Aperçu
On 19 November 2024, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities held an open hearing to receive testimony on the activities of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Senator Kirsten Gillibrand chaired the session, Senator Joni Ernst served as ranking member, and Senator Gary Peters also attended. The sole witness was Dr. Jon T. Kosloski, who had become AARO director in August 2024. The public session ran from 4:30 p.m. to 5:10 p.m. and followed the committee's broader Open/Closed hearing format.
The hearing was primarily an oversight event rather than an evidentiary hearing into a single UAP case. Kosloski presented AARO's analytic trends, described three resolved cases - the Puerto Rico infrared event, GOFAST, and the Mt. Etna object - and acknowledged that AARO also held cases it regarded as genuinely anomalous or insufficiently explained. Senators pressed him on whistleblower trust, public reporting, classified-data barriers, academic engagement, declassification, unresolved cases, drone incursions around sensitive facilities and the practical limits of AARO's mission.
Its historical significance lies in the institutional record it created. The hearing put AARO's new leadership, methods and constraints on the public record at a moment when the office faced substantial distrust from parts of the UAP community and when Congress was simultaneously demanding greater transparency. It also produced several concrete commitments that can be tested against later implementation, including a planned public reporting mechanism, expanded declassification, more academic engagement and greater release of unresolved-case material.
Chronology
26 August 2024 Jon Kosloski was announced as AARO director.
14 November 2024 DoD released the FY2024 consolidated annual UAP report.
19 November 2024 The Senate held its open AARO oversight hearing.
Context and mandate
Context: AARO under new leadership
The November hearing came during a transition in AARO leadership. The Department of Defense announced Jon Kosloski as director on 26 August 2024 after a period in which the office had been led on an acting basis following Sean Kirkpatrick's departure. Kosloski arrived from the National Security Agency with a technical background in mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, optics and advanced research. His appointment gave the Senate its first opportunity to question the new permanent director in public.
The timing also mattered. Five days before the hearing, the Department of Defense released the FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP. That report stated that AARO had received 757 reports during the covered reporting cycle and held 1,652 reports in total as of 24 October 2024. It described a large unresolved caseload, persistent data-quality constraints and a growing effort to improve sensor coverage and interagency reporting. Six days before the Senate session, the House Oversight Committee had held a separate UAP hearing centred on transparency, alleged hidden programmes and testimony from non-government witnesses. The Senate event therefore served a different purpose: direct oversight of the office Congress had created to investigate the subject.
The hearing also continued a line of Senate oversight that had been visible in the Subcommittee's April 2023 public hearing with then-director Sean Kirkpatrick. By November 2024, however, AARO was no longer a newly established office explaining its mandate. The Senate was assessing how that mandate was being executed, whether reporting and declassification mechanisms were working, and whether the office could regain confidence among witnesses who had been reluctant to engage with it.
The hearing structure and scope
The Armed Services Committee listed the 19 November proceeding as Open/Closed. The public transcript records the open session beginning at 4:30 p.m. in Room SD-G50 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and adjourning at 5:10 p.m. The existence of a classified component is important to the event's scope: public testimony cannot be assumed to represent the full content provided to the subcommittee, while the closed record is not available for independent public assessment.
Gillibrand's opening statement framed the hearing around five practical questions: the security implications of unidentified objects and UAS around sensitive facilities; AARO's ability to resolve prominent cases and discuss unresolved ones; the need for more timely and actionable sensor data; the office's relationship with whistleblowers and persons claiming knowledge of unreported programmes; and the need for a public-facing reporting mechanism. Ernst emphasised national-security uncertainty, including whether some objects could reflect adversary technology or unknown physical phenomena.
The sole-witness format gave the hearing a clear institutional focus. Unlike the House hearing six days earlier, the Senate session did not juxtapose competing witnesses or test AARO against critics under oath. It functioned as direct oversight of an executive-branch office and as a public status briefing by that office. This makes the transcript particularly strong evidence for AARO's stated methods, priorities and commitments, but much weaker evidence for independently validating the underlying cases discussed.
Kosloski's three priorities for AARO
Kosloski organised his opening statement around three priorities: building partnerships, promoting transparency and scaling AARO's work to match its mission. He said the office was improving data collection and retention, sensor development, case triage and reporting culture, while relying on military services, ODNI, the FBI, DHS, NASA, national laboratories and other partners. He also said AARO intended to broaden collaboration with academic and scientific communities.
Transparency was presented as partly a declassification problem. Kosloski emphasised that AARO does not control classification decisions unilaterally: the originating agency or record owner must participate in any downgrade or release. He said AARO had hired declassification specialists and would work to separate information about an observed object from sensitive information about the collection platform, source, location or method. This is a useful institutional distinction because it explains why apparently ordinary imagery can remain classified even when the object itself is assessed as conventional.
