A Session That Reached the Public Through One Door
The fullest public account of where America’s UAP investigation stood at the end of 2022 came not through a government press release, but through a transcript that a single invited journalist chose to publish.
On December 16, 2022, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) held a closed media roundtable by telephone. The session was not publicly advertised in advance. Among the invited journalists was John Greenewald Jr. of The Black Vault, a FOIA-focused research archive. The official participants were Ronald S. Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, AARO’s inaugural director. Defense Press Operations officer Sue Gough moderated.
Greenewald published the full transcript on December 17, 2022. No independently issued government version of that transcript has entered the public record, and no official audio release has been located. Its provenance as public information therefore runs through a single voluntary publication by one of the session’s participants, a fact about how the record reached public view, not a judgment on what it contains.
The legislative background referenced during the session includes Section 1683 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which established AARO’s statutory foundation, and two congressionally mandated quarterly UAP reports AARO had submitted in August 2022 and November 2022.
AARO at Five Months
AARO was formally established on July 15, 2022, by a Deputy Secretary of Defense memorandum, with a public announcement following on July 20. The Navy-led Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was disestablished on the same timeline, and its data holdings transferred to the new office. Kirkpatrick, a physicist whose previous posting was Chief Scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center, was named AARO’s first director.
By December 16, 2022, the office had been operating for approximately five months. Officials stated that the total UAP caseload had grown well beyond the 144 reports documented in the 2021 preliminary assessment, which covered incidents from November 2004 through March 2021. Kirkpatrick described the expanded total as “several hundreds” of additional reports, some predating the earlier dataset’s cutoff, but declined to provide a precise figure, citing a forthcoming ODNI report that would carry the updated count.
One item was confirmed explicitly on the record: the terminology shift from “unidentified aerial phenomena” to “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” Moultrie stated this was deliberate, intended to extend the office’s investigative scope to submerged objects and objects capable of moving between domains, water, air, and space.
What Officials Reported, and What They Didn’t Resolve
AARO had built coordination channels with a named list of partners: ODNI, NASA, the FAA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, the Coast Guard, the Joint Staff, the military departments, allied and partner nations, academia, and private industry. NASA was described in the transcript as “a particularly valuable partner.”
Work had begun on a mechanism to separate UAP reports attributable to known U.S. military and intelligence programs, referred to as “blue programs”, from reports of genuinely unidentified objects. Sensor recalibration, identified as a foundational requirement at the May 17, 2022 congressional hearing, was described as underway but at a very early stage, with no quantified progress stated.
On the two questions reporters pressed most directly: Moultrie said the department had found nothing in any reviewed case to suggest extraterrestrial origin, and Kirkpatrick stated the same. On trans-medium objects, Moultrie said no credible, confirmed cases had been identified as of the roundtable date, while noting that data review was ongoing and he would not be “definitive” on whether such activity existed.
The Ordinary Explanation, and Its Limits in This Record
The explanatory framework officials emphasized was not exotic physics but data quality. Miscalibrated sensors, incomplete reporting chains, and the difficulty of distinguishing anomalous observations from misidentified U.S. classified activity were presented as the core investigative challenges. The blue-program deconfliction work, the sensor recalibration effort, and both quarterly reports all point in the same direction: that a significant share of apparent anomalies likely reflects instrumentation failures and reporting gaps rather than genuinely unknown objects.
What the transcript cannot supply is any measure of how far that explanation actually extends. No figure is given for how many of the “several hundreds” of new reports had been assigned to identifiable categories, how many had been closed, or how many remained without an explanation. The ordinary account is structurally plausible from this document, but its actual reach across the caseload cannot be assessed from this record alone.
What Remains Open
Several threads raised during the session have no resolution within the available material. The ODNI report Kirkpatrick described as forthcoming was subsequently submitted to Congress on January 12, 2023, placing the total at 510 reports as of August 30, 2022, but that figure reflects the caseload four months before the roundtable, not the count on December 16, 2022 itself. The resolution rate for the new reports is not stated. Outcomes of the sensor recalibration effort are not quantified. Greenewald noted in his editorial preface that he was in the queue to ask questions but was not called upon, and that he had submitted his questions to the Pentagon’s Office of Public Affairs; whether responses were provided is not addressed in the published record.
Greenewald also characterized the roundtable as invitation-only and not publicly advertised, treating the arrangement as a transparency concern. That is an editorial observation by the session’s publisher, not an official finding. The structural facts he describes are consistent with the provenance noted above. What those facts signify is his interpretation, and the record’s own conclusion is silence on the point.
On the record, in unison, the two most senior officials overseeing America’s UAP investigation answered the question of whether any reviewed case had produced evidence of extraterrestrial origin. Both said no. That answer is clear. What the investigation found as it continued past December 2022 belongs to a different record, and not this one.