AARO's Historical Record Report Vol. II misses a community-tracked August window. It is still not public.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has not published the second volume of its congressionally directed Historical Record Report. As of August 2, the document is not on AARO's public site, the Defense Department media archive, or the Congressional/Press Products landing page where Vol. I has been listed since 2024.

UAP disclosure trackers, summarizing Pentagon briefings and congressional correspondence, had been watching August 1, 2026 as the latest in a string of informal release windows for Vol. II. The window passed on Saturday. AARO has not announced a formal publication date, and no congressional committee has publicly requested a status update since the Senate Armed Services Committee's FY2026 markup last July.

A closed gap and an open one

On July 20, 2026, AARO posted its Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP to its public site. The release closes the second of the two outstanding statutory deliverables former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon flagged in February 2026. The annual report is the document AARO owes Congress each year under Section 1683(h) of the FY2022 NDAA, as amended by Section 6802(k) of the FY2023 NDAA and codified at 50 U.S.C. § 3373(k). It tabulates incoming UAP reports. The Historical Record Report is a different document — a Section 6802(j) review of the U.S. government's full historical record of UAP involvement. AARO has now delivered one. The other is still missing.

AARO's two-volume structure, not the statute's

Vol. I, published on March 8, 2024, with an administrative cover date of February 2024, covered AARO's findings from 1945 through October 31, 2023, and concluded that no empirical evidence had been found that any UAP sighting represented off-world technology, or that any classified UAP program had been hidden from Congress.

Vol. I is also where the second volume was defined. AARO wrote that Vol. II "will provide additional analysis on information not yet secured and analyzed, interviews not yet conducted, and additional avenues of investigation not yet completed by the date of the publication of Volume I," with a research window of November 1, 2023 through April 15, 2024. The bifurcation is AARO's own decision. Section 6802(j) called for "a written report" within 540 days of enactment. Public Law 117-263 was signed December 23, 2022, setting a statutory deadline of June 15, 2024. AARO met it by publishing Vol. I on March 8, 2024. Vol. II is a continuation, not a separate clock that has been missed.

What the continuation is expected to cover is partially spelled out in Vol. I itself. The first volume deferred "additional analysis on information not yet secured and analyzed" — including, in AARO's own enumeration, "claims involving specific people, known locations, technological tests, and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology" — plus interviews that had not yet been completed by the Vol. I research cutoff of October 31, 2023. Vol. II, in AARO's framing, is the place where those deferred items and the November 2023 to April 2024 interview window were supposed to land.

Kosloski's 2024 promises

The release date has slipped repeatedly since Vol. I came out. The Debrief reported at the time that "Volume II is due on about June 15, 2024," the same date as the original 540-day statutory deadline. That date passed without a release.

On November 19, 2024, AARO director Jon Kosloski told reporters at a Department of Defense media roundtable that Vol. II was still ahead. "We're going to be releasing some analysis in the upcoming Volume II Historical Report in the next few months, where we were able to resolve a number of historic cases," Kosloski said in the transcript. In a separate Statement for the Record submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee the same day, Kosloski explained the underlying delay in classification terms: "AARO does not unilaterally declassify information. Instead, we work with the originator of a classified record to ensure that declassifying that record does not inadvertently harm national security. This can take time."

By March 1, 2026, the public UAP archive at alien-contact.me listed Vol. II's status as "mandated, not yet published," noting that AARO had not announced a release date. The worldclocktools countdowns, which track working windows communicated through Pentagon briefings and congressional correspondence, had by then moved the target to "on or around August 1, 2026." AARO has not provided a new target date since that window closed.

Congress's most recent direction

The Senate Armed Services Committee's report on the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, S. Rept. 119-39, was filed July 15, 2025, a year before the working window AARO missed. The committee's report describes AARO as "conclud[ing] work on Historical Record Report: Volume II" and pairs that language with affirmation that the office "remains an important focal point for coordination and execution of the Department's enduring responsibilities with respect to UAP inquiry."

Section 6802 itself contains no enforcement mechanism for a follow-on volume; the original statutory deadline was the 540-day clock AARO already met. The available public pressure on Vol. II is the FY2026 markup's working language, the absence of an FY2025 annual report until last month, and the public characterization by Christopher Mellon — former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and now chairman of the UAP Disclosure Fund — that AARO "has yet to fulfill its statutory obligations" with respect to the historical record. No congressional committee has publicly requested a status update on Vol. II since the FY2026 markup.

What publication still requires

For the document to appear publicly, AARO would need to clear it through the Department of Defense's prepublication and security review process, the same DOPSR clearance that approved Vol. I on March 6, 2024, before its March 8 release. It would need to deliver the report to the congressional defense, intelligence, and leadership committees named in Section 6802(j), and post the report on AARO's public UAP Records page, where Vol. I has been continuously listed since March 2024. The Vol. I PDF still describes Vol. II in the future tense: "Volume II will be published in accordance with the date established in Section 6802."

Sources

• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I, February 2024 (administrative cover date); DOPSR cleared March 6, 2024; published March 8, 2024.
• Dr. Jon Kosloski, Director, AARO: Statement for the Record, Senate Armed Services Committee Open Hearing, November 19, 2024.
• Dr. Jon Kosloski, Director, AARO: Media Roundtable on the FY24 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, November 19, 2024.
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, information cut-off May 30, 2025; posted July 20, 2026.
• AARO Congressional/Press Products, listing the FY2025 Consolidated Annual Report as new content on July 20, 2026; Vol. I listed as a 2024 report; Vol. II not listed.
• U.S. Senate, S. Rept. 119-39 — National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, filed July 15, 2025; AARO, GREMLIN, and Historical Record Report: Volume II language.
• Public Law 117-263, James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, signed December 23, 2022; Section 6802.
• The Debrief, contemporaneous reporting on Vol. II's original mid-2024 schedule.
• World Clock Tools — AARO UAP Historical Record Report Vol. II countdown, working window "on or around August 1, 2026," status: expected, not announced.
• alien-contact.me UAP Archive: Dated Source Record, status note as of March 1, 2026: AARO Historical Record Report Volume II — mandated, not yet published.
• UFOUAP: AARO's Accountability Problem — Missing Reports and Broken Promises, Christopher Mellon quote on AARO's statutory obligations, February 2026 (updated July 21, 2026).