How Federal UAP Policy and Oversight Work

“UAP” — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — is the federal government’s current term for objects or sensor contacts that cannot immediately be identified. This article is not about what UAP are. It is about how Washington actually handles them: which office is responsible, what the law requires, how Congress oversees the work, and how the government distinguishes what it has established from what it is still investigating. That last distinction is the most important thing to understand, because most public confusion comes from collapsing it.

One office: AARO

The federal government’s UAP work is centered in a single Defense Department office: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Congress created it in the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 1683 of Public Law 117-81), and its authorities are codified at 50 U.S.C. §3373. AARO consolidated a series of earlier, narrower military efforts into one standing office with a statutory mandate.

By statute, AARO’s job is to detect, identify, and attribute objects of interest in, on, or near military installations and other areas of national-security concern — and to mitigate any threats they pose. In plain terms, it exists to resolve anomalies and to minimize the risk of technical or intelligence surprise, whether the eventual explanation is a foreign drone, a sensor artifact, a weather balloon, or something genuinely unexplained.

The statutes: built one NDAA at a time

The UAP framework was not created by a single landmark law. It was assembled incrementally through the annual National Defense Authorization Act — the same must-pass defense bill that shapes the rest of Pentagon policy. Three enacted provisions form the spine:

• FY2022 NDAA §1683 (P.L. 117-81, enacted December 27, 2021): created the office now known as AARO, codified at 50 U.S.C. §3373.
• FY2023 NDAA §1673 (P.L. 117-263, enacted December 23, 2022): expanded AARO’s mandate and established authorized-disclosure and whistleblower protections at 50 U.S.C. §3373b, giving insiders a lawful, secure channel to report UAP information.
• FY2024 NDAA §§1841–1843 (P.L. 118-31, enacted December 22, 2023): directed a government-wide UAP records collection at the National Archives, codified at 44 U.S.C. §2107 note.

Congress has continued to adjust these authorities in later bills; the FY2026 NDAA (Public Law 119-60) again amended the AARO statute. The pattern matters: UAP policy advances the way most defense policy does — through incremental, negotiated NDAA provisions, not dramatic standalone legislation.

Reporting requirements

The law requires the executive branch to report on UAP regularly rather than at its discretion. AARO, working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issues consolidated annual reports that catalog the cases reported to the government during each period and describe how they were resolved. Successive reports have described the large majority of cases as resolvable to ordinary sources — aircraft, balloons, satellites, drones, and sensor artifacts — while noting that a minority remain unresolved, generally because there is not enough data to reach a conclusion rather than because of evidence of exotic technology.

Congressional oversight and hearings

UAP oversight runs through the national-security committees: the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (including its task force on the declassification of federal secrets), the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, and the intelligence committees. Their most visible tool is the public hearing, and here the fact/testimony distinction becomes essential.

The government’s own witnesses have said the opposite. When AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s emerging-threats subcommittee in November 2024, he stated that AARO had found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology. That is an agency assessment delivered as testimony — the considered judgment of the responsible office, not a proven fact and not this publication’s independent conclusion.

Independent oversight: the Inspector General

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General has examined how the Department handles UAP. In an unclassified summary released in 2024 (DODIG-2023-109), the IG found that the Department lacked a coordinated, department-wide approach and recommended that it establish consistent policy and procedures. It is worth being precise about what this finding is: a critique of governance and coordination, not a substantiation of any claim about the nature or origin of UAP.

The National Archives records collection

The most concrete transparency mechanism in current law is a dedicated records collection at the National Archives: Record Group 615, the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, created by the FY2024 NDAA provisions above. Federal agencies — including the FAA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ODNI, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the NSA, the State Department, and the FBI — were directed to transmit qualifying records to NARA under a statutory deadline of September 30, 2025, and the Archives releases them on a rolling basis through its online catalog.

The collection is powerful precisely because it is modest in what it claims. It makes government documents about UAP available for public research. It does not adjudicate whether anything in those documents is true, and a record’s presence in the collection means only that an agency held the document — not that its contents are established.

What has not become law

It is just as important to be clear about what Congress considered and declined to enact. A broader “UAP Disclosure Act,” led in the Senate by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds, would have created an independent review board to oversee declassification and asserted federal control — including eminent domain — over any recovered UAP materials and technologies. In the enacted FY2024 NDAA, those provisions were dropped; only the narrower records-collection provisions survived. Versions of the full Disclosure Act have been reintroduced since but have not passed. As of 2026, that comprehensive regime remains a proposal, not law.

How to read the federal UAP record

The framework is genuinely substantial: a permanent office, a statutory mandate, mandatory reporting, active oversight, and a public records collection. But reading it accurately means keeping four categories distinct — and they are the categories Federal Policy Monitor labels explicitly in its UAP dossier:

• Official fact — what the law says and what published reports and findings state (for example, that AARO exists and that the records collection was created).
• Agency assessment — an official analytic conclusion, such as AARO’s statement that it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
• Testimony / allegation — what a witness asserted, which is on the record but not thereby proven.
• Congressional action — that a hearing was held or a bill was filed or enacted, independent of whether any underlying claim is true.

Hold those apart and the federal UAP picture is clear: the United States has built real institutional machinery to investigate anomalies and to disclose records about them, while its responsible office reports that it has not found evidence of the extraordinary claims that draw the most attention. Both halves of that sentence are true at once, and neither cancels the other.

For the full document-by-document record — the statutes, the reports, the hearings, the oversight, and the National Archives collection, each labeled by its evidentiary status — see Federal Policy Monitor’s UAP Policy & Oversight dossier.