Hi everyone,

I made a thread a couple of days ago calling out much of the flawed logic in the AARO report. There have been several excellent, in-depth critiques since, from the likes of Robert Powell and Kevin Randle which I would urge everyone to read. They have done a great job of pointing out the missing pieces, oversights, and straight-up errors in the historical parts of the report.

Again, this post won’t be much about the substantive claims in the report, which are best left to those with more expertise. I’m just here to call out the way this report has been compiled and presented, and the general approach of AARO.

I went back to re-read the report today with the intention of seeing if there’s anything interesting or useful to be learned from it, despite the problems.

Instead, I only found deeper, more concerning problems.

AARO’s approach to evidence

The official AARO stance on UAPs appears to be ‘the only reason there are still unresolved cases is a lack of data’. Page 7:

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. Sensors and visual observations are imperfect; the vast majority of cases lack actionable data or the data available is limited or of poor quality.

I will note the qualifying language they use here: “most of” these cases could be identified as ordinary. This may well be the case, but it’s not the “most of” that matters.

Another bit of language they consistently rely on is “empirical”, “provable” evidence. e.g. page 7:

AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.

Page 11:

Although individual accounts are important, they are only one element of the larger picture and provide AARO with the opportunity to initiate an investigation. However, any final assessment on the veracity of these accounts must be accompanied by provable facts.

AARO concludes by telling us they didn’t find any empirical evidence “that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress.” (Page 45)

So what does “empirical” evidence mean? What would satisfy AARO’s standards of proof? Clearly, witness evidence doesn’t cut it. I talked in my previous thread about the discrepancy between how AARO treats interviewee evidence compared to statements from those inside USG/MIC corporations, which I won’t repeat here.

What I had missed were the words “sensors and visual observations are imperfect”. Many of us have been asking the obvious questions: where is the Nimitz radar data? Where are the extended videos from Gimbal and GOFAST? But it turns out, for AARO, none of that would matter, because “sensors are… imperfect”. This casual dismissal basically throws into doubt every single piece of available UAP evidence, regardless of how many accounts or sensor readings there are, with zero explanation. Let’s not forget, these are the sensors that are apparently trusted with keeping pilots, soldiers, and civilians safe; these are sensors whose data is used to make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis.

So let’s look at their methodologies to see what types of evidence they did look for.

Page 11:

This report, pursuant to the legislation, is based upon the records and documents of the IC and DoD, oral history interviews, open source analysis, interviews of current and former government officials, and classified and unclassified archives.

Essentially, three types of evidence: interviews; “open source analysis” (i.e. glorified googline); and archived documents.

There’s a list of six different “lines of effort” on pages 12-13, which describe what they did. Everything is incredibly light on detail. It’s not clear what powers they had to compel agencies/archives to hand over documents, what they asked for, whether they received it, whether they conducted searches themselves or relied on the agencies themselves to provide, etc.

Based on what they already stated about interview accounts and sensor data, we can deduce that documentation is likely the only evidence they would consider “empirical”. i.e. for AARO, they will only conclude something is truly anomalous if another agency has determined it to be so and written that conclusion down on a piece of paper somewhere.

Nowhere does it say what methods of analysis AARO applied to all the documents they read. Looking through the long historical review section, it appears that their efforts are limited to simply re-summarising, with zero critical analysis, the conclusions of all the previous reports. What exactly was the point of their research, if they were just going to regurgitate decades of previous USG reports? This, by the way, takes up 14 out of the 45 pages of substantive content.

“Extraterrestrial”; “alien”

Many have correctly noted AARO’s insistence on using the very narrow terms “extraterrestrial”, “off-world”, and “alien”.

Their very remit, which is quoted on page 11, mentions “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, and none of the above terms. We would expect, then, for AARO to follow this legislative mandate and provide some explanation of what they consider a UAP.

There is indeed a paragraph on “UAP Nomenclature”, but it is not a definition. It does not even make an attempt to justify the narrowing of scope from UAP to “extraterrestrial”. Instead, it is a bizarre rant about how the umbrella term confers a false sense of commonality between sightings.

AARO understands that the use of “UAP” to refer to all potential possibilities provides a false sense of commonality; such as their origins, identity, purpose, type, and threat they may pose. The only commonality that they all share, at least initially, is that they are each unidentified. Beyond initially being unidentified or misidentified, drones, balloons, aircraft, rockets, rocket exhaust plumes, satellites, infrared (IR) aberrations, sensor artifacts, birds, stars, planets, indistinct lights, vague radar returns, meteors, and optical effects—such as parallax—have nothing in common.

Note again the insistence on devaluing sensor data. They do not directly say, but do heavily imply, that all UAPs are simply something from this list.

At no point in the report is there an explanation for what “extraterrestrial” means to AARO. There is a great deal of asserting that there’s no evidence of extraterrestrial origin, but how is this assessed? Are they hoping for a return address? For most of us rational people, the question that should be asked is: “is the observed phenomena capable of being produced by human technology”?

Experimental projects as a debunk

There are a few attempts to handwave sightings away as experimental projects, but with no detailed comparisons released of any of the accounts with those projects. The only case which they can reliably say (assuming we trust their and DoD’s word on this) was a mistaken case of experimental human tech is found on page 32:

At the time the interviewee said he observed the event, DoD was conducting tests of a platform protected by a SAP. The seemingly strange characteristics reported by the interviewee match closely with the platform’s characteristics, which was being tested at a military facility in the time frame the interviewee was there. This program is not related in any way to the exploitation of off-world technology.

That doesn’t stop them from filling several pages with a list of historical experimental projects, all of which were already in the public domain.

Determination that alleged material from a craft is terrestrial

The only solid piece of science that AARO appears to have done is on the claimed piece of material from a crash. I assume this refers to the TTSA owned “Art’s Parts”, which has been treated as dubious-at-best by the UAP community for years. But nevertheless, since this is the only active piece of research mentioned in the report, let’s look at what they say:

AARO and a leading science laboratory concluded that the material is a metallic alloy, terrestrial in nature, and possibly of USAF origin, based on its materials characterization. It was also assessed that the material is mostly composed of magnesium, and the bismuth present was not a pure layer per initial claims.

First of all, this whole paragraph is just a headache. What were the initial claims? They’re not quoted. Also, where is the results of the materials characterization? Surely, this cannot be classified, since they determined the material is terrestrial. No methodology or results are given at all. This really goes to show how shoddy this piece of work is from AARO: this is such low-hanging fruit! It should be a slam dunk for them to simply publish a graph and show how the materials are identical to terrestrial ones. But absolutely nothing is provided.

Final thoughts

I am not really sure what the point of me going back through all of this was. I was really hoping to be able to read between the lines and see what real research AARO actually did, and get a sense of what they are claiming.

Instead, the whole report is just incredibly lacking in substance. Given their insistence on “empirical evidence” and “provable facts”, they provide nothing of the sort in relation to the vast majority of their claims.

I’ll leave you with an ironically pithy quote from page 12:

confirmation bias is a recognized subconscious cognitive process whereby a person tends to seek and believe information that supports their hypothesis and to discount information that undermines their hypothesis.