In a sources sought notice released this week, officials unveiled plans for “a new effort” to enable a custom case management system on the intranet that hosts the Defense Department’s top secret and sensitive compartmented information — known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS.

“The intent is to field this capability for AARO personnel at AARO HQ and for use at supporting organizations,” they wrote.

A defense official told DefenseScoop Wednesday that this marks the first “solicitation” published on behalf of the UAP-sleuthing office since its inception. The term UAP encompasses UFOs and trans-medium objects.

“AARO currently uses a variety of tools for its mission management needs and seeks to integrate them,” the official said.

Following mounting public pressure and a mandate from lawmakers, Pentagon leadership formally established the organization in 2022, under the Biden administration. Details about its budget and internal functions have been sparse since then. 

Currently, the department’s intelligence and security directorate is responsible for administrative support to AARO, while the deputy secretary of defense and the principal deputy director for national intelligence exercise control and direction.

According to the performance work statement attached to the new sources sought notice, the office is “responsible for the whole-of-government efforts to detect, identify, attribute, and as appropriate, mitigate, spaceborne, airborne, and maritime objects of interest in or near national security areas.”

One of the hub’s top tasks is to collect, manage and resolve a continuously expanding caseload of reports from current and former government officials — and eventually the general public — about encounters and events that could involve UAP and are relevant to the U.S. government and military.

“A case management system, or CMS, will assist AARO in tracking the status of the UAP reports in its holdings and in meeting its records management requirements, particularly as the office works to launch a public UAP reporting mechanism,” the defense official told DefenseScoop.

The new notice outlines a core list of minimum technical features that would be expected for the potential vendor-developed CMS, including the capacity to categorize UAP cases under investigation based on type, severity, and priority; convert document content into structured data with unique identifiers automatically (like weather, speed or location) that could subsequently be linked to case objects; maintain a history of actions taken on cases and capture their statuses from initiation to resolution; generate automated responses for people’s case submissions; encrypt data in accordance with proper sensitivity levels; and offer customizable views and dashboards for different user roles, among other criteria.

If the office opts to move forward with a full acquisition down the line, AARO envisions at this point that it would buy software development services, the fielding and certification of the software for the AARO JWICS domain, training for AARO personnel to use the capability — as well as sustainment, and spiral development of additional functionality. 

The performance period would likely be set for one base year, with options for up to four follow-on years.

The defense official declined to share further information Wednesday regarding the total cost estimate for any future CMS procurement. They also did not provide an update on the number of UAP reports and resolutions in AARO’s current investigative portfolio, since leadership revealed the receipt of more than 1,600 in November 2024. 

Contractors with an active top secret clearance that are interested in the new CMS opportunity must submit a capabilities statement and other information for consideration to a government email address provided in the notice, by June 9.

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Hicks now holds regular meetings with AARO’s inaugural director, Sean Kirkpatrick — who she’s also repositioned to report directly to her.

The Pentagon’s second-in-charge took action late last month, partly to help speed up AARO’s development and launch of a congressionally mandated public website where the organization will be expected to disclose its unclassified work and findings and offer a secure mechanism via which users can submit their own reports of possible UAP observances.

In separate discussions over the last week, Hicks and Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon briefed DefenseScoop on new details regarding the deputy secretary’s near-term vision for AARO — and the latest status of the new website and reporting mechanism ahead of an official announcement from the Defense Department expected on Thursday.

“I believe that transparency is a critical component of AARO’s work, and I am committed to sharing AARO’s discoveries with Congress and the public, consistent with our responsibility to protect critical national defense and intelligence capabilities,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.

Behind the scenes

Mysterious, seemingly unexplainable flying objects have long perplexed humans all over the world. For decades, they have been referred to as UFOs. But recently, the U.S. government began using the “UAP” moniker to account for what appear to be craft that can travel underwater or transition between space and Earth’s atmosphere, or other domains.

The latest surge of interest and pressure from the American public and Congress started really mounting in the last five or so years, in response to multiple verified videos showing U.S. military pilots’ interactions with baffling objects, often around key national security installations.

