In Part 1 of this series, we covered seven decades of government secrecy, from Roswell to the quiet closure of Project Blue Book. In Part 2, we covered how that silence broke, ending with David Grusch's explosive 2023 congressional testimony and the Pentagon's flat denial of his claims. This part picks up exactly where that left off, and covers what's actually happened since, including one of the largest government document declassification efforts in modern U.S. history, unfolding in real time as this post is being written.
What Did AARO's 2024 Historical Report Actually Conclude?
Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's first director, retired from the office on December 1, 2023, just months after Grusch's testimony had put his agency squarely in the national spotlight. Before leaving, Kirkpatrick personally led the research and writing of AARO's first mandated report to Congress, the Historical Record Report Volume I, covering the government's involvement with UAP from 1945 through October 2023. He reportedly pushed to finish it himself rather than hand it to his deputy, wanting to see the project through before his departure.
The Pentagon released the report publicly on March 8, 2024, under a blunt headline of its own choosing: "DOD Report Discounts Sightings of Extraterrestrial Technology." Its core conclusion was direct. Investigators wrote that the combined findings of every U.S. government investigation to date had not found even a single confirmed case of UAP representing off-world technology, that none of the classified programs described by interviewees turned out to be genuine reverse-engineering efforts, and that a specific piece of metal alleged by one source to have come from a non-human spacecraft was, on examination, ordinary and terrestrial in origin. The report went further, stating AARO had been able to directly disprove the majority of specific claims made by interviewees, though it noted some individual claims remained under evaluation.
Why Was the Report So Controversial?
The report's release didn't settle the dispute; if anything, it sharpened it. Grusch and his congressional allies pushed back hard, arguing AARO's own investigators lacked the security clearance levels necessary to actually access the classified Special Access Programs where he claimed the real evidence was being held, meaning the report could credibly disprove secondhand rumors without ever having reviewed the material at the center of the actual allegation.
The report's rollout drew criticism on process grounds too. Two days before public release, AARO's acting director gave a small group of hand-selected journalists advance access to shape early coverage, and on the same day, Kirkpatrick published an op-ed in Scientific American describing the broader UFO disclosure narrative in unusually blunt terms, writing that most claims traced back to a small, interconnected group of believers and individuals he characterized as having less than fully honest intentions, and describing much of what circulates publicly as a mix of fabrication and repeated secondhand retellings that all ultimately source back to the same handful of people. It's about as pointed as an outgoing government scientist's public statement on this topic has ever gotten, and it did little to calm the researchers already convinced AARO was running interference rather than genuinely investigating.
Who Leads AARO Now?
Leadership changed hands twice in less than a year. Timothy Phillips served as acting director through the report's release and into mid-2024, before Dr. Jon Kosloski, a specialist in quantum optics and cryptomathematics with a background at the NSA's Research Directorate, was formally named AARO's director on August 26, 2024. Under Kosloski, the office's annual reporting has continued to show a genuinely growing caseload; the report covering activity through mid-2024 documented 757 new incidents, including a backlog of older reports only recently submitted, bringing AARO's total reviewed case count since its founding to 1,652. Of that most recent batch, Kosloski told reporters directly that 21 specific incidents, occurring near sensitive national security sites and captured on video, sensor data, or multiple simultaneous eyewitness accounts, remained genuinely unexplained even to him personally, despite his own physics and engineering background.
What Changed in Early 2026?
The pace of this story accelerated dramatically in 2026. On February 19, President Donald Trump posted directly on social media ordering federal agencies, including the Department of War (the renamed Department of Defense), the ODNI, NASA, and the FBI, to identify and declassify government records connected to UAP, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life, framing it explicitly as a transparency initiative. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed in early May that his agency had already begun handing over its first batch of classified UAP-related material to the interagency team coordinating the release.
What Has the PURSUE Portal Actually Released?
The result launched publicly on May 8, 2026: a new government-run archive called PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, hosted directly at war.gov/ufo, requiring no security clearance or special access to view. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the initiative's goal as "maximum transparency," and unlike previous piecemeal disclosures through FOIA requests or individual leaks, PURSUE was explicitly designed as an ongoing, rolling release rather than a single document dump.