The third priority - scale - concerned the quality and diversity of the data available for analysis. Kosloski described AARO's effort to use broader interagency data sources and its own sensor capabilities to reduce domain-awareness gaps. The hearing repeatedly returned to the same methodological constraint: the office can only resolve a report to the degree that the underlying data support a defensible identification or physical reconstruction.
Documentary analysis
What AARO presented as resolved
AARO used three cases to demonstrate its analytic method. The first was the 2013 Puerto Rico infrared event. Kosloski said the apparent high speed, splitting and transmedium behaviour could be reconstructed through sensor geometry, thermal contrast and motion analysis. AARO assessed that two nearby objects - likely balloons or sky lanterns - were moving slowly above the airport and that the apparent disappearance into water occurred where thermal contrast was lost.
The second was GOFAST, a Navy infrared video recorded in 2016 and publicly released after becoming part of the modern UAP debate. AARO presented a geospatial reconstruction in which parallax made the object appear lower and faster than it was. Kosloski said the office assessed with high confidence that the object was closer to 13,000 feet rather than skimming the ocean and pointed to a publicly released parallax paper so outside readers could inspect the calculation.
The third was a 2018 object filmed near Mount Etna. It appeared in the imagery to cross the volcano's ash plume without interaction. Kosloski said AARO, intelligence and science-and-technology partners, including a volcanologist, used three-dimensional and pixel-level analysis to place the object approximately 170 metres away from the plume. In each example, the hearing's evidential value lies primarily in documenting AARO's stated reconstruction and methodology. The public session did not provide the full raw data package, independent replication record or classified sensor metadata needed to treat the hearing itself as a final independent adjudication of those cases.
Unresolved cases and the active archive
One of the most important parts of the hearing was Kosloski's explicit distinction between resolved and unresolved work. After presenting the three case resolutions, he stated that AARO did have objects it regarded as "very anomalous" and said the office was developing products that could inform Congress and the public about cases while they were still under study rather than waiting until after resolution.
Gillibrand then asked what made a case anomalous and how the "active archive" worked. Kosloski described that archive as the place for cases lacking enough scientific information for resolution at the time, with the possibility of reopening or enriching them when new reports or correlated data became available. This is methodologically significant because an unresolved case in AARO's system is not equivalent to a positive anomalous finding; it can reflect insufficient information, unresolved geometry, missing metadata or a genuinely unusual reported performance characteristic.
Kosloski described three examples then under analysis. One involved a law-enforcement officer reporting a dark object associated with an orange orb and rapid vertical acceleration. A second involved government contractors reporting a large stationary metallic cylinder that disappeared after 15 to 20 seconds. A third involved an object apparently passing rapidly between two aircraft, for which AARO suspected a distance-perception issue but lacked the metadata needed to support a firm conclusion. These examples are important because they show that the office was willing to discuss unresolved material publicly. Their evidential weight remains limited by the absence, in the hearing record, of the underlying reports, sensor files and independent corroboration.
Whistleblowers, historical programmes and trust
Gillibrand directly raised reports that persons claiming firsthand knowledge of unreported UAP programmes had been reluctant to engage with AARO. Kosloski responded that Congress had given AARO unusual access authorities for UAP-related information and said the office was actively re-engaging people who had been uncomfortable with earlier interactions. He reported meetings with intermediaries and a small number of firsthand witnesses, and invited current or former personnel with relevant information to use AARO's established reporting process.
The exchange is notable because it placed two different questions on the same record. First, AARO stated that it had broad legal authority to receive and investigate protected information. Second, the committee acknowledged that authority alone had not solved the institutional trust problem. Gillibrand emphasised that the purpose of the office was to allow congressional oversight of claims that might otherwise remain hidden behind nondisclosure restrictions or special-access controls.
Kosloski closed the hearing by saying AARO was well resourced and possessed remarkable authorities; his principal request to senators was continued support in encouraging witnesses to come forward so the office could conduct fuller investigations of potential historical or ongoing legacy programmes. That statement documents an investigative category, not a finding that a legacy programme had been verified.
Outcomes and legacy
Public reporting, feedback and scientific access
The hearing created a clear implementation benchmark. Kosloski said AARO intended to establish a public reporting mechanism in 2025, using a downloadable form that members of the public could submit with narrative information and media. He said the planned system would feed into automated processing capable of cross-correlating public submissions with government cases. He also acknowledged that AARO did not yet have a good feedback mechanism for people who had submitted reports and said a new case-management system was intended to improve that process.
