Pentagon
The Pentagon is the Arlington headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, and also the common name for the department itself. Both the investigations and the public communication on UFO/UAP matters are coordinated there.
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense in Arlington, Northern Virginia. The pentagon-shaped building was built between 1941 and 1943 and became a symbol of the command of the US armed forces. In everyday usage, the word often also refers to the department itself and its leadership. Since September 2025, under a presidential executive order, the department also uses the name Department of War.
Role in UFO/UAP matters
The Pentagon is a key player on the subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) because data from military sensors, as well as observations by Navy and Air Force pilots, fall under the authority of the defense department. Over the years, the department has created several successive organizations to investigate the phenomena: AATIP (2007–2012), the UAP Task Force (2020–2021), AOIMSG (2021), and then, from 2022, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), which is now responsible for official data collection and analysis. In 2020, the Pentagon officially released the three best-known Navy UAP videos, and it reports to Congress regularly.
Official finding and skeptical positions
According to the official finding, most of the cases received can be explained by ordinary causes (balloons, drones, atmospheric phenomena, instrument errors), while the remaining unidentified cases require more data. According to AARO's 2024 historical report, there is no evidence that the US government has ever obtained extraterrestrial technology.
Some researchers of the subject and former officials, by contrast, claim that government agencies do not disclose all information. The best known of them is David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, who testified before Congress in 2023 that the United States is retrieving crashed vehicles of non-human origin in a secret program. According to skeptics, these claims cannot be verified on the basis of publicly known data.
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