Director of Pentagon's UAP office testifies: No 'verifiable evidence' of aliens

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The head of the federal office tasked with providing transparency around UFOs told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday that the office had not found links to extraterrestrial life.

Jon Kosloski, the newly appointed director of the All-Domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO), testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities that the majority of reports to the office were not anomalous but the few that were required "significant" resources from the office.

"AARO needs to bolster the quantity, quality and diversity of data that it acquires and examines," Kosloski said.

For the office to be successful in investigating unidentified objects, those who have seen them need to be able to report them, Kosloski told the committee, adding that the department is committed to increasing partnerships within and outside of the government.

"There should be zero stigma associated with UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) reporting," Kosloski said.

Kosloski testified that the office would not rule out potential explanations on UAP while reiterating that the office "has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology."

Senate hearing comes on heels of House testimony

The hearing was held on the heels of the latest round of testimony in the halls of Congress last week about unexplained objects violating U.S. airspace and shadowy programs to recover and study downed craft.

Former military members and others have for years described witnessing or recording baffling objects − in both the sky and bodies of water − maneuvering in ways they believed to be beyond known human technology.

Last Wednesday, journalist Michael Shellenberger testified that sources had informed him that intelligence communities have numerous high-resolution photos and videos of UAP unlike any of the grainy imagery that has so far been declassified.

One witness, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official, described a decades-long international arms race to obtain and reverse-engineer the strange vehicles so governments can bolster their own technology. In corroborating much of the testimony Pentagon intelligence official David Grusch offered in July 2023, Elizondo also accused the Department of Defense of hiding its UFO programs from Congress while misappropriating funds to operate them.

Elizondo said in the House hearing that laws regarding classified information constrained him and Grusch from publicly presenting hard evidence to support claims of a crash-retrieval program, which the Pentagon has repeatedly denied exists.

Kosloski testified Tuesday that the AARO does not unilaterally declassify materials and that some photos and other evidence remain classified due to how it was obtained instead of what the information reveals.

What is AARO?

The Pentagon has overseen AARO since its creation in 2022 and created a website for the office in 2023 to allow the public to access declassified UFO information.

AARO has released a series of reports with findings on various UFO sightings, all of which end with the same conclusion: That no evidence has been found to suggest that unexplained sightings are extraterrestrial in nature.

In its most recent report released Thursday, a day after the congressional UFO hearing, AARO studied 757 reports of UAP between May 1, 2023, and June 1, 2024.

"There are definitely anomalies," Kosloski admitted at a briefing last week, adding: "We have not been able to draw the link to extraterrestrial."

Astrophysicists have long cautioned that the absence of obvious natural explanations for UFOs doesn't make otherworldly ones likely.