Department of Defense

The Department of Defense is the U.S. executive department that oversees the armed forces. It houses the Pentagon's UAP offices and the committee that rules on special access programs.

Earlier UAP efforts include the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a Defense Intelligence Agency program that ended in 2012, and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The UAP Task Force was set up on 14 August 2020 under the authority of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) superseded it in July 2022, charged with detecting, identifying and attributing UAP. Its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, called it a "microcosm of a combatant command." Researcher Steve Bassett calls AARO a "Potemkin village." AARO's March 2024 historical report said it had found no empirical evidence of off-world technology.

On 5 January 1994 the Deputy Secretary of Defense created the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, which decides whether the Department's special access programs are created, kept, restructured or ended. In 2009 the Pentagon declined Harry Reid's request to make AAWSAP a special access program.

A post by Ross Coulthart quotes acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller (November 2020 to January 2021) from the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure: "Some intelligence official decided I, the Acting Secretary of Defense, did not have a need to know about the UAP topic." The Research and Development Board, a Department board, is the institutional link between Eric Walker and Robert Sarbacher in the UFO accounts, though it had no chartered role in UFO reports.

The Electromagnetic Compatibility Analysis Center, set up on 19 July 1960, is a Department organization. Federally funded research centers tied to the Department include the Institute for Defense Analyses, MITRE's National Security Engineering Center and The Aerospace Corporation.