Defense Document Reveals Concern Amid Top Military Officials Over Anomalous Military Encounters, Contains Extensive Reporting Procedures
The document is also an admission by top military officials that UAP are operating in airspace controlled by U.S. allies and adversaries alike.
“There is a lot of unidentified aerial phenomena out there. That’s true. And they’ve got pilot reports, there’s various other sensors out there, and some of it is difficult to explain… some [UAP are] really kind of weird and unexplainable,” said former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, in August 2023.
Now, a Defense Department document, obtained by a veteran UFO researcher, reveals that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) are prioritizing the issue of unidentified anomalous phenomena sightings and incursions into sensitive airspace and over critical U.S. infrastructure.
The document, titled Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting and Material-Disposition GENADMIN, dated May 2023, was distributed to all Department of Defense service branches and combatant commands worldwide, including NORAD, U.S. Cyber Command, and others, by the J3 Operations Command of the JCS. This division advises the President and other high-ranking officials on U.S. military affairs. The document was exclusively obtained by Douglas Dean Johnson, a private researcher renowned for in-depth analysis of legislative and executive branch activities concerning UFOs.
“This guidance is merely one necessary component in the painfully slow process of implementing the very specific mandates enacted by Congress in recent years, which require the military and the Intelligence Community to systematically gather and analyze data on UAP,” Johnson told the UAP Register. He says that in time this should result in better data reaching the central hub — meaning the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — but whether the quality of the analysis will also improve remains to be seen.
You can read his full analysis here.
The directive specifies that it applies solely to observations and engagements “that demonstrate behaviors not readily understood by sensors or observers” and “include but are not limited to phenomena that demonstrate apparent capabilities or material that exceed known performance envelopes.” Additionally, it emphasizes that “incidents, incursions, and engagements by identifiable, non-anomalous phenomena” should continue to be reported through previously established procedures.
This directive tacitly acknowledges from top military officials that U.S. forces consistently encounter anomalous phenomena through direct observation, detection by various sensor platforms, or both. It also acknowledges breaches of sensitive military areas by UAP and their observation in territories and operating areas held by U.S. allies and adversaries.
Furthermore, the document highlights the significant challenges posed by UAP, which include "operational hazards and threats" as well as the potential for adversaries to misinterpret UAP activity. The JCS views it as crucial that combatant commands and service branches provide data on "UAP incident, incursion, and engagement" to the DoD and the AARO. As per the directive, UAP incident reports must be submitted within 96 hours. Additionally, reports of “kinetic or non-kinetic” UAP engagements—defined as military responses involving the use of lethal force or non-lethal actions such as cyber or electromagnetic offensive activity, respectively, that are designed to "deny, disrupt, or destroy the phenomenon and/or its objects"—must be submitted within 12 hours.
The acknowledgment that allies and adversaries are also encountering UAP lends additional credence to former U.S. defense and intelligence officials’ claims that a small percentage of the objects being observed by U.S. military personnel are likely not high-end domestic, allied, or adversarial technology.
Furthermore, the directive precisely outlines the types of anomalous phenomena witnessed by U.S. military personnel. These include phenomena observed in airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and transmedium environments that cannot currently be attributed to known sources. The directive underscores instances demonstrating capabilities or materials that exceed known performance thresholds.
Contrasting Responses to UAP
The issuance of the directive by the Joint Chiefs closely coincided with the release of a critical evaluation by the Department of Defense Inspector General in August 2023. This evaluation emphasized "the DoD’s lack of a comprehensive, coordinated approach to address UAP, which may pose a threat to military forces and U.S. national security." The DoD-IG evaluation also highlighted that the Joint Chiefs had "issued guidance to the geographic combatant commanders on unidentified anomalous phenomena detection, reporting, collection, analysis, and identification."
In contrast, the tone of the Joint Chiefs' directive and the DOD IG report sharply differs from a report released in February by the Pentagon’s UAP office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), titled Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) (Volume 1). This report, in part, essentially suggests that most anomalous aerial encounters are likely attributed to secret U.S. military or adversarial technology while ignoring the small percentage of truly anomalous objects.
Additionally, it fails to address major portions of UAP history relating to military personnel going back decades.
The AARO's flawed report has faced significant criticism from UAP transparency advocates and historians. However, mainstream news outlets have largely accepted it. Regrettably, the report fails to address modern-day military encounters with genuinely anomalous objects, such as the well-documented 2004 U.S.S. Nimitz case, among others.
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, also expressed his concerns, stating, "The recently released AARO Historical Report suggests that secret government programs and stealthy aircraft account for a high percentage of civilian UAP sightings. Yet, they seem unable to provide a single example. More importantly, what about the military's own sightings of UAP that they know full well are not attributable to secret government programs? Why is that not fully examined and discussed?"
In a recent press briefing of handpicked journalists, the AARO's interim director revealed that the office receives between "90 and 110" reports a month through the JCS directive.
Joint Chiefs Issue First-Ever UAP-Specific Reporting Template
Notably, this directive includes an official reporting template developed jointly by the AARO and military leadership, as reported by DefenseScoop's Brandi Vincent last year. It mandates that military personnel utilize the template for reporting 'incidents,' 'engagements,' and 'incursions' involving UAP."
The template directs military witnesses to provide comprehensive descriptions of the characteristics exhibited by the object(s) they encounter. These descriptions encompass attributes that have been consistently reported by military and civilian witnesses for over 70 years, such as:
No apparent means of propulsion
Extreme acceleration or sudden changes in direction
Signature management (e.g., invisibility to sensors)
Effects on equipment from UAP, such as “mechanical, electrical controls and weapons systems and whether [those effects are] persistent or transitory".
These are just a few examples of the detailed information sought by the template.
Finally, the AARO is designated as the final repository of all UAP incident and engagement reports and "objects and material of incidents, intrusions, and engagements.” The AARO recently claimed that they have not received any recovered “objects and material” of anomalous or nonhuman origin, however.
Joint Chiefs’ History with UAP/UFOs: JANAP-146
Contrary to the limited coverage of UAP history in current U.S. mainstream media, it's crucial to acknowledge that concerns about UAP have persisted among various Joint Chiefs of Staff for decades. The JCS began implementing reporting requirements for foreign intelligence purposes sometime before 1969, which encompassed UAP—previously referred to as UFOs—although not nearly as comprehensively as the recent directive.
The directive, known as Joint Army Navy Air Force Publication-146 (JANAP-146), was collaboratively developed by Canadian Defense staff and the JCS and issued before 1969. It instructed all military branches, as well as commercial pilots and maritime personnel, on reporting "vital intelligence sightings," which included "unidentified flying objects" (UFOs). According to longtime UFO historian Richard Dolan, author of the volumes UFOs and the National Security State, JANAP-146 also imposed severe criminal and civil penalties for any military or civilian official leaking such reports to the public, effectively cutting off the public and news media from some of the more interesting UAP reports.
Initially, JANAP-146 faced resistance from service members and others, as documented in the insightful volume UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. Time will reveal the extent to which this new directive issued by the JCS is adhered to.