The first tranche alone included roughly 160 files, a mix of PDF reports, sensor videos, and photographs spanning historical material dating back to 1944 through recent years. Subsequent releases followed roughly every three to five weeks. A second tranche in late May added dozens more files, including a first-person account from a serving senior U.S. intelligence officer describing an hour-long, multi-witness UAP encounter observed from a military helicopter. A third tranche in June included FBI-authenticated eyewitness video footage of unexplained "orb" phenomena reported in the northeastern United States. A fourth tranche in July added further AARO-collected military video alongside historical documents, including material connected to NASA's Apollo and Gemini programs. As of this post, five tranches have been published under PURSUE, the most recent on August 7, 2026, including newly declassified FBI digital renderings of triangular objects reported between 2002 and 2026, with the Department of War confirming more are actively in preparation as additional records are located, reviewed, and cleared for release.
It's worth being direct about what this rolling disclosure has, and hasn't, actually delivered so far. Much of the released material to date consists of historical curiosities, older Apollo-era photographs, older infrared clips, and internal correspondence, rather than the kind of raw sensor telemetry or physical-material analysis that would move the needle on the crash-retrieval claims covered in Part 2 of this series. AARO itself has noted publicly that the majority of cases within the PURSUE archive continue to resolve to conventional explanations, drones, balloons, and similar mundane causes, once properly analyzed.
What Is Congress Doing About It?
Congressional interest has kept pace with the executive branch's disclosure push. Through 2026, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued subpoenas to private defense contractors believed to be holding legacy UAP-related programs operating outside standard congressional oversight, a genuinely significant escalation beyond the voluntary hearings and public testimony that characterized 2023 and 2024. Multiple public hearings have continued as well, featuring testimony from figures including Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo, and additional military witnesses, focused specifically on whistleblower protections and the scope of proposed UAP Disclosure Act legislation. Several senators from both parties who've received classified briefings on the subject have stated publicly, without providing specifics, that the underlying situation is more significant than has been publicly acknowledged.
Where Can You Read the Primary Sources Yourself?
In keeping with this blog's standard of accuracy over sensationalism, here are the actual government documents referenced in this post, so you can read them directly rather than taking any secondhand summary, including this one, at face value:
- AARO Historical Record Report, Volume I (March 2024) : the full 63-page report discussed above, hosted directly on the Department of Defense's own servers: media.defense.gov PDF
- The PURSUE declassification archive : the Department of War's official, ongoing portal for all released UAP material, searchable and filterable by release, agency, and file type, with direct document and video downloads for every tranche: war.gov/UFO
- AARO's own case database : the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office maintains its own historical records and case reporting separately from PURSUE: aaro.mil
- ODNI's 2021 Preliminary Assessment on UAP : the original government report covering 144 military-reported incidents from 2004 to 2021, available through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
- Sean Kirkpatrick's March 2024 Scientific American op-ed : his direct, on-the-record account of AARO's findings and his characterization of the broader disclosure narrative.
In the final part of this series, we'll weigh everything covered across these three parts against each other, what's been proven, what remains genuinely unresolved, and what it would actually take to settle this question one way or the other.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did AARO's 2024 report conclude about UFOs? AARO's Historical Record Report Volume I, released March 8, 2024, concluded that no U.S. government investigation had ever found a confirmed case of UAP representing off-world technology, and that it had directly disproven most specific whistleblower claims it examined, though some remained under evaluation.
Who leads AARO in 2026? Dr. Jon Kosloski, a former NSA quantum optics and cryptomathematics specialist, was named AARO's director on August 26, 2024, following the departure of founding director Sean Kirkpatrick and a brief period under acting director Timothy Phillips.
What is the PURSUE UAP disclosure portal? PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, is a Department of War archive launched May 8, 2026, at war.gov/ufo, publicly releasing declassified UAP-related documents, videos, and historical records on an ongoing, rolling basis.
Has the U.S. government released any new UAP videos in 2026? Yes. Through the PURSUE portal, the Department of War has released multiple tranches of declassified sensor footage, including FBI-authenticated video of unexplained "orb" phenomena and additional military infrared footage, alongside historical documents and photographs.
Is Congress investigating UAP disclosure separately from the Pentagon? Yes. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has issued subpoenas to private defense contractors believed to hold legacy UAP programs outside standard oversight, and multiple congressional hearings have continued through 2026 focused on whistleblower protections and disclosure legislation.
Read the Full UAP Disclosure Investigation Series
- UAP Disclosure, Part 1: 70 Years of Government UFO Secrecy
- UAP Disclosure, Part 2: How Modern Disclosure Actually Began
- UAP Disclosure, Part 3: Inside the 2024–2026 Hearings
- UAP Disclosure, Part 4: What the Evidence Actually Shows
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