InvestigationAirborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group / AOIMSG (November 2021 – July 2022)

aka Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group / AOIMSG (November 2021 – July 2022)

AARO's predecessor organization; established by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks memorandum of 23 November 2021 under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security. Succeeded the UAP Task Force (UAPTF) and was succeeded itself by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022.

apparatus-event DoD data-coordination office (Nov 2021 – Jul 2022); now linked to apparatus-response theory family.

status history (1)

2026-06-09 · unannotated → apparatus-event — annotated before the 2026-06-09 sweep; history begins at seeding

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks at the Pentagon — the official whose 21 November 2021 memorandum formally established the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase, U.S. Air Force · Take

The logo of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — AOIMSG's July 2022 successor, the third Pentagon UAP office in eighteen months. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · U. S. Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · 2026

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick — AARO's first director, appointed July 2022, who would resign in December 2023 after concluding the Pentagon had no credible evidence of non-human technology. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · NASA/Joel Kowsky · Take

The 26 July 2023 House Oversight UAP hearing — the political pressure that made AOIMSG's brief existence (Nov 2021–Jul 2022) and AARO's establishment a Congressional rather than purely DoD-initiated process. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · U.S. House Committee On Oversight and Accountability · 2023

The Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) was established by memorandum of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks on 23 November 2021, in the wake of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s June 2021 Preliminary Assessment on UAP. AOIMSG was placed under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security and was directed to synchronize the U.S. Department of Defense’s processes for detecting, identifying, attributing, and mitigating threats from “unidentified aerial phenomena” within special use airspace. The group was the institutional successor to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), which had been established by the Department of the Navy on 4 August 2020 and operated through 2020–2021.

AOIMSG’s operational lifetime was brief — November 2021 to July 2022 — and its public profile was correspondingly limited. The group did not publish standalone reports; its analytical work was folded into the broader UAP-related work product of OUSD(I&S) and contributed to the drafting of the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act’s UAP provisions (NDAA Section 1683, signed 27 December 2021, P.L. 117-81).

On 15 July 2022, AOIMSG was reorganized into the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), with a substantially broader mandate covering transmedium phenomena (air, sea, space, undersea) and a charter to investigate historical claims of legacy U.S. government UAP-related programs. AOIMSG is the institutional bridge from the Navy-internal UAPTF (a single-service collection function) to AARO (an OSD-level office with cross-service and historical-record authority). The 23 November 2021 Hicks memorandum is the founding instrument; the 15 July 2022 reorganization order superseded it.

Notable & intriguing

AOIMSG was established by memorandum of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks on 23 November 2021, under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, succeeding the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks memorandum, ‘Establishment of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,’ 23 November 2021 (declassified)
AOIMSG’s mandate was to synchronize the Department of Defense’s processes for detecting, identifying, attributing, and mitigating threats from unidentified aerial phenomena within special use airspace; the group’s analytical work contributed to the drafting of the FY2022 NDAA’s UAP provisions (Section 1683).

Hicks memorandum, 23 November 2021; FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act, P.L. 117-81, Section 1683
On 15 July 2022, AOIMSG was reorganized into the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) with a substantially broader transmedium mandate and a charter to investigate historical claims of legacy U.S. UAP-related programs (see aaro).

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin memorandum, ‘Establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office,’ 15 July 2022; Department of Defense press release, 20 July 2022

Public-record items already documented about this subject. Folklore is labelled. Sources cited where the specificity warrants it.

Appears in interpretive theories

Apparatus-response theories — cites as evidence

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