Zakiya Lathan, News Editor, Digital and Audio

The Pentagon’s UAP office says it is collecting as much data as possible, but its current reporting system still provides no general portal for civilian witnesses — raising questions about what evidence may be missing.

The Pentagon office charged with investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena says it is collecting as much data as possible. But there is still one major source it cannot directly hear from through a general reporting portal: ordinary civilian witnesses.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, states on its official “Submit a Report” page that its current online process is for present or former U.S. government employees, service members and contractors with firsthand knowledge of government programs or activities related to UAP. Military and Pentagon civilian personnel are instructed to report operational sightings through their command or service, while civilian pilots are encouraged to report sightings to air traffic control, according to AARO.

For everyone else, the agency’s position remains straightforward: “AARO will announce when a reporting mechanism is available to the public.”

The limitation received renewed attention after television personality Dr. Phil McGraw criticized the lack of a civilian reporting channel in remarks reported and posted on his X account. McGraw characterized the policy as evidence that the government is disregarding civilian UAP evidence. That conclusion has not been established, however. What can be independently verified is that AARO currently offers no general mechanism through which an ordinary member of the public can directly submit a UAP sighting.

That creates a potentially important data question.

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Civilian organizations are already collecting information AARO does not directly solicit from the general public. The National UFO Reporting Center, or NUFORC, operates a public reporting system and describes its database as the largest independently collected set of UFO/UAP sighting reports available online. NUFORC also cautions that it makes no claim that the information contained in individual reports is valid.

The Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, likewise accepts civilian reports and says it receives between 500 and 1,000 UFO sighting reports worldwide each month, assigning submitted cases for review and follow-up.

AARO, meanwhile, says in its FAQ that it is “collecting as much data as possible” and following the evidence where it leads.

That makes the absence of a public reporting system more than a transparency issue. It raises a methodological one: Can a federal office tasked with understanding UAP develop a representative picture of the phenomenon while a potentially substantial body of civilian observations remains outside its direct collection system?

There is no verified evidence that the reporting restriction was designed to conceal civilian UAP evidence. But several questions remain unanswered: When will AARO open civilian reporting? What has delayed it? And when it does, will the office incorporate historical reports accumulated by established civilian organizations such as NUFORC and MUFON?

Until those questions are answered, the Pentagon’s UAP dataset may be missing an important part of the sky.

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