Dr. Jon Kosloski, Director, AARO, Media Roundtable on the FY24 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP

Nov. 14, 2024

STAFF:  For those who haven't met me, I am Sue Gough from the Defense Press Operations in the OSD — Office of the Secretary —Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. We are here today to hear what Doctor Jon Kosloski, the new director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has to say about AARO's activities and the release today of the unclassified version of their annual report on unidentified anomalous phenomena, as required by — by statute.

I'm going to — in a moment, I'll turn it over to Dr. Kosloski to provide opening remarks, then we will go to Q&A. I will be moderating and calling on you. Because Dr. Kosloski is — this is his first time with you all, we would appreciate it if you would identify yourself by name and outlet when you ask your question. Please keep it to one question and one follow up. And as we — if we have more time, I will circle back. We have about 30 minutes. All right, Dr. Kosloski.

DR. JON KOSLOSKI:  Thanks, Sue. Good morning. I'm Dr. Jon Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. It's a pleasure to be here today to introduce myself and to provide an update of the work of our office. As you know, I assumed the AARO directorship in August following more than two decades at the National Security Agency where I did advanced research in the areas of optics, computing and crypto mathematics.

By nature, I'm drawn to tough scientific problems, which is what brought me to AARO and the UAP mission. Unidentified objects in any domain pose potential threats to safety and security. Reports of unidentified anomalous phenomenon, particularly near national security sites, must be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the U.S. government.

Since becoming director, I've been extremely pleased by AARO’s team and the framework they've established for rigorous analysis of UAP reports. AARO has taken meaningful steps to improve data collection and retention, bolster sensor development, effectively triage UAP reports, and reduce the stigma of reporting a UAP event.

In the coming year, AARO will prioritize building partnerships, promoting increased transparency and scaling up the work of the office.

This week, the department delivered its Fiscal Year 2024 consolidated annual report on UAP and had the opportunity to brief congressional staff on the report's findings.

As of today, over 1,600 UAP reports, 757 of which — I'm sorry, AARO has received over 1,600 UAP reports, over 757 of which came to AARO during the period covered by the report. AARO has successfully resolved hundreds of cases in its holdings to commonplace objects such as balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft.

Meanwhile, over 900 reports lack sufficient data for — scientific data for analysis and are retained in our active archive. These cases may be reopened and resolved, should additional information emerge to support analysis. I want to emphasize that although only a very small percentage of reports to AARO are potentially anomalous, these are the cases that require significant time, resources and a focused scientific inquiry by AARO and its partners.

It is also important to underscore that to date, AARO has discovered no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology. None of the cases resolved by AARO have pointed to advanced capabilities or breakthrough technologies. It is also worth noting that AARO continues to see a geographic bias of UAP reports near U.S. military assets and sensors.

However, this bias has been mitigated somewhat by an increase in commercial pilot reporting in the continental United States. AARO is working closely with the services to implement existing reporting guidance while expanding UAP reporting to more of the interagency. Meanwhile, AARO continues to review the U.S. historical record relating to UAP and will release a second volume of its congressionally directed Historical Record Report.

We welcome any former or current government civilian, contractor or military service member with relevant information to reach out to us at www.AARO.mil. For every UAP report, operational or historical, AARO will follow the science and data wherever they lead. And we are committed to sharing as much information as possible at the unclassified level to inform the public of our activities and findings. With that, I'll take your questions.

STAFF:  Brandi?

Q:  Thanks. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm Brandi Vincent with Defense Scoop. One question on the report and then a follow-up. It noted that the next step for Gremlin, the Gremlin capability, is conducting a 90-day pattern of life collection at a national security site. Where is that going to be? How did you pick that location? And what ultimately are you guys trying to accomplish with that?

DR. KOSLOSKI: So it's currently deployed. We'd rather not say exactly where it is because we want it to be an unbiased test and don't want to invite folks to come and do flyovers and test against the system. We chose that specific location because of the environment. We expect there to be a lot of variety in the types of things that we're going to see. And there had been UAP reports in that general area.

