Most official counts of unexplained things work by subtraction. You start with everything reported, you take away everything you can explain, and you are left with a number. The Pentagon’s UAP office did exactly that in its fiscal year 2024 report, and the record is unusually precise about where the subtraction stops.
The Document
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Defense Department body that consolidates reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), delivered its Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP to Congress and briefed congressional staff during the week of November 14, 2024. An unclassified version was released to the public on November 14, the same day AARO director Dr. Jon Kosloski held a press roundtable, moderated by Sue Gough of the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. A full transcript of that roundtable was published by researcher John Greenewald on The Black Vault on November 18, 2024. Four separate documents, four separate dates: a classified report, a public version of it, a press briefing about it, and a third-party transcript of the briefing.
The Numbers
The report covers reports received from May 1, 2023 through June 1, 2024. AARO logged 757 new reports in that window, pushing its cumulative total past 1,600 since it began collecting them in 2022. The report notes that reports continue to cluster geographically around U.S. military installations and sensor arrays, though that pattern has been partly offset by a rising number of reports from commercial airline pilots flying within the continental United States. These are intake figures. The report does not draw a conclusion from them at this stage; it simply counts.
The Sorting
AARO states that it resolved hundreds of cases to ordinary objects: balloons, birds, drones, satellites, and conventional aircraft. Over 900 reports remain in what the report calls an “active archive,” meaning there is not enough sensor or corroborating data to analyze them, not that they are anomalous. AARO is explicit that this is a different category from unexplained. On the larger question, the office states it has found no verifiable evidence linking any case to extraterrestrial activity, and none linking any case to a foreign adversary’s technology.
The Residual, and Its Limit
Once the mundane objects are subtracted and the data-poor cases are set aside, a residue remains. Kosloski told reporters this group, cases that keep “anomalous” characteristics after analysis, comes to under 3.5% of the total caseload. That is the report’s own term, and the report does not go further than the term. No criteria are given for what qualifies as anomalous, no case count is attached to the figure, and no examples are offered. The ordinary explanation is not shown to be wrong here; it simply runs out before it covers everyone, and the paperwork marks the exact point where it stops.
Gremlin
Kosloski referred to a detection effort called “Gremlin,” a planned 90-day pattern-of-life collection run at an undisclosed U.S. national security site, chosen, he said, for its mix of sensors and its history of prior UAP reports. Asked directly by a reporter to name the location, he declined. The transcript records that the test happened and that its site is withheld. It does not record what Gremlin was looking for or what, if anything, it found.
Cases He Doesn’t Understand
Later in the roundtable, Kosloski said there are cases he called interesting that, in his words, he does not understand, and that he does not know anyone else who understands either. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and spent time in technical and leadership roles at the National Security Agency before taking the AARO directorship in August 2024. He said some of these cases are being worked toward declassification. No number was given, no description, no timeline. This is not the 3.5% figure restated. The 3.5% is a category in a report. This is a personal statement by the report’s own author, made after the report was already public, about a gap he says still exists in what he can currently explain.
The Border Question
A reporter asked whether AARO has any role investigating drone incursions near the U.S.-Mexico border. Kosloski said he was not familiar with the specifics of that involvement. He added that some UAP cases near the border had reportedly already been resolved internally and were pending declassification before they could be released publicly.
The Elizondo Claim
At a congressional hearing on November 13, 2024, the day before the roundtable, former Defense Department official Luis Elizondo testified that UAP are real, that non-human technologies are monitoring sensitive U.S. installations, and that both the United States and some adversaries possess UAP-derived technology. A reporter read that testimony back to Kosloski at the roundtable. Kosloski said AARO agrees UAP are real in the sense that the reports are real, but that the office has found no evidence supporting the claim that any government, American or otherwise, possesses UAP technology. That is where it stands: a claim entered into the public record one day, addressed directly the next, and left uncorroborated.
The SCIF Offer
Following interest expressed after the November 13 hearing, Kosloski confirmed that AARO would be willing to meet with lawmakers, whistleblowers, and other officials inside a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility built to allow discussion of classified material. He did not say whether any such meeting had taken place. The offer is on the record. Whether it was ever taken up is not.
What the FY24 report and its roundtable leave behind is not a mystery in the usual sense. It is a sorted pile: hundreds of ordinary objects named as such, over 900 cases parked for lack of data, and a residue under 3.5% that the report’s own director says he personally cannot account for. The record does not resolve what that residue is. It states that it exists, gives it no shape, and stops.