After nearly eight decades of official denial and obfuscation of the UFO phenomenon, the new head of the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office made a remarkable admission last month.
During a briefing with reporters, Jon Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, admitted that the U.S. government is stumped by several “true anomalies.” According to Kosloski, “There are interesting [UFO] cases that I, with my physics and engineering background and time in the [intelligence community], I do not understand. And I don’t know anybody else who understands them either.”
Critically, the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies are so perplexed by some UFO incidents that, per Kosloski, “We’re going to need the help of academia and the public to address some of these.”
These admissions are a welcome — and long-overdue — shift in the official tone on the UFO phenomenon. After decades of dismissive “nothing to see here” statements from the Pentagon, the sudden pivot to officials being so stumped by some incidents that they need the public’s help is striking.
At the same time, given the long history of highly credible, consistent, multi-witness reports of objects exhibiting extreme performance characteristics, this shift is not surprising.
Asked about UFOs a few days after Kosloski’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated, “there are things that happen, that have happened and probably will continue to happen that are difficult to explain.”
Such unprecedented commentary from sitting Defense Department officials follows several eyebrow-raising statements on UFOs from former presidents and ex-national security officials in recent years.
A former CIA director stating, for example, that a “different form of life” may be behind recent military UFO incidents, or an ex-director of national intelligence admitting that UFOs exhibit technologies “that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against” was unfathomable just 10 years ago.
Perhaps most remarkably, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) proposed legislation alleging that decades-long government “legacy programs” have secretly retrieved and are attempting to reverse-engineer UFOs of “unknown” and “non-human” origin.
Not only is “non-human intelligence” formally defined in the bipartisan Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, the attention-grabbing term appears two dozen times throughout the 64-page legislation. Astoundingly, the Disclosure Act would also require the government to take possession of “any and all” recovered objects and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” that had been transferred to private defense contractors.
At a Nov. 13 joint hearing by two House Oversight and Accountability subcommittees, former Department of Defense official Luis Elizondo testified to the existence of the unreported programs outlined in the Schumer-Rounds legislation. Air Force veteran and former intelligence official David Grusch testified to the existence of a “multi-decade [UFO] crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” during a July 2023 congressional hearing.
Notably, the internal watchdog overseeing America’s spy agencies deemed Grusch’s allegations “credible and urgent,” triggering mandatory notifications to Congress. Moreover, the intelligence community’s first inspector general serves as Grusch’s attorney, adding significant weight to the underlying assertions.
Elizondo and Grusch’s under-oath allegations are also backed by multiple, ostensibly credible sources.
For example, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (and Trump’s nominee to lead the State Department), has stated that highly credible, senior government officials approached Congress with “firsthand” knowledge of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), who sat on the House Intelligence Committee, echoed Rubio’s comments.
More recently, Kirk McConnell, a former congressional staffer with 37 years of experience on the armed services and intelligence committees, confirmed that individuals with firsthand knowledge have spoken to Congress about such programs. Kosloski stated during a Nov. 19 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that individuals with “firsthand” knowledge of unreported UFO programs have spoken to his office.
But the hearing also demonstrated the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s clear and lingering deficiencies. Kosloski, for example, presented a botched analysis of the well-known “GoFast” UFO video.
By failing to interview the aircrew that recorded the footage — a major analytic oversight — the office appears unaware that the “GoFast” UFO was one of several unknown objects flying in formation, which is what drew pilots’ attention to it in the first place. Since the “GoFast” UFO lacks wings or discernible means of propulsion, this places the institution’s “high confidence” assessment that the object “did not demonstrate any anomalous … flight characteristics” into significant doubt.
Nor did the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office account for the fact that the video was recorded 300 miles off the coast of Florida just minutes before the well-known and scientifically intriguing “Gimbal” encounter. Notably, these incidents caused major flight safety concerns among top Navy leadership and occurred amid daily incursions by enigmatic spherical objects — like the “GoFast” UFO — that exhibited highly anomalous flight characteristics.
After nearly a century of denial and ridicule, the first public comments by the new director of the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office reflect a striking and encouraging shift. But the office’s analytic failures on the “GoFast” incident — along with several other shockingly flawed reports and assessments — indicate that the office has much work to do to regain the public’s trust.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the Department of Defense.
