The Defense Department on Thursday unveiled a website that's intended to serve as a clearinghouse for declassified information about unidentified aerial phenomena.
The site, which is being billed as a "one-stop shop" for publicly available records about UFOs, is expected to shed light on the work of an office Congress created last year that coordinates efforts across federal agencies to detect and identify what the Pentagon officially refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.
“The posting of the website is the next step in this process, in terms of ensuring that the public has information and insight into UAPs,” the Pentagon press secretary, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, said at a news conference Thursday. “And so what you see today is what has been declassified to date.”
For now, the site includes just a handful of videos, some labeled "unresolved" or “unclassified,” with short descriptions offering explanations of assessments by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which the National Defense Authorization Act established last year. It also includes sections labeled "Coming Soon."
The website will house photos and videos about resolved UAP cases as they are declassified and approved for public release, the Pentagon said in a news release. It will also feature links to reports, transcripts and other resources like aircraft, balloon and satellite tracking sites.
The Pentagon also plans to update the website to include a tool allowing current and former U.S. government employees, service members and contractors to "provide reports via a private and secure means," Ryder said. The update is expected in the fall, and a tool for the public to file similar reports will also be announced "in coming months," the news release said.
"The department is committed to transparency with the American people on AARO’s work on UAPs," Ryder said, adding that the office reviews the facts and, "when possible," declassifies the information to make it publicly available.
The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night about the anticipated frequency of updates to the website.
Demands from Congress for greater transparency around UAPs are growing.
Last month, a former U.S. intelligence official who once led Defense Department efforts to analyze reported UAP sightings told a House Oversight subcommittee that he had been informed about a “multidecade” Pentagon program to collect and reassemble damaged UAPs. In his testimony, David Grusch accused the government of covering up the program and claimed that “non-human biologics” had been found amid the rubble of crashed UAPs.
Asked about Grusch’s claims, a Pentagon spokesperson said last month the Defense Department “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
The National Intelligence Director’s Office said in an unclassified report in January that the Defense Department had received 366 new reports of UAPs since March 2021. The report said a preliminary analysis suggested that about half appeared to be balloons or drones, but it said that “initial characterization does not mean positively resolved or unidentified.”
The intelligence agency released its first report on UFOs in 2021. It reviewed 144 reported cases.