The UAP Task Force

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was the Department of Defense's official UAP investigation body from August 2020 to mid-2022, run under the Department of the Navy. It standardized military reporting, assembled the case base for the landmark June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment, and was succeeded by AOIMSG and then AARO.

After the 2017 AATIP revelations and 2019 Navy acknowledgment of pilot videos, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist approved the task force's establishment in August 2020 "to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs" that could threaten national security, formalizing work that had continued informally since AATIP's era.

The UAPTF issued classified intelligence briefings, expanded reporting channels across the services, and gathered the 144 military-witness cases analyzed in the 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment, which resolved one case and stated most reports probably represent physical objects, given multi-sensor registration. Its unclassified-adjacent briefing slides and materials leaked steadily, feeding the era's coverage. Task force personnel also interviewed witnesses whose claims later surfaced through David Grusch, who served as an intelligence-community liaison to the group.

Jay Stratton led the task force for most of its existence (and later joined the private venture Skywatcher). Navy intelligence officials oversaw it; scientists and intelligence officers were detailed in from across the community.

Superseded in November 2021 by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), which Congress replaced with the broader AARO in 2022. Its case files transferred forward.

Advocates regard the UAPTF era as the moment insiders took the subject seriously, and some former members have become whistleblower-adjacent figures. Skeptics note the task force operated with tiny resources and that its leaked materials mixed strong military cases with internet-sourced imagery, blurring standards. Its brief life and rapid renaming also exemplify, for critics on both sides, the bureaucratic churn that has plagued the subject.