And we're trying to build a baseline. So, right now, we have this geographic bias where we are getting reports near the national security sites. But we also have a bias from pilots and other security personnel. So we want to have a better understanding of what normal looks like near those national security sites. And then eventually we'll be expanding our baseline investigations to other areas in the U.S. to look at what normal looks like away from national security sites.

Q:  And then, after the hearing on the Hill yesterday, lawmakers were saying that they are really keen to meet in a SCIF with AARO officials, other DOD officials, whistleblowers and members of Congress. Is that something you've been approached about, have done or are open to doing?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So we're absolutely open to meeting with everybody. We've been meeting with a variety of folks, from whistleblowers through staffers. And we encourage anybody with direct information to come to us, go to our secure reporting mechanism on the website. And when we get that, we'll reach out to them, schedule a meeting in the SCIF.

And Congress has enabled us to receive all sensitive information regardless of classification or NDAs they may have signed. And we receive that information. And we follow-up on every tip that they provide us.

Q:  Thank you.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.

STAFF:  Oren

Q:  Two questions. One, I was wondering if you could talk about whether any analysis or data of reports you have received has led you to the foreign adversary conclusion, specifically the UASs — 18 reports of UASs spotted near nuclear facilities? And then I was wondering if you could just talk about the — the — the effort to increase engagement with foreign partners for a better —a broader array of sensors, data analysis information.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Sure. So, firstly, no, we have not been able to correlate any UAP activity to adversarial collection activities or advanced technologies. I also want to make it clear that UAP covers a lot of potential activity by its very nature. The definition is in the name, right? So it's unidentified and it's anomalous. Once we know that it's a UAV or a UAS of some nature, we then hand that responsibility off to one of our partners.

So Langley being a great example. It was known to be UAV activity, so we were there in a supporting role, but it was not our responsibility to address that. So those investigations are conducted by somebody else. And we're focusing on the truly anomalous where we don't understand the activity. And then for the foreign engagement, we're working on increasing our foreign engagement.

We recognize that UAP is not just going to be a domestic issue. The office has focused primarily on U.S. government. And we're going to be growing to public reporting soon in 2025. And we're going to be growing our international partnerships hopefully also in 2025. So starting with the group that we have the most familiar — familiarity with and then growing that from there.

Q:  Are there any specific countries you can name in terms of who you aim to work with?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  We are going to be starting with the traditional allies of the DOD and the IC. And I'll leave it at that for now until we have those partnerships well established and then we'll probably come out with more information. Yes.

STAFF:  Yes. Nick?

Q:  Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour. Thanks very much for doing this. This may be basic and silly, but I just want to read you a quotation from the hearing yesterday and have you respond to it. This is Luis Elizondo, former DOD official. "Let me be clear. UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. The U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies as are some of our adversaries."

Can you just give us a sense of your perspective on that quotation?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Break that down, so there's a lot in that quotation. Firstly, absolutely agree. UAP are real. We — as I said, we've received 1,600 cases. A large number of those are unresolved, which means we don't know exactly what they are. Until we know what they are or who they belong to, we can't attribute intent and understand exactly what the purpose of that phenomenon is. So we're not comfortable —we at AARO, are not comfortable saying at this time whether or not the UAP are there to collect information or not.

In regards to whether or not AARO, U.S. government or any other government has UAP. We have not found any evidence of that at this time.

Q:  …but the bottom line conclusion remains what you said at the top — There is no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  We have not found any, no. There are definitely anomalies. We have not been able to draw the link to extraterrestrial.

STAFF:  Phil.

Q:  Just to follow up on that.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.

