Whether captured in declassified military footage or in smartphone videos uploaded to social media, UFOs are swarming Earth’s skies and demonstrating capabilities so astonishing that they must represent technologies that are advanced beyond any available on Earth. Clearly, these sightings point to the involvement of space aliens—or perhaps just a global cabal of nefarious humans with ultraspiffy, above-top-secret flying machines that routinely break the known laws of physics.
At least, that’s what modern-day folklore would have you believe, no matter how many times skeptics convincingly debunk sensational UFO sightings as mere misidentifications of conventional aircraft, sensor artifacts or natural phenomena.
Regardless of what one personally believes about all this, what’s certain is that claims of mysterious trespassers in American airspace are taken very seriously by the U.S. government for reasons of national security. That’s why, at Congress’s behest, the U.S. Department of Defense established its All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022. This office investigates reports of UFOs under the more generic rebranding of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
AARO’s work, however, isn’t really about chasing down extraterrestrial invaders so much as it involves standardizing reporting methods, curating and analyzing datasets and assessing possible threats posed by UAPs. Think less Men in Black and more “Pentagon desk jockeys with advanced degrees and highly classified résumés.”
The office’s current director Jon Kosloski, who took over in August 2024, after the departure of his predecessor Sean Kirkpatrick in December 2023, is a good example of the archetype. His professional past is punctuated by National Security Agency research in networking and computing, optical light communications and cryptography, as well as his invention of an advanced language-agnostic search engine for the DOD.
Scientific American has become so pathetically lame.
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