Hicks formally established AARO via an official memorandum last year, after lawmakers mandated its creation in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The UAP mission is not easy, and AARO’s mission, to minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of UAP objects of national security issues, is being orchestrated by a small, but growing team,” Hicks explained.

“AARO is not yet at full operational capability, and I look forward to AARO achieving that in fiscal year 2024,” she also told DefenseScoop. 

To meet its directions from Congress — and led by it’s inaugural director Sean Kirkpatrick — AARO officials must disseminate a series of reviews about the organization’s expanding portfolio of UAP investigations and sightings that Defense Department and intelligence community personnel catalog. Kirkpatrick testified at a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing in April that, at that time, AARO was diving deep into more than 650 cases of reported incidents.

Not long after that event, in July, the House Oversight Committee held a separate hearing on UAP transparency, which was notably well-attended, where three former U.S. defense officials each testified under oath that they believe UAP pose “an existential threat to national security.” During the hearing, all witnesses suggested, and one blatantly stated, that AARO has not met its responsibility to seriously engage with potential observers and that DOD needed better reporting and response mechanisms. 

During both Kirkpatrick’s and the whistleblowers’ hearings, a visible point of contention that came up was associated with AARO’s seemingly delayed delivery of the fiscal 2023 NDAA-mandated website and UAP reporting mechanism.

The legislation set a June deadline for the online portal to be supplied by the office.

Kirkpatrick told lawmakers at the review hearing in April that his team “submitted the first version of that before Christmas,” but he was still waiting on input from superiors at the time. 

At the transparency hearing on July 26, witnesses urged lawmakers to hold AARO accountable and ensure it was on track to implement the required reporting mechanism for UAP observers to access information and share their personal accounts to inform DOD.

DefenseScoop viewed a timeline in an unofficial memo that allegedly records all the major steps AARO previously pursued aligned with the website development up until July 31 — the same date that Hicks convened stakeholders to discuss AARO’s website and formally directed DOD to provide that office with any administrative and technical support needed to build and launch the online portal successfully.

Hicks was not provided with the website materials until late-July, which is when she got involved and took personal oversight over the project, DefenseScoop confirmed.

According to the timeline, last fall AARO began planning to generate and launch a public-facing website and reporting mechanism at the recommendation of its Senior Technical Advisory Group — and in anticipation of the fiscal 2023 NDAA requirement.

That November, the office submitted a package to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and requested formal approval to begin developing a website and the “Phase Two” secure reporting mechanism. The timeline notes that the “Phase One” reporting mechanism is the email address that individuals who have spoken to members of Congress currently use to report information to AARO.

Phase Three, which has not yet been approved, is the NDAA-mandated mechanism for AARO to receive reports from the public.

Between November 2022 and April 2023, that submitted package moved back and forth between the I&S front office and AARO at least every other week. At Moultrie’s request, AARO regularly responded to questions, made edits and re-coordinated the memo. And Kirkpatrick also had several in-person meetings with the undersecretary.

In May — not long after Kirkpatrick testified about the product being under review — Moultrie approved AARO’s staff package, authorizing the office to provide members of Congress with an email address that individuals can use to contact AARO and to coordinate a package authorizing launch of the website and the Phase Two reporting mechanism. 

A decision on the Phase Three mechanism was deferred until a later date.

Following Moultrie’s approval, AARO worked with its IT contractor to refine a prototype website, according to timeline.

That month, the Joint Staff also separately published a “GENADMIN” message on  “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting and Material Disposition” that offers guidance to the military services and commands about reporting UAP worldwide, using a standard reporting template. The template is a result of work AARO has pursued with military leaders to improve and standardize reporting procedures across the force, since its inception.

Two months ago, on June 27, Kirkpatrick’s team delivered an overview of the prototype website to the DOD’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, and others. During that briefing, the intel lawyers identified several privacy and records management requirements that AARO needed to address before releasing the secure reporting mechanism portion.

AARO then reached out to department stakeholders to address those issues raised — but the timeline suggests staff faced challenges receiving definitive guidance on what privacy and records management actions were required to launch the website.