Q:  You know, a lot of people read that or saw — just that hearing. You know, when you said there was no breakthrough technologies. I mean the person seems to be suggesting that, you know, at a minimum these are breakthrough technologies. What leads you to assume that the ones that —the UAP cases that you can't resolve are not potentially breakthrough technologies? Or is it that you just haven't been able to conclusively decide either way?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  That's exactly right. So we don't fully understand the phenomenon enough to say whether or not it's a breakthrough technology or not. So it's a very small percentage of our overall cases that after the initial analysis still have the anomalous characteristics that one could attribute breakthrough technologies to. It's less than 3.5% of our cases. And we're still studying those with our IC and S&T partners, trying to understand what technologies could be used to provide those characteristics.

But we don't understand them well enough to say whether it's a breakthrough technology, a misunderstanding of the sensor performance or something else.

Q:  And a skeptic might say that, you know, if you — just because you can't explain it isn't a reason to assume that it's not a breakthrough technology or I mean by the definition of breakthrough technology would be something that you don't have — if you don't have it, you can't explain, right?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Agree 100%. So, we're not ruling it out. We're open to that as an explanation for it. But we're just not attributing breakthrough technology as the explanation to it. We're — an open mind works both ways. So if we don't understand what it is, we can't say that it is or is not a breakthrough technology. So we're just trying to keep an open mind.

Q:  Got it. It's not a catch 22.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Right.

Q:  (inaudible) OK.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes. It — we accept that the explanation could be a misunderstanding of ours in interpreting the data or it could be a breakthrough technology. Until we understand, we don't know.

Q:  Thank you. Brad Dress, for The Hill. Have you found anything that might be a breakthrough technology? I know you're saying you don't know if there are breakthroughs yet, but something that might be a breakthrough technology near the military sites, some of those sightings you've seen near the military sites, have you found anything that might be that? Or are they all just been drones and UAS?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  It's definitely not all just drones and UAS. So we have several particularly interesting cases. We're working on within the office, working with our partners to downgrade several of those cases, so we can talk about them publicly. But there are interesting cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the IC, I do not understand. And I don't know anybody else who understands them either.

Q:  But those near military sites and facilities?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Until we get the information approved for release, I'd rather not say where those sightings were, but definitely interesting sightings.

Q:  OK. Thank you. Tanya Nori with NewsNation. Can you please speak to AARO's involvement in investigating incidents of drone or UAP, UAV incursions at the U.S. southern border with Mexico?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So we — I'm not that familiar with any specific investigations that we have — that AARO has supported for UAP or sorry, UAS, UAV activity near the southern border. We have had several UAP cases that have been brought to us that were near the border that we've investigated. I believe that we have resolved the cases that have been brought to us. And we're working on downgrading those so that we can share those.

Q:  And do you — can you speak to the procedures that are in place for Border Patrol agents to report UFO sightings? And how are those reports handled and investigated by the Pentagon overall and by AARO specifically?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So at this time, I don't believe we have a formal mechanism for Border Patrol to report to AARO. Right now, the only formal mechanism is through the DOD. And we're working on expanding that across the government through the interagency and for public reporting. We expect that formally to be in place hopefully in 2025. Right now, we're getting those cases more through partnerships that those folks have with DOD or counterintelligence members.

STAFF:  Luis?

Q:  Hi. Luis Martinez with ABC News. Thank you for doing this and welcome.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Thank you for coming.

Q:  Yes. I would like to follow-up on that earlier question about incidents you cannot explain based on your, you know, broad experience. A couple of follow-ups on that, please. Were these all within the last year? Were these all at the same location? Were you looking at video evidence? Or what are the metrics that you're looking at that you cannot explain?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Great question. So of the cases that I'm thinking of, there's a variety of them. The cases that are top of my mind are spread out over the last year and a half. I'm sure that there's some other anomalous ones a little further back. But the ones that I'm particularly most interested in are the last year and a half. There is some video footage for a few of the cases, not all of the cases.

So it's not just eyewitnesses. But in each of the cases I'm particularly interested in, there were multiple eyewitnesses. And there is additional data to go with them. It remains to be seen whether or not that additional data is going to be sufficient for us to either resolve the case, understand whether it's a UAV, bird or balloon, or say something substantive about the nature of the unknown phenomenon.

