Pentagon's highly anticipated UFO report claims there is NO evidence of alien contact - but critics call it a cover-up

The Pentagon's embattled, but official UFO investigations office released its congressionally mandated report on 'historic' UFO cases dating back to 1945, Friday.

The report — which came in classified and unclassified formats, with the latter now available to the public online — claims that the office found 'no verifiable evidence that any UAP [i.e. UFO] sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity.'

The UFO office, which did not enjoy subpoena power for its inquiries, reported that c-suite executives at US defense contractors 'denied the existence' of any top secret UFO crash retrieval programs 'on the record.'

But it did reveal at least one proposed top secret project, dubbed 'Kona Blue,' reviewed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the 2010s, and pitched as an effort to reverse-engineer hypothetically recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

Tim Phillips, acting director of the Pentagon's UFO-hunting All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told reporters that his office's new report casts doubt on the public testimony of UFO whistleblower and ex-US intel officer David Grusch. 

'AARO has found no verifiable evidence that the US government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology,' Phillips told select reporters in a closed setting.

But in the past week, the exclusive, invite-only nature of the report's pre-release has been criticized by other journalists and UFO researchers for its lack of transparency.

The Pentagon 's embattled, but official, UFO investigations office released it's Congressionally mandated report on 'historic' UFO cases dating back to 1945, Friday. Above, the office's first-ever director, former CIA laser physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who retired this December 

But whistleblowers with knowledge of a classified UFO 'reverse engineering' program have opted to testify to the Senate intelligence committee, in part over their reported mistrust of Dr. Kirkpatrick and his Pentagon UFO office. Above, a page from Project 1794 declassified in 2012

'They've pledged openness and transparency to Congress on the subject of UAPs, but they're not following through on their actions,' said NewsNation correspondent Ross Coulthart, who secured the first televised interview with Grusch last summer.

UAP, short for 'unidentified anomalous phenomena,' has become the term of art for UFOs in recent years, deployed by Pentagon brass, NASA experts and academics.

Coulthart told NewsNation's 'Elizabeth Vargas Reports' this week that AARO had denied him access to the office's advanced briefings on the new report.

The Pentagon, he said, is 'trying to constrain what people are allowed to know.'

Tim Phillips (above), current acting director of the Pentagon 's UFO-hunting All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told press his office's new report casts doubt on the public testimony of UFO whistleblowers

But privileged reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other hand-picked outlets were treated to news about Kona Blue, an aborted secret government proposal to reverse engineer UFOs.

That effort, apparently spearheaded by members of a previous Defense Intelligence Agency effort that investigated UFO cases from 2007-2012, according to AARO's acting director Phillips, never got off the ground.   

'It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected,' Phillips noted, according to ABC News, speaking on the 'Kona Blue' UFO plans. 

'This material was only assumed to exist by Kona Blue advocates and its anticipated contract performers,' he clarified.

The 'Kona Blue' proposal, according to Phillips, was rejected by DHS leaders 'for lacking merit.' No other-worldly craft, he said, were recovered by the planned effort.

The new Pentagon report also detailed over two dozen once top secret programs and less secret US space programs that 'most likely accounted for some portion of UAP sightings.' 

The list included everything from NASA's Apollo missions to Lockheed Martin's 'Have Blue,' its early proof-of-concept for the angular, futuristic stealth fighter, the F-117.

A months-long tease has preceded AARO's 'Historical Record Report' on UFOs since the retirement of the office's first-ever director, former CIA laser physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, last December.

Dr. Kirkpatrick appeared on CNN analyst Peter Bergen's podcast, 'In the Room,' late last January, revealing that his office intended to double-down on the Air Force's evidence-poor explanation for the infamous Roswell UFO case of 1947. 

In fact, multiple ex-NASA scientists, as well as former US Air Force personnel, including the Air Force Colonel who authored the Pentagon's official 1994 Roswell report have cast doubt the 'Project Mogul spy balloon' explanation that Dr. Kirkpatrick and his AARO successors still maintain is correct.

In its official report today, AARO wrote of the Roswell UFO case: 'The materials recovered near Roswell were consistent with a balloon of the type used in the then-classified Project Mogul.'

Last month, DailyMail.com published records from the US Air Force's own official report confirming that no scheduled Project Mogul flights fit the Roswell timeline. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick's successor, acting director Phillips described Friday's release of AARO's historical review as the most comprehensive government-wide investigation of US government UFO records, classified and unclassified, ever conducted.

But critics of AARO have long maintained that the office has lost the trust of past and present government officials, military personnel and US defense contractors with any knowledge of the alleged top secret UFO crash retrieval programs. 

On page 715 of the Air Force's 881-page report on the Roswell crash, a transcribed journal entry by Project Mogul's Field Operations Director, geophysicist Dr. Albert Crary, states that the key scheduled balloon launch never took place - and thus couldn't be confused for a UFO 

Above, documents from Project 1794: a Cold War-era US Air Force effort to build a supersonic flying saucer in collaboration with a Canadian defense contractor

Prior to Grusch's sworn Congressional testimony last summer, which covered his UFO program knowledge, other ex-Pentagon officials came forward to corroborate his claims.  

Chris Mellon, a former official with the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and an advocate for increased government diligence and transparency on UFOs, told NewsNation's Chris Cuomo, that similar information had been revealed to him.

'I've been told that we have recovered technology that did not originate on this Earth,' Mellon told NewsNation, 'by officials in the Department of Defense and by former intelligence officials.' 

This summer, Dr. Kirkpatrick called Grusch's congressional testimony on a hidden and illegal UFO crash retrieval program, delivered under oath, 'insulting [...] to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.'

The public sparring between Grusch and Dr. Kirkpatrick has left other sources with firsthand testimony on purported top secret UFO programs skittish about delivering what they know to AARO, sources told DailyMail.com last year.

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US Customs and Border Patrol, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and weapons out of the country, uploaded 10 videos that appear to show craft moving in strange ways in our skies. The videos document a fighter jet pursued by an apparently baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider, and another apparent orb hovering near a parked 16-wheeler truck

As Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-trained lawyer who represented past UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo in his formal complaint to the DoD's Inspector General, explained: 'What they were doing is they were going straight through to the Senate Intelligence Committee.' 

'That's where the queue is forming of people who have real direct immediate knowledge — and Dave Grusch is in communication with these people, and our people are in communication with these people.'

'None of the whistleblowers want to go in there,' Sheehan told DailyMail.com last year, 'because they don't view it as stable or safe.' 

Sheehan, whose history litigating progressive civil rights law cases dates back to the Vietnam War-era 'Pentagon Papers,' is now chief counsel, president and co-founder of the New Paradigm Institute.

The institute, a branch of the 501(C)(3) nonprofit Romero Institute, describes itself as dedicated to public policy advocacy on 'societal, environmental, and cosmic objectives,' which presumably includes UAP transparency.

In the unclassified version of AARO's new UFO report — technically titled 'Historical Record Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume One' — the office concluded that many sincere UFO whistleblowers had simply become confused. 

In some cases, the report argued, defense personnel had misidentified genuine top secret programs involving advanced, but all too terrestrial, aerospace hardware.

'AARO concludes many of these programs represent authentic, current and former sensitive, national security programs,' the report reads. 

'But none of these programs have been involved with capturing, recovering, or reverse-engineering off-world technology or material.'

This is a developing story and will be updated throughout the day.