So, on July 31, Hicks convened them all to discuss AARO’s website, and ultimately accelerate its creation.

“She has the ability — and used it — to bring together all the top actors in the department. I think what she found was that this was being worked at a working level, but it didn’t have the right level of senior leader attention until she really kind of drove it home to say, ‘Hey, you people around the table are going to make this thing happen,’” Pahon, the Pentagon spokesperson, told DefenseScoop.

When asked why she went all-in on prioritizing AARO as an element under her purview, particularly now, Hicks told DefenseScoop: “The department takes UAP seriously because UAP are a potential national security threat. They also pose safety risks, and potentially endanger our personnel, our equipment and bases, and the security of our operations. DOD is focusing through AARO to better understand UAP, and improve our capabilities to detect, collect, analyze and eventually resolve UAP to prevent strategic surprise and protect our forces, our operations, and our nation.” 

The new UAP website

On Thursday, the Pentagon is expected to announce that AARO is set to launch its informational website that compiles details around its ongoing operations and efforts to make sense of UAP reports.

This site will host readily accessible, regularly updated information for the public about AARO’s activities. And Kirkpatrick’s growing team will post information, photos, videos and other media of UAP cases as they are declassified and approved for public release.

Other content will include reporting trends and a “frequently asked questions” section, as well as links to official reports, transcripts, press releases and other resources that AARO thinks the public may find useful. 

“In the near future, the authorized reporting mechanism consistent with section 1673 of the fiscal 2023 NDAA will reside on the website, as well. AARO’s intent is for this website to be a one-stop shop on AARO and UAP, and we look forward to continuing to refine the website to provide the most transparency possible regarding AARO’s work and findings,” Pahon told DefenseScoop.

He confirmed that AARO has established a multi-phased approach to developing the authorized secure reporting mechanism. 

That secure resource is projected to be launched in late October of this year. AARO will initially only be accepting reports from current or former U.S. government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of federal programs or activities dating back to 1945.   

“The process for submitting these reports, via the AARO website, is going through a significant security review to ensure that we protect both the privacy of the participants and the security of the site. AARO and the Department recognize that members of the general public also desire to make UAP reports, and this capability will be established in the next phase of the website development in the coming months,” Pahon noted.

The office will engage closely with and through the department’s Chief Information Office and the Defense Media Activity to ensure the upkeep of this portal.

“While no one can guarantee that a website cannot be hacked, AARO has been working with experts across DOD to ensure that this website meets the highest government security standards. For example, AARO rigorously tested the site for vulnerabilities, and will be hosting it on the .mil domain,” Pahon also said. 

Broadly, department officials “acknowledge that there have been some delays to launch the website” and reporting hub, he added. But he emphasized that the holdups “resulted from our work to ensure that [they comply with DOD] standards for security and the public release of information, and to verify that the website meets the statutory, regulatory, and technical standards for official government websites.”

Despite the challenges and bureaucratic hurdles so far, Hicks told DefenseScoop that she and other DOD leaders are “confident in the process that AARO is putting into place to receive reports and protect the information it is provided, as well as the DOD CIO’s efforts to ensure the integrity of the website.” 

“Key to these efforts is AARO’s work with the military services and organizations across DOD, including the DOD CIO, to ensure that our most sensitive work is secure and continues to provide the department with the technological edge we require to deter conflict and ensure success,” the deputy secretary said.

In her view, AARO has taken “significant steps” this year to build a pathway towards establishing transparency and trust “with the American public, members of Congress, and our own DOD and Intelligence Community employees” on UAP — and the website’s unveiling is the latest demonstration of that.

“AARO is also working to standardize and destigmatize reporting on UAP and to thoroughly analyze reports of both current and historical events. We still have a long way to go, but I have charged AARO to aggressively pursue efforts to make its findings as widely available as possible to the Congress and, whenever possible, the public,” Hicks added.

In response to questions regarding how concerned she is that some of these reported UAP encounters could be advanced platforms owned by a U.S. adversary like China or Russia, Hicks said that DOD “is always concerned about the potential threats of new advanced technology being used by our adversaries.”

