ODNI delivers preliminary assessment to Congress

On 25 June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) delivered to the U.S. Congress a nine-page unclassified report titled 'Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,' prepared in response to a directive in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.

The report covered 144 UAP reports collected by U.S. government sources between November 2004 and March 2021, primarily from U.S. Navy aviators. It concluded that the U.S. government could provide a high-confidence explanation for only one of the 144 reports — a deflating balloon — and that the remaining 143 'probably do represent physical objects' but could not be reliably attributed to any particular origin. It identified five 'potential explanatory categories,' including airborne clutter, atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and 'other.'

The ODNI assessment was the first formal U.S. intelligence-community product on UAP since the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969 and provided the analytic foundation for the legislative establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office the following year.