Pentagon Again Rejects Extraterrestrial Life, Tests ‘Gremlin’ UFO Kit

In its 63-page report, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, offered numerous other explanations for the strange sightings in the sky. “Investigative efforts determined that most sightings were the result of misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomena,” according to the report of “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP.

Although many UFO reports remain unsolved, “most of these cases could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena” if additional, reliable data were available, the AARO report said.

The U.S. military is developing technology called “Gremlin,” a portable UFO detection kit to collect data on reported sightings. The kits, which consist of sensors inside a protective case, are currently being tested in Texas, Acting AARO Director Timothy Phillips told reporters Wednesday.

“If we have a national security site and there are objects being reported that [are] within restricted airspace or within a maritime range or within the proximity of one of our spaceships, we need to understand what that is,” Phillips said. “And so that’s why we’re developing sensor capability that we can deploy in reaction to reports.”

Phillips said his office will deploy the Gremlin kits to sites with multiple reports of UAPs — the Pentagon preferred term for what are commonly called UFOs.

More than 40 percent of Americans think UFOs are alien spacecraft from other planets or galaxies. The report released Friday acknowledged that many people “sincerely hold versions of these beliefs” as truth.

The report noted a consistent theme in popular culture is that the U.S. government, or a secretive organization within it, “recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.”

In 2022, Congress held its first public hearing on UFOs in half a century. The AARO was created the same year and added hundreds of reports of unidentified aircraft flying at mysterious speeds and trajectories to its database.

To date, “no verifiable evidence” of claims of a cover up has been found, the office said in the report.

Among plausible explanations are that the unidentified object may be a satellite or other data-gathering craft developed in secret by the government or private industry.

The National UFO Reporting Center has processed about 170,000 reports of unidentified flying objects since it was created in 1974 by UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble. Its primary purpose over the decades has been to receive, record and to the greatest extent possible corroborate and document reports from ordinary citizens who see unusual and possibly UFO-related events.