The hearing also recorded a limitation in AARO's academic engagement. Kosloski said the office had some work with university-affiliated research centers and individual professors but described broader university partnership as lacking, largely because much of the relevant data remained classified. He linked expanded academic involvement to declassification, arguing that outside scientists require usable data rather than access to claims alone.
Later implementation is mixed. AARO did convene a 2025 interdisciplinary UAP workshop that addressed data quality, narrative evidence, public reporting portals and research infrastructure. However, as of the 30 August 2026 research cut-off, AARO's public reporting page still states that a general public reporting mechanism will be announced when available. The 2024 commitment therefore remains only partly fulfilled: AARO expanded engagement and reporting infrastructure, but the specific public-facing mechanism projected for 2025 had not become generally available by the cut-off date.
UAP, counter-UAS and domain awareness
A further theme was the overlap between UAP investigation and the rapidly growing counter-UAS problem. Gillibrand cited the extended drone incursions at Langley and asked how AARO could contribute once an object was not yet identified. Kosloski described AARO's role as largely advisory: establishing environmental baselines, gathering sensor data and developing detection practices that could help distinguish normal activity, drones and genuinely anomalous observations.
This convergence is historically important because it places UAP investigation inside a broader domain-awareness problem rather than isolating it as a separate category of extraordinary claims. Radar, electro-optical, infrared and passive sensing systems useful for UAP analysis can also support counter-UAS work. Conversely, a surge in drone and satellite activity can increase the number of reports that initially appear anomalous. The hearing therefore showed the office operating at the boundary between anomalous-phenomena research, intelligence warning, aviation safety and conventional airspace-security missions.
What changed because of the hearing
The hearing did not enact legislation, establish a new office or publish a new statutory finding. Its immediate effect was oversight and public accountability. It placed Kosloski's priorities, several case analyses, unresolved examples and future commitments into an official Senate record, and gave senators a public basis for evaluating subsequent AARO performance.
The event also sharpened the distinction between three categories that are often blurred in public debate: resolved cases where AARO says a conventional explanation is supported; active-archive cases where available data are insufficient; and cases the office regards as potentially anomalous and worthy of deeper scientific work. At the same time, the hearing highlighted the continuing gap between AARO's internal access to classified information and the much narrower dataset available to independent researchers and the public.
Historical significance
The November 2024 Senate hearing is significant because it was one of the clearest public snapshots of AARO's operational model under its new director. It documented an office trying to move beyond simple report collection towards sensor deployment, quantitative case reconstruction, declassification, historical interviews and eventual public participation. It also captured the Senate's expectation that AARO address both conventional national-security threats and the residual set of cases that remain unexplained after analysis.
In the broader UAP chronology, the hearing belongs with the recurring congressional oversight architecture created after 2021. It is best read alongside the 2023 Senate AARO hearing, the 2024 AARO Historical Record Report, the FY2024 annual report and the House hearing held six days earlier. Together those records show Congress pressing simultaneously on scientific rigour, whistleblower access, security, public transparency and the credibility of AARO itself.
Evidence assessment
Documentary strength and scope. The evidential basis for the event itself is exceptionally strong. The Senate publishes the hearing page, full stenographic transcript, Kosloski's written statement and the presentation slides used during the open session. This allows the event to be reconstructed with high confidence at the level that matters for historical analysis: who testified, what the committee asked, what AARO said, which commitments were made and what institutional limitations were acknowledged. The principal boundary is the classified component. The public record cannot establish what additional evidence, cases or assessments were discussed in closed session.
What the hearing establishes about AARO. The hearing provides strong evidence that by late 2024 AARO had matured into a structured analytic office with a large report inventory, formal case-resolution processes, interagency partnerships, declassification work and developing sensor capabilities. Kosloski's presentation also shows that AARO was prepared to publish technical explanations for selected high-profile cases and to acknowledge unresolved or anomalous cases in public. This is more informative than treating the office as either a purely dismissive body or as an institution that had validated extraordinary claims. The transcript shows both conventional resolutions and continuing uncertainty.
The status of extraordinary-origin claims. Kosloski repeated AARO's institutional position that it had found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology. That statement is important because it is the office's formal status assessment at the time. Its scope should be kept precise. It does not mean every report had been resolved; the same testimony explicitly described unresolved and "very anomalous" cases. Conversely, the existence of unresolved cases or dramatic witness narratives is not evidence, by itself, that the remaining cases have an extraterrestrial or non-human origin. The hearing leaves the residual category open because data and attribution remain incomplete.
