report.
“Analyzing and understanding the potential threats posed by UAP is an ongoing collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies, and the Department thanks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and other contributing departments and agencies for their collaborative efforts to produce this report,” the Pentagon said in an Oct. 18 statement.
“The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount. We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.”