So we're still trying to understand whether or not there's more data available. Because we get the data that comes in from the witnesses. But we also go through a bunch of other sources. Whether or not we can enrich the data that was brought to us and then build a better case. Still digging into it.

Q:  What are some of the characteristics or are there — is there a trend among these things? And are they extended period incidents or are they very, very quick?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  In each of these cases, they were not extended. The cases that I'm thinking of, there was no commonality across the different cases, different morphologies, so orbs, cylinders, triangles. In one of the cases, it has been happening over an extended period of time. And it is possible that there's multiple things happening. There could be some UAV activity in the environment that's getting confused or conflated with the UAP activity, so we're trying to tease that out right now.

Q:  Just to clarify, earlier, you said Langley was UAVs. This — who — the Langley incidents would not be among what you're describing?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Correct.

Q:  OK.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Correct.

STAFF:  Konstantin?

Q:  Thanks. Konstantin Toropin with Military.com.  So one of the sort of key criticisms, I think, around this issue from the hearing yesterday was government transparency, lack of government transparency. I mean, can you sort of speak to that critique and whether you feel that AARO is being overly secretive? If you guys are working on being more transparent, sort of address this criticism from the Hill that you guys are emblematic of a government that overtly classifies everything and?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes, yes, it's an understandable concern. And I’m going to make a comment. My wife would like me to share more about the UAP incidents too, but I'll — I guess it's on the record now, so.

(Laughter)

The fundamental issue is that AARO receives cases from our partners. And in most cases, to date, because we've been working through the services, those partners are providing data that is gathered from sensitive platforms. And we need to make sure that we are protecting sensitive sources and methods not introducing vulnerabilities to their operations.

So even though that there's nothing inherently classified about the existence of a UAP, we have to protect that information. When AARO receives those interesting cases, the cases that we’re just briefly talking about, we try to identify if the UAP information can be isolated from the sensitive — usually it's metadata that identifies characteristics of the platform.

And we work to downgrade that material as much as we can. But we can't do it unilaterally. It has to be in partnership with the folks that brought that information. That is a very deliberate process, as you can imagine, to make sure that we're not releasing sensitive information. So we have taken significant steps to speed that up. We've hired a number of declassification experts.

We're going to be hosting a declassification workshop, so we can make sure we're implementing best practices from across the DOD and the IC. All of that takes more time than I think the public would like for it to take, but AARO is working on it. We recognize that the types of cases that I was just talking about are, from my perspective, true anomalies.

And we're going to need significant scientific rigor to address those. And yes, the U.S. government has a lot of nice scientists, little bias there, but we're going to need the help of academia and the public to address some of these so we need to build that more transparent partnership.

Q:  And just to follow-up sort of on the flip side, you know, is there any — as you look at cases to release for example, you talked about how at least one of the interesting ones is sort of ongoing. Is there a world where you hold back release out of fear of drawing more reports, you know, sort of drawing attention to a location and getting copycats or you know what have you sort of muddying the data?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes, so that concern has been raised to us. Because bad data in gets bad analysis out. However, no data in gets no analysis out. And so, being an NSA guy, I'm a firm believer in big data is going to lead to better conclusions. And I would rather have to filter out some of those copycat cases but have more substantive data. If we're looking for a needle in a haystack, I'd rather have multiple haystacks to go digging through rather than just one.

Q:  Thank you.

STAFF:  Brandi.

Q:  Just one quick follow up.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.

Q:  I'm sorry if I've missed it before, but what is AARO or your definition for breakthrough technology?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So lots of people, lots of organizations have different definitions. And the definition, the working definition that we've been using informally inside of our office, and we are working on more formal definitions for the different domains for space, the air domain and the undersea domain. But the general definition is beyond state of the art today and beyond where we think that we could get in the next couple years.

