Historical Case Studies of U.S. Government Disinformation: The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the 2024 UAP Report

The establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 marked a significant development in the official U.S. government engagement with UAP. While tasked by Congress with investigating contemporary UAP incidents and the historical record of government involvement, specifically that of the Intelligence Community (IC), dating back to 1945, AARO was framed publicly as a step toward greater transparency²⁹. However, the office’s handling of its mandate, culminating in the 2024 release of the “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Volume 1,” reveals striking continuities with prior governmental strategies of narrative management, selective disclosure, and institutional suppression.³⁰

The AARO’s March 2024 report was expected to serve as a comprehensive accounting of decades of U.S. government involvement with UAP, including potential misconduct by the Intelligence Community, specifically “any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, conceal, or otherwise disseminate incorrect unclassified or classified information.” The report was supposed to help resolve long-standing public suspicions regarding hidden crash retrieval programs, classified research initiatives, and suppressed technological discoveries. Instead, the document minimized the historical significance of UAP encounters, dismissed allegations of recovered technologies and reverse engineering efforts, and carefully curated the documentary record to align with preexisting official narratives of insignificance and misidentification.³¹

The report’s preparation and release process strongly suggests a deliberate effort to shape public and legislative perception. The tactics mirror the information management strategies formalized by the Robertson Panel in 1953, which recommended that mass media diminish public interest in UAP through ridicule and trivialization. Selected media outlets were given advance access to the AARO’s report, ensuring the first wave of coverage reinforced the office’s preferred interpretation. On March 6, 2024, two days before the public release of AARO’s report, Acting Director Tim Phillips took questions from hand-selected journalists for a media pre-briefing conducted by Susan Gough³² to shape press narratives around its findings³³. That same day, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the AARO’s former director, published an op-ed in Scientific American that characterized theories of UAP being of non-human origin as speculative and conspiratorial, employing stigmatizing language such as “space aliens” to reinforce a dismissive tone³⁴. The Pentagon’s pre-briefing and Kirkpatrick’s preemptive article functioned as a coordinated messaging strategy shaping public perception before the report’s release and reinforcing a narrative intended to marginalize extraordinary interpretations. The Department of Defense formally released the AARO report to the public two days later, on March 8, 2024. The Pentagon’s own news release was titled “DOD Report Discounts Sightings of Extraterrestrial Technology.”³⁵

Substantively, the report failed to engage with credible whistleblower allegations, most notably those made by former intelligence official David Grusch, who testified that crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs involving non-human technology exist within SAPs and Controlled Access Programs (CAPs)³⁶. Nor did the report incorporate or disclose classified findings that, according to various sources, still remain sequestered from congressional oversight. Instead, the AARO report, charged with investigating nearly 80 years of UAP historical record, presented a 63-page sanitized version of events, focusing heavily on historical misidentifications and reassuring that no credible evidence supports extraordinary claims.

The selective nature of the AARO’s disclosures, coupled with its preemptive narrative framing, raises serious concerns about compliance with Executive Order 12333³⁷, which prohibits U.S. intelligence agencies from engaging in covert activities to influence domestic political processes or public opinion. If the AARO’s public engagements were structured to dismiss whistleblower claims and suppress serious congressional inquiry preemptively, the entity might represent not merely bureaucratic caution but active disinformation.

The approach taken by AARO is consistent with historical patterns of managing disruptive knowledge identified in earlier government programs. In this sense, it represents a continuation of those programs.