Most people who’ve heard of a government UFO program know one name: Project Blue Book. The actual official record, laid out by AARO’s own historical report, documents roughly two dozen separate U.S. government efforts since 1945. Here’s the real list, plainly explained.
The Source: AARO’s Own Historical Record Report
In March 2024, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published an unclassified report reviewing official U.S. government involvement with UAP since 1945. This is the government’s own account of its own history on the subject — not a third-party summary — and it documents a much longer, more fragmented history than the single “Project Blue Book” name most people know.
Project Sign (1948): The First Formal Effort
Project Sign was the U.S. Air Force’s first official UFO investigation, established in 1948. It’s the actual starting point of formal government involvement — before Blue Book existed at all, before the term “flying saucer” had fully entered public vocabulary.
Project Grudge (1949): The Second Program
Project Grudge succeeded Sign in 1949 — the same program that directly investigated the Sandia green fireball sightings covered elsewhere on this site. Grudge is the direct link between the earliest formal effort and the program almost everyone actually recognizes.
Project Blue Book (1952-1969): The One Everyone Knows
Blue Book ran for 17 years, reviewed 12,618 reported sightings, and closed 701 of them as officially unresolved. It’s the longest-running and best-documented of the historical programs, and its full case files are held at the National Archives — covered in more depth in our Reader’s Guide to the RG 615 Collection.
Twinkle and Bear: The Short-Lived Side Projects
Alongside the headline programs, AARO’s report also documents smaller, shorter-term efforts, including Projects Twinkle and Bear — narrower investigations that don’t carry the same name recognition as Sign, Grudge, or Blue Book, but are part of the same official chain of government attention to the subject across the decades.
The Modern Era: AOIMSG to AARO
After Blue Book closed in 1969, the trail goes quiet in the official record for decades before the modern effort restarts. The Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) was a more recent transitional effort, succeeded by the DoD’s UAP Task Force and, ultimately, by AARO itself — the office that authored the very report this page is sourced from. The name has changed several times; the underlying government function — reviewing and investigating reported cases — has continued in some form.
What AARO’s Report Actually Concludes
Worth stating plainly, since it’s easy to read a report about UAP programs and assume the conclusion: AARO’s historical review states it found no empirical evidence that any reviewed sighting represented off-world technology, and no evidence of an unreported classified program reverse-engineering non-human technology. Most sightings reviewed across this history were determined to be misidentifications of ordinary objects and phenomena. That’s the government’s own stated conclusion about its own 80-year history on this subject — not a claim this site is making independently.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Project Blue Book the only government UFO program that matters?
It’s the longest-running and most thoroughly documented, but it’s one of roughly two dozen separate official efforts identified in AARO’s own historical review, spanning Project Sign in 1948 through AARO today.
Why did the government have so many differently-named programs instead of one continuous one?
Programs were repeatedly shut down, restarted, and renamed across decades and changing administrations — a pattern of intermittent rather than continuous formal attention, according to AARO’s own account of its history.
Where can I read AARO’s actual report myself?
AARO published an unclassified version of its Historical Record Report Volume I in March 2024, publicly available directly from AARO’s own site — the primary source this page is built from, rather than a secondhand summary.