DoD Website For UFO Sightings Is Anything But

I thought it was time to check out this new Pentagon website I’d heard about on TV news, supposedly for UFO sightings. Even the head of NASA commented on it, and about extraterrestrial life as a realistic possibility. This made me ponder, maybe that means the Department of Defense is also finally recognizing that these UFOs—or UAPs as they are now called by DoD—must be piloted by someone, if only remotely.

The NASA chief said that we don’t know what these UAP are, and we also don’t know if they are of extraterrestrial origin, but he indicated a personal belief in the possibility that extraterrestrials exist. He also called on the American public to go to the AARO.mil website to help identify UAP.

So off I went to explore at AARO.mil. Let me first just say that I am no stranger to convoluted and bizarre terms cooked up by the federal government and turned into acronyms, but this one, AARO, is, well, kind of ridiculous.

AARO stands for All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Really.

Also, I’ve been mistaken in thinking UAP stood for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. According to the AARO website, it doesn’t. Instead of aerial, the A stands for anomalous. I prefer the word phenomena to anomaly, though both words are a pain to type, but they didn’t ask me. Plus, the AP part of this UAP acronym therefore seems redundant.

The Pentagon also isn’t asking regular citizens about UFO or UAP sightings on the AARO website, so I’m not at all sure why the head of NASA is directing the American public there. Silly me for thinking that DoD might actually want to hear from people who haven’t been intimidated into not talking about such things for fear of ridicule and job loss. The way DoD and NASA have previously managed to keep military aviators and astronauts from revealing what they have seen.

Initial observations about this website were that it’s kind of spooky, in a good way. The logo has a black, starry-space backdrop, with an ethereal white orb that isn’t Earth’s moon, plus ribbonlike or cloudlike wispy stuff.

This AARO logo is perhaps the most authentic part of the entire endeavor. Because, I’m assuming they couldn’t or wouldn’t have come up with an orb and deep space logo to represent “anomalies” if they hadn’t actually been provided with information about sightings of such “anomalies.” I myself have only seen a red orb, not white, but I still felt somewhat vindicated by the logo. Until I read further.

The website starts with a word-salad message from AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick:

“Welcome to the website for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Our team of experts is leading the U.S. government’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.  Since its establishment in July 2022, AARO has taken important steps to improve data collection, standardize reporting requirements, and mitigate the potential threats to safety and security posed by UAP. We look forward to using this site regularly to update the public about AAROs work and findings, and to provide a mechanism for UAP reporting.”

Couple of things. If this office was formed in July 2022, it took them a while to update the public via this website, or to publicize this website.  Also, there’s always got to be a reference to potential threats, despite no disseminated evidence of actual, tangible, and—most importantly—demonstrated threats from UAP.

To wit, this website includes “official UAP videos,” including some recorded in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Western U.S. The website also includes DoD videos we’ve all now seen on TV of the Navy 2021 flyby and other Navy F/A-18 jet encounters. Funny thing, those encounters did not include physical attacks on our naval aviators or aircraft by UAPs. No destruction, no violent engagement.

The website also includes charts and graphs of UAP “reporting trends” from 1996-2023. Could it be that those dates are parameters used simply because, before 1996, no member of the military or NASA was allowed to report UAP sightings with impunity?

As for the most disappointing part of this website, a “Coming Soon” mechanism for reporting UAPs will only apply to current or former US government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of U.S. government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945.  Direct knowledge of existing programs or activities is the criteria, not firsthand experience in sighting UFOs, even by a current or former federal employee and contractor like me and so many others.

Plus, this looks more like the plan is to glean information on 80 years of deliberate government coverups about UFOs, as opposed to addressing anything even remotely resembling present realities. So much for concerns over supposed threats to safety and security.

Or maybe it’s just fancy AARO semantics subterfuge. Here’s the mission statement provided on the website:

“Minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.”

Now we might be getting somewhere. It’s the specific location of some of those UAP that have government entities worried. Nukes, experimental technology, salacious secrets…and also that they don’t want to be “surprised.”

In my Other Worldly novels, I posit that aliens might just be more worried about what humans will do with weapons of mass destruction than they are interested in stealing our “secrets.” Because if they’re already here, their technology and capabilities far exceed ours, yet they aren’t interested in destroying us—those naval aviator non-violent UAP encounter videos serve as exhibit A.

But then comes the absolute drivel of ridiculousness, in my not-humble opinion. The “AARO Vision”:

“Unidentified anomalous phenomena are effectively and efficiently detected, tracked, analyzed, and managed by way of normalized DoD, Intelligence Community, and civil business practices; by adherence to the highest scientific and intelligence tradecraft standards; and with the greatest transparency and shared awareness.”

It’s that last part that gets me. When can we the people whose taxpayer dollars fund the AARO, when can we expect to see this great transparency and shared awareness?

According to the AARO website, “Current Operational UAP Reporting” exists only for military personnel through their command or service, which leaves out civilians entirely, and civilian pilots apparently have a mechanism to report sightings to the Federal Aviation Administration.

That’s more than they used to have. But here’s the problem. DoD considers UAP as sources of anomalous detections in one or more domains, including airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or trans medium, that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers.

According to DoD, anomalous detections include but are not limited to phenomena that demonstrate apparent capabilities or material that exceed known performance envelopes. A UAP may consist of one or more unidentified anomalous objects and may persist over a period of time.

Hence, we’re not just dealing with Earth’s airspace and outer space aerial phenomena, but water vessels or combinations thereof operating on land and at sea, as in littoral craft. Crafts that could be operating and existing in places far more likely to be seen by citizens who are not military or civilian pilots, not government contractors working in this particular UAP field, but merely someone who is in the right place at the right time, with fully capable eyes and ears and powers of observation.

If AARO isn’t interested in potential “civilian” input regarding sightings, one might assume AARO also isn’t really interested in sharing or being transparent about what it actually already knows. Like, are there truly valid security concerns over UAP sightings? What are they? Why? Out of the number of sightings recorded, what percentage involve actual security concerns?

Here’s the thing. If AARO only addresses sightings and encounters by military personnel, it makes it all too easy and convenient to declare anything unexplainable a “threat.” They, and we, will never learn a damn thing.

One final observation (pun intended). Out of all those elaborate words and technical descriptions in the AARO directors’ message, the AARO mission statement, and the AARO vision, there was not one single mention of resolution. Yet that’s what this office is supposed to be about, according to its actual title: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Go figure.

Come to think of it, the logo matches neither the mission statement nor vision either. Almost as if this AARO isn’t really what it says it is, or what its name says it is. Like maybe it doesn’t really exist or is a total hoax itself. That would make it more like the federal government’s apparent opinion of UFO sightings by average citizens.