Case-analysis transparency. The Puerto Rico, GOFAST and Mt. Etna examples were useful because AARO exposed some of its reasoning rather than merely announcing conclusions. The public could see the types of geometric, thermal and pixel-level arguments being used. The hearing nevertheless stopped short of the standard required for full independent scientific replication. For some cases, the public record lacks complete raw sensor data, calibration information, platform metadata or a comprehensive audit trail. This analysis therefore treats the hearing as strong evidence of AARO's methods and conclusions, but not as an independent substitute for the complete underlying evidence package.
Oversight and institutional trust. The hearing directly records a problem that is central to the modern UAP policy debate: Congress created AARO with unusually broad authorities, yet some potential witnesses remained unwilling to use it. Gillibrand's questioning and Kosloski's response show that the Senate viewed witness trust as a live implementation issue rather than a settled matter. Kosloski's invitation for firsthand witnesses to return to AARO, and his final request that senators encourage them to do so, support a cautious conclusion: the office's legal access mechanisms were in place, but their practical credibility among all relevant witnesses was still being rebuilt.
Public transparency commitments. The hearing is particularly valuable because several forward-looking commitments can now be tested. AARO expanded public case material, maintained a congressional-products archive and later convened a 2025 scientific workshop. However, the general public reporting mechanism projected for 2025 was still not available on AARO's public reporting page at the August 2026 research cut-off. This does not negate the hearing's transparency agenda, but it shows that implementation was slower and less complete than the timetable presented to senators.
National-security significance. The hearing also clarifies why UAP remained within the Armed Services oversight structure even when many reports resolve conventionally. Unknown objects near sensitive facilities create a domain-awareness problem before their identity is known. The same sensor and data-integration shortcomings that complicate UAP analysis can also create vulnerabilities to drones, balloons or foreign collection platforms. The hearing therefore has lasting significance even if future analysis resolves a high proportion of reports to conventional sources.
The available evidence supports treating the 19 November 2024 Senate hearing as a high-value oversight milestone rather than a breakthrough evidentiary event. It documented AARO's state under new leadership, exposed its methodological and transparency constraints, placed unresolved cases and witness-trust problems on the official record, and created measurable commitments for later scrutiny. Its strongest contribution is institutional: it shows what Congress expected AARO to do, what the office said it could do, and where significant gaps still remained.
Source library
Senate Armed Services Committee hearing page - To receive testimony on the activities of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
Official committee record identifying the subcommittee, date, witness and related hearing files.
Open Senate Armed Services Committee hearing page - To receive testimony on the activities of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
19 November 2024 stenographic transcript
Complete public transcript of the open Senate session, including member statements, AARO presentation and questioning.
Open 19 November 2024 stenographic transcript
Dr. Jon Kosloski statement for the record
Prepared testimony setting out AARO priorities, report totals, partnerships, transparency approach and sensor/data objectives.
Open Dr. Jon Kosloski statement for the record
AARO open-hearing case slides
Official presentation material used for the Puerto Rico, GOFAST, Mt. Etna and reporting-trend briefing.
Open AARO open-hearing case slides
FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
DoD/AARO annual report released five days before the hearing; provides the contemporaneous caseload, resolution figures and data-quality constraints.
Open FY2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
AARO Congressional and Press Products
Official index preserving the November 2024 hearing statement, video, presentation and annual-report material.
Open AARO Congressional and Press Products
Dr. Jon T. Kosloski - Department of Defense biography
Official biography documenting the AARO director's research, NSA and technical background.
Open Dr. Jon T. Kosloski - Department of Defense biography
AARO Submit A Report
Current official reporting page; important for testing the hearing's projected general public reporting mechanism against later implementation.
Open AARO Submit A Report
2025 UAP Workshop paper
Later AARO documentation of interdisciplinary research, reporting-infrastructure and public-portal discussions relevant to post-hearing implementation.
Open 2025 UAP Workshop paper
19 April 2023 Senate AARO oversight hearing
Immediate Senate predecessor, useful for tracking how oversight priorities and AARO maturity changed between directors.
Open 19 April 2023 Senate AARO oversight hearing
13 November 2024 House Oversight UAP hearing
Separate congressional event six days earlier, centred on public witnesses, transparency and alleged hidden programmes.
Open 13 November 2024 House Oversight UAP hearing
DefenseScoop, 19 November 2024 - AARO reviews GOFAST, Puerto Rico and Mt. Etna findings
Contemporary specialist reporting that summarises the public presentation and counter-UAS discussion; used for context, not as a substitute for the official transcript.
Open DefenseScoop, 19 November 2024 - AARO reviews GOFAST, Puerto Rico and Mt. Etna findings