“That’s why the Department takes UAP seriously. We need to understand these UAP that exhibit behaviors not readily understood by our sensors or observers to ensure they are not a threat to our homeland,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.

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The proposed legislative language included in the annual authorization bill comes just after reports from a former Pentagon official-turned-whistleblower emerged, alleging that the U.S. had or has what could be spacecraft of non-human origin in its UAP research arsenal. So far, lawmakers have not responded to those claims, which also have not been proven with official records or evidence to date. 

But in the latest version of the IAA introduced in the Senate last week, lawmakers incorporated a mandate for any person currently or formerly under contract with the federal government that “has in their possession material or information provided by or derived from the” government relating to UAP — “that formerly or currently is protected by any form of special access or restricted access” — to notify Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), within 60 days of the bill’s enactment.

No later than 180 days after the IAA’s passage, the officials would also need to make “all such material and information” and “a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic [UAP] material” available to AARO for “assessment, analysis, and inspection.”

Restricted and special access programs involve sensitive information at classified or higher security levels. 

Further, the text of Sec. 1104 of this version of the IAA states that “no amount authorized to be appropriated or appropriated by this act or any other act may be obligated or expended, directly or indirectly, in part or in whole, for, on, in relation to, or in support of activities involving [UAP] protected under any form of special access or restricted access limitations” that have not been “formally, officially, explicitly, and specifically described, explained, and justified” to the AARO director, and congressional leadership.

The legislation notes that it applies to “any activities relating to the following”:

1. Recruiting, employing, training, equipping, and operations of, and providing security for, government or contractor personnel with a primary, secondary, or contingency mission of capturing, recovering, and securing unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or pieces and components of such craft.
2. Analyzing such craft or pieces or components thereof, including for the purpose of determining properties, material composition, method of manufacture, origin, characteristics, usage and application, performance, operational modalities, or reverse engineering of such craft or component technology.
3. Managing and providing security for protecting activities and information relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena from disclosure or compromise.
4. Actions relating to reverse engineering or replicating unidentified anomalous phenomena technology or performance based on analysis of materials or sensor and observational information associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena.
5. The development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or materials.
6. Any aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology other than chemical propellants, solar power, or electric ion thrust.

In recent years, intelligence and defense authorization bills have been used as mechanisms to pass UAP-related legislation. According to an executive summary released last week, the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal 2024 requests additional funding for AARO.

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Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first-ever chief, revealed the moves during NASA’s highly anticipated, inaugural UAP Independent Study Team meeting on Wednesday.

“One of the first things that we’re doing” is assessing all existing sensors and associated data its privy to — from the Department of Defense, intelligence community, commercial sector, NASA and elsewhere — against typical UAP target objects, Kirkpatrick explained. 

“Given what we’ve got so far, that is going to be an important first step to understanding which sensors are going to be relevant. From there we are augmenting with dedicated sensors that we’ve purpose-built and designed to detect, track and characterize those particular objects. We will keep putting those out in very select areas for surveillance purposes,” he added.

His team is working to better calibrate existing U.S. and allies’ platforms to better spot and monitor unidentified anomalous phenomena. Just days ago, Kirkpatrick met with members of the “Five Eyes” alliance — made up of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — to establish processes for UAP data-sharing and asset calibration that can better inform investigations. 

AARO is also working with universities to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to its data holdings and target searches. Among other activities, Kirkpatrick said his office is conducting a new “pattern of life analysis.”

“This is essentially baselining what is normal. I have all these hotspot areas — but we only have hotspot areas because that’s when the reports come in from the operators that are operating at that time. They don’t operate all the time. So to have a 24/7 collection monitoring campaign in some of these areas for three months at a time is going to be necessary in order to measure out what is normal. Then I’ll know what is not normal when we have additional things that come through those spaces — and that includes space and maritime,” Kirkpatrick said

Broadly, NASA’s study explores how data captured by government, commercial and other sources can be studied to shed light on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Officials at the public meeting confirmed plans to officially publish their overarching work in late July.