So we keep an eye on the capabilities of ourselves, our partners and everyone else at the academic and the very technical level. And then if it's beyond that, then we would say that's a breakthrough technology.

STAFF:  Phil.

Q:  Just a quick follow-up on your answer to Konstantin.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.

Q:  So, if you need to — I mean, I guess a lot of Americans have this view of the government as kind of all-knowing and being able to ascertain, you know, everything, particularly when they think of NSA and other agencies.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  If only.

Q:  And so, I guess if you could help us explain to readers, you know, what is it about these phenomena that — that, you know, reach the limits of government of the understanding of the professionals in the government and why it would be necessary to bring in academics? That'd be helpful for us.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Great question. So following on Brandi's question, if it's a breakthrough technology by its very nature, we don't know how it would be done, right? If we knew how to do it, we'd be doing it already and it wouldn't be a breakthrough technology. And so, usually those breakthroughs are coming from the academics. Historically, either in science or engineering, the breakthroughs come from academia and then they go into industry and then they come into government.

The government's employing a lot of scientists like myself and others who understand a fair amount about the science. But being able to extend that to something that we could not have imagined when we were in school or when we were in training is a very difficult process. And so we're going to have to pull in those folks that they spend all day every day just thinking of what is the next possible thing that you could do if you were just to tweak the equations a little bit this way or change the material a little bit that way.

And the government, because of our day jobs we don't get to spend all day every day doing that as much as I would like to.

STAFF:  Nick?

Q:  Just two small clarification, so the — what you called interesting cases at the beginning and then Luis asked you more specific spread out over the last year and a half. Just to be clear, those are cases that we don't know about, right? Meaning, we have not read about these cases that you're speaking about?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Correct, correct.

Q:  You said to Luis, one of the cases has been happening over extended period of time. I think Konstantin said ongoing. Just to be clear, that is ongoing or you just —or was it just happening over extended period of time? And you're not saying whether it's extended or not?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Extended period of time. It may be ongoing. But we don't know if the current activity is just drone activity in the environment. And so, we're trying to follow-up on that. We had put more energy into it earlier on, something flared up and now we're checking on it.

Q:  OK.

Q:  Ellie, CBS. Just a follow-up on the interesting cases. Are the interesting cases that you're talking about the 21 cases that merit further analysis or are they part of the active archive?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  They're part of the 21, yes, that merit. So the active archive, just so that we're clear, those are cases where we don't have enough scientific data to continue the analysis. We're always looking for more. And then when we do, we'll pull those into the merit more analysis. Yes.

STAFF:  Luis

Q:  Last year's report in the time frame had 281 new, I believe incidents. Now you have 485. What do we owe this really large increase to?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So I just —the new incidents I think to be clear, this — it had 757.

Q:  In your report here, you talk about a total of 757, you know, in the period of the reporting period.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.

Q:  Of which 485 were from this year and then the remainder were from previous.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Oh, yes. Yes.

Q:  But then, in last year's report, which was from — and I'm looking at my notes here —

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Why the ramp up in reporting?

Q:  Yes, I mean an additional 200, I mean in the same reporting period?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes.  Engagement.

Q:  Right.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So we're — we have the GENADMIN out. We're engaged with the services. We're engaging more with the services, helping them understand what qualifies as a UAP, how to report it. And we're getting more reports of the anomalous activity. It's not that there's —we don't believe that there's necessarily more anomalous activity.

It's just, we're getting greater, greater reporting. And we expect as we continue that engagement with the services, but also across the IC and the rest of the government to the question earlier, we're going to see that reporting go up as well. We're going to follow that with education campaigns, so that for example, the FAA is providing us reports now as well.

So we're getting reports from the pilots. Some of the reports from the pilots are Starlink flares, so light glinting off of satellites at just the right time of the evening. It looks interesting and potentially anomalous. But we can model that and we can show pilots what that anomaly looks like, so that that doesn't get reported to us necessarily.

