144 Reports, One Answer: The Government's First UAP Assessment

It was a Friday afternoon, June 25, 2021, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a nine-page PDF to its website. The title was as dry as a government title can be: "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."

Inside was something no U.S. intelligence agency had ever put in a public document.

U.S. military aviators had reported 144 encounters with objects they couldn't identify. The government's UAP Task Force had examined all of them. It could explain exactly one.

"We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence," the report said. "In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained."

Why this report exists

The report wasn't the intelligence community's idea. Congress ordered it.

The demand came from Senate Report 116-233, which accompanied the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2021. It asked the Director of National Intelligence, working with the Secretary of Defense, to assess "the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena" and the task force's progress in understanding it.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, then acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had put that language in the bill in 2020, The Black Vault reported.

The report was drafted by the UAP Task Force and the ODNI's national intelligence manager for aviation, with input from a long list of agencies, from the FBI and NSA to NOAA and the FAA.

The numbers that mattered

The task force focused on reports "largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators" and collected from systems it considered reliable. Here's what it found.

• 144 reports came from U.S. government sources.
• 80 of them "involved observation with multiple sensors."
• 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, involved "unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics."
• 11 reports documented near misses between pilots and a UAP.
• One was explained: the deflating balloon.

The report also said most of the cases came in the last two years of the window, as a new reporting system took hold. "No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019," it said.

The line everyone quoted

For a cautious intelligence document, one sentence went further than many expected.

"Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation."

Then came the part that launched a thousand headlines. Some UAP, the report said, "appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion." In a small number of cases, military aircraft "processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings."

The task force said it held "a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management." It said it was "conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated."

The official explanation, stated fairly

Here's the part that often got skipped. The report was just as clear about the limits of its own data.

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the executive summary opened.

The unusual flight observations, it said, "could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis." It noted sightings clustered around U.S. training and testing grounds, but warned that "this may result from a collection bias," since that's where the newest sensors and the most attention are.

And it laid out five boxes every case would eventually land in: "airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall 'other' bin."

Two of those boxes got notable answers. On secret U.S. programs, the report said: "We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected." On rivals, it said: "We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary."

The "other" bin, it said, was for objects that might require "additional scientific knowledge" to characterize. The report never used the word "extraterrestrial."

Stigma, in writing

One passage read less like intelligence analysis and more like a confession.

"Narratives from aviators in the operational community and analysts from the military and IC describe disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues," the report said. It warned that "reputational risk may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the topic."

The task force also said it "regularly heard anecdotally" about observations that were never formally reported at all.

The reaction

Rubio welcomed the report and pushed for more. "This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step," he said in a statement. "The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand" whether the objects pose a serious national security threat.

The Pentagon moved quickly. Press Secretary John Kirby announced that Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks had directed the Pentagon's intelligence and security office "to develop a plan to formalize the mission currently performed by the UAPTF."

Not everyone read the report the same way. On Fox News that night, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo called it "a historic moment for us, for our country." He told Tucker Carlson the government was saying "these things are A, they're real; and two, that they're not ours." He also said, "out of the 144 cases, we only were able to solve one."

That interpretation went further than the text. The report did say most UAP were probably physical objects, and that it couldn't tie any to U.S. programs. It did not conclude they weren't American, foreign or natural. It said it didn't have enough data to say.

What changed after

The report's biggest effect was bureaucratic, and it came fast.

In November 2021, Hicks replaced the Navy-led task force with a new Pentagon group, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, The Black Vault and The Debrief reported. Its job included standardizing incident reporting across the military.

Six months later, in May 2022, Congress held its first open UAP hearing in about half a century. Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testified that since the preliminary report, the database had "grown to contain approximately 400 reports." "The stigma has been reduced," he said. "We stand by those initial results."

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• The ODNI reviewed 144 U.S. government UAP reports from 2004 to 2021 and explained one, a deflating balloon.
• It said most UAP were probably physical objects and that 80 reports involved multiple sensors.
• It found no evidence that the objects were U.S. secret programs or foreign adversary technology, but couldn't rule either out.

What we don't

• What the 18 incidents with unusual movement actually were.
• What the classified annex, which went to Congress, contains.
• Whether the "signature management" and acceleration data reflect real capabilities or sensor problems.

Nine pages, one balloon

You can read the 2021 assessment two ways. It was the U.S. intelligence community admitting, in public, that its pilots keep running into objects it can't identify. Or it was a report confessing it didn't have enough good data to say much of anything.

Both readings are true. That's what made it news.

So which line from the report matters more to you: "probably do represent physical objects," or "we currently lack sufficient information"? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2021
• Senator Marco Rubio issues statement just prior to UAP report release — The Black Vault, 2021
• Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — U.S. Department of Defense, 2021
• Tucker reacts to unclassified government UFO report (transcript) — Fox News, 2021
• Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) replaces UAP Task Force — The Black Vault, 2021
• DoD announces the establishment of Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group to study UAP — The Debrief, 2021
• Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript — House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2022