The Pentagon’s ARRO is separately working to better characterize, understand, attribute and help the department respond to UAP — specifically with priority given to reports by government personnel in or near areas of national security importance. It has a number of future deliverables mandated by Congress in the next several years. 

“While NASA is evaluating unclassified data sources for its study, AARO’s dataset includes classified material with a focus on national security areas. However, all of this data — collectively — is critical to understanding the nature and origin of UAP,” Kirkpatrick said in his presentation on Wednesday. 

Beyond “unique capabilities, world class scientists, and a wealth of academic and research linkages,” he noted, the space agency “also has access to Earth-sensing satellites, radiological sensors, tools for gravitational wave and geomagnetic detection, and means of analyzing crowd-sourced data that may assist AARO and NASA in their UAP efforts.”

AARO was mandated by the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act and established that same year. Pressure from the public and Congress for explanations of imagery demonstrating U.S. military pilots’ interactions with baffling objects detected across multiple domains, ultimately led to its establishment.

In October 2022, NASA unveiled a team of 16 outside experts studying “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena.”

As AARO’s director, Kirkpatrick serves as a non-voting participant of the NASA independent study team. He’s been providing input and guidance since the study kicked off last year.

“The NASA team is using only unclassified data for its UAP study and is not drawing on classified data. However, AARO has been sharing classified data and information with the cleared members of the study panel. Though NASA and AARO are taking on different aspects of the UAP problem set, those efforts are very much complementary,” Pentagon Spokesperson Sue Gough told DefenseScoop on Wednesday.

During a press briefing after the public meeting on Wednesday, Dan Evans — assistant deputy associate administrator for research in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate — told DefenseScoop that his agency sees “true benefit to this team working solely on unclassified data, because when you restrict yourself to those types of data, you can collaborate freely with academia, with industry and with international partners.”

Evans further confirmed to DefenseScoop that Mark McInerney — who he described as a “tremendous expert on large-scale curation of data and an employee of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who really runs the show when it comes to our Earth observing assets” — is the NASA official recently tapped to embed with AARO.

“Individuals such as [McInerney] can translate into both domains between unclassified and classified data,” Evans said. 

Back in April, Kirkpatrick testified to Congress about AARO’s work and progress made from its inception up to that point. On Wednesday during the NASA-led briefing, he shed light on how his team’s research continues to evolve.

“At the time of my open hearing, we were at 650 cases-ish. We are now at over 800. We are putting together our annual report, which will be due Aug. 1 to the Hill, and there will be an unclassified version as there always has been. We will have those updated numbers at that time,” Kirkpatrick explained. 

The “jump” in new reports stems from AARO recently integrating data from the Federal Aviation Administration into its arsenal.

“We’re going to try to do a little more fidelity on some of the analytics we report out, but the numbers I would say that we see are possibly really anomalous or less than single-digit percentages of that total database,” Kirkpatrick told the NASA experts.

AARO is generating a “robust scientific plan” about its efforts for Congress, which he said McInerney will fundamentally help inform. 

Kirkpatrick also supplied eight recommendations that the Defense Department would like to see the space agency incorporate into its own UAP-resolving pursuits (see chart below). 

.

He suggested NASA take the lead on the government’s crowd-sourced metadata evaluations, lead a comprehensive review of archive UAP data, examine the use of large-scale scientific instruments for such discoveries — and more. 

Notably, during the meeting and follow-on press briefing, DOD and NASA officials also reflected on the online trolling and hostile public responses they are steadily receiving for participating in the government’s UFO projects.

“The stigma has improved significantly over the years since the Navy first took this on, some years ago. It is not gone — and in fact, I would argue the stigma exists inside the leadership of all of our buildings, wherever that is. My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment, especially coming out of my last [congressional] hearing because people don’t understand the scientific method and why we have to do the things we have to do,” Kirkpatrick said. “Where can NASA help? I made that recommendation that NASA should lead the scientific discourse. We need to elevate this conversation. We need to have this conversation in an open environment like this where we aren’t going to get harassed.”

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