WASHINGTON: A Pentagon report on unidentified flying objects, released on Friday, said US government investigations since the end of World War Two have found no evidence of extra-terrestrial technology and had concluded that most sightings were misidentified ordinary objects and phenomena.

The report follows on from a 2022 Pentagon announcement that its then newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) had not found any evidence to suggest that aliens have visited Earth or crash-landed here. Under last year’s National Defence Authorisation Act, ARRO was required to issue a report to Congress detailing the government’s historical record relating to “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) since 1945. It delivered the first of two volumes of that to Congress last week, Pentagon’s press secretary Major General Pat Rider said in statement accompanying the release of the unclassified version.

“AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extra-terrestrial technology,” the report’s executive summary said.

“Although many UAP reports remain unsolved or unidentified, AARO assesses that if more and better quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena,” it said.

The report said that since 1945, the government had funded investigations to determine whether UAPs represented a flight safety risk, or evidence of “off-world technology under intelligent control”.

The report said there was a persistent narrative in popular culture that the government, or a secretive organisation within it, had recovered several “off-world spacecraft and extra-terrestrial biological remains” and operates programmes to “reverse engineer” the recovered technology. “AARO recognises that many people sincerely hold versions of these beliefs,” the report said. “The goal of this report is not to prove or disprove any particular belief set, but rather to use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts.

Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2024