So we're going to follow up the engagement campaigns with education campaigns so that as we're increasing the number of accounts that come to us, we're not just getting more of the noise and trying to keep it focused on the interesting.

STAFF:  Oren.

Q:  Just a very quick question on the active archive, do you have an instance or instances where you have gotten more information for an event in the active archive and have pulled it out or is that?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Thank you for asking. We do, yes.

(Laughter)

Yes, we do. So it actually was the instance that I'm most familiar with was a Starlink instance. So we had several folks over the period, I think, it was multiple months, where we're seeing interesting activity in the sky. And we found that when we — because we're continuously looking back at that active archive and looking for correlations across those incidents, but also new incidents coming in.

We found some of those correlations in time, the direction that they were looking, and the location. And we were able to assess that they were all in those cases looking at Starlink flares. Yes.

STAFF:  (inaudible)

Q:  How many people work in your office?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  We have several dozen folks working in the office, but the power of the office isn't the number of people who work in it, it's our partnerships across the IC and the DOD. And hopefully, in the near future academia as well.

STAFF:  Luis.

Q:  In the historical report from earlier this year, there was mentioned that in the 1950s and 60s as pilots started, commercial pilots started flying, they saw reflections as well off of what were like U-2 aircraft at that time. So this new Starlink seems to be very reminiscent of that. That’s—

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes, very reminiscent. Yes.

Q:  So you're seeing an uptick in that, that might be again, a historical parallel, right?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Yes. And we do see some trends in the morphologies that are reported. So for a while, we were seeing a lot more balloons. And then pilots started understanding what some of the space trash looked like. And now we're seeing as the mega satellite constellations are increasing, Starlink and there's others that are going up, we're seeing an increase in those lights in the sky that look very unusual as those satellites are deploying. And we expect that that trend will also go down eventually. Yes.

STAFF:  Ellie?

Q:  I have to ask a broadcast specific question, but do you anticipate releasing any video related to any of the cases that were ruled out or that are still unexplained?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So we're going to be — we have some resolved cases that are of public interest that have been talked about publicly that will be releasing on the 19th. I think those are going to come with videos? Yes. And then, as we downgrade information, the hope is that we will be able to release as much of that content as we can to the public so that we can get help in resolving them. Yes.

STAFF:  Mosheh?

Q:  Thanks for doing this. Mosheh Gaines with NBC. You said earlier that there wasn’t evidence that the UAP activity was linked to foreign adversaries. But I'm wondering, have you seen any kind of suggestion that foreign adversaries have been trying to capitalize off of this with disinformation or anything else?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  We have not. But I am concerned that somebody could use the potential stigma to and take advantage of that. If there is a stigma associated with reporting UAP, then that's an opportunity for the adversary to maybe conduct collection operations and not have folks report on it. But we haven't seen evidence of that yet.

STAFF:  We’ve got time for one more question. Anybody have one? (inaudible)

Q:  So can you speak to any historic incidents like the Phoenix Lights incident in the 1990s, which many who claimed to have been a witness to the event feel the government has never taken seriously?

DR. KOSLOSKI:  So, we take those incidents very seriously. And we're going to be releasing some analysis in the upcoming Volume II Historical Report in the next few months, where we were able to resolve a number of historic cases. There are quite a few cases of public interest where we have resource limitations, either we can't get enough technical data from — back.

In the case of the Phoenix, there's lots of video. And we can — we're still working on that. I was actually having a conversation with somebody earlier this morning about additional data we can get for the Phoenix case. But in a lot of the historic cases, we're going looking for film. And the film has been recycled or destroyed because it's too expensive to retain.

And so we're going to museums. And all of that takes a lot of manpower. At the same time, we're trying to resolve these other interesting cases that are coming in continuously, these 1,600 cases that we have. So we're trying to balance those. But the historical report that's coming out will have some of those that you had asked about.

STAFF:  All right, folks. Thank you very much.

DR. KOSLOSKI:  Thank you very much.

Q:  Thank you.