The Pentagon’s long-awaited UFO report claims there is NO evidence of alien contact – but critics call it a cover-up

The Pentagon’s controversial but official UFO research agency on Friday released its congressionally mandated report on “historic” UFO cases dating back to 1945.

The report – which appeared in classified and unclassified formats, the latter now available to the public online – claims that the agency has found “no verifiable evidence that any UAP (i.e. UFO) sightings represent extraterrestrial activity.”

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 presented as an attempt to reverse engineer hypothetically recovered alien 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 intelligence officer David Grusch .

“AARO has found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to alien technology,” Phillips told select reporters privately.

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

“They have promised openness and transparency to Congress on the subject of UAPs, but they are not following through on their actions,” said NewsNation correspondent Ross Coulthart, who secured the first television interview with Grusch last summer.

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

Coulthart said NewsNation’s ‘Elizabeth Vargas Reports’ this week that AARO had denied him access to the agency’s advanced briefings on the new report.

The Pentagon, he said, “is trying to limit what people can know.”

But privileged reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other hand-picked outlets were treated to news of at least one secret government effort to reverse engineer UFOs.

That effort, apparently led by members of an earlier Defense Intelligence Agency effort that investigated UFO cases between 2007 and 2012, never got off the ground, according to AARO’s acting director Phillips.

“It is critical to note that no alien vehicles or bodies have ever been collected,” Phillips said ABC newstalking about the ‘Kona Blue’ UFO plans.

“This material was only believed to exist by Kona Blue advocates and expected contract artists,” he clarified.

The “Kona Blue” proposal was rejected by DHS leaders “for lack of merit,” according to Phillips. Not a single alien craft, he said, was recovered by the planned effort.

AAROs were preceded by months of plague ‘Historical record report‘ about UFOs since the retirement of the agency’s very first 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 planned to further investigate the Air Force’s flawed explanation for the infamous 1947 Roswell UFO case.

In fact, several ex-NASA scientists, as well as former US Air Force personnel, including the Air Force Colonel The authors of the Pentagon’s official 1994 Roswell Report have questioned the veracity of the “Project Mogul spy balloon” statement that Dr. Kirkpatrick and his AARO successors still persist, questioned.

In his official report today says wrote AARO on the Roswell UFO case: “The materials recovered at Roswell were consistent with a balloon of the type used in the then classified Project Mogul.”

Last month, DailyMail.com published data from the US Air Force’s official report confirming that no planned Project Mogul flights fit within the Roswell timeline.

The successor to Dr. Kirkpatrick, Acting Director Phillips, described Friday’s release of AARO’s historical review as the most comprehensive government-wide investigation of U.S. government UFO data, classified and unclassified, ever conducted.

But critics of AARO have long maintained that the agency has lost the trust of former and current government officials, military personnel and U.S. defense contractors with any knowledge of the so-called top-secret UFO crash retrieval programs.

Before Grusch’s sworn testimony in Congress last summer regarding his knowledge of the UFO program, other ex-Pentagon officials came forward to corroborate his claims.

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

“I have been told that we have recovered technology that is not from this Earth,” Mellon told NewsNation, “by Department of Defense officials and by former intelligence officials.”

This summer, Dr. Kirkpatrick called Grusch’s congressional testimony about a hidden and illegal UFO crash retrieval program, delivered under oath, “insulting … to the officers of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.”

The public discussion between Grusch and Dr. Kirkpatrick has made other sources with firsthand testimony about top-secret UFO programs skittish about reporting what they know to AARO, sources told DailyMail.com last year.

As Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-educated attorney who represented former UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo in his formal complaint to the Department of Defense Inspector General, explained: “What they did was they went straight to the Senate Intelligence Committee .’

“That’s where the line forms of people who have real direct, immediate knowledge – and Dave Grusch communicates with these people, and our people communicate with these people.”

“None of the whistleblowers want to go in there,” Sheehan told DailyMail.com last year, “because they don’t consider it stable or safe.”

Sheehan, whose history of litigating progressive civil rights 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 division of the 501(C)(3) nonprofit Romero Institute, describes itself as committed to advocating public policy on “social, environmental and cosmic goals,” which presumably includes UAP transparency.

In the unclassified version of AARO’s new UFO report – technically titled “Historical Record Report on Unidentified Abomalous Phenomena, Volume One” – the agency concluded that many genuine UFO whistleblowers had simply become confused.

In some cases, the report argued, defense personnel had misidentified real top-secret programs involving advanced, all-too-terrestrial, spaceflight hardware.

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

“But none of these programs have been involved in capturing, recovering or reverse-engineering alien technology or material.”

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