The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was formally established in 2022 under the National Defense Authorization Act. It is the US government’s official UAP investigation body — the public face of Pentagon UAP work. David Grusch, the intelligence officer whose whistleblower testimony triggered congressional hearings, has described AARO as a honeypot designed to capture and neutralise UAP whistleblowers rather than investigate the phenomenon.
What AARO Is
Per AARO’s own definition (NDAA FY23 Section 1673(d)(8)), Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena means: (A) airborne objects not immediately identifiable; (B) transmedium objects or devices; (C) submerged objects displaying behaviour suggesting connection to (A) or (B). The Department of War defines UAP as “sources of anomalous detections in one or more domain (airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviours not readily understood by sensors or observers.”
That official definition — written into US law — explicitly includes transmedium and submerged objects displaying anomalous behaviour. This is not a fringe definition. It is the US government’s own legal framework for UAP, confirming that the phenomenon encompasses objects operating across air, water, and space domains simultaneously.
What AARO Publishes
AARO publishes case statistics, reporting procedures, and historical record reports. Its 2024 Historical Record Report Volume 1 concluded there was “no evidence” of US government UAP crash retrieval programs — a finding directly contradicted by David Grusch’s sworn congressional testimony and the subsequent intelligence community Inspector General designation of his complaint as “urgent and credible.”
In February 2026, AARO hosted a private workshop with civilian researchers, universities, and government agencies — the first time AARO had formally engaged the civilian research community in a structured setting.
The Honeypot Assessment
UAP Gerb’s research identifies AARO as the public-facing capture mechanism for valuable UAP information and whistleblowers — designed to receive, document, and neutralise disclosures rather than investigate them. The real oversight nodes, per the research corpus, are the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) and Ronald Moultrie — not AARO.
The mechanism: whistleblowers who go to AARO are documented, identified, and managed. The programme architecture they might reveal is protected by the classification layers AARO itself cannot penetrate. AARO’s mandate covers unresolved cases. The resolved ones — recovered and reverse-engineered craft — are held in contractor-operated programs outside AARO’s jurisdiction by design.
Report UAP to AARO at aaro.mil. Understand that doing so puts your name in a government database. The real programs are not there.
Sources: aaro.mil, NDAA FY23 Section 1673(d)(8), UAP Gerb research corpus, Grusch congressional testimony July 2023.