AARO’s Historical Report Volume I is an Op-Ed not a History
Disclosure Yearbook Series (2024)
To read more from this series about AARO’s historical report, follow the links:
Jump to Chapter 1: Objective Summary of AARO’s 2024 Historical Report (Volume I)
Jump to Chapter 3: Kirkpatrick’s Messaging Strategy for Volume I
Jump to Chapter 4: The Aims and Effectiveness of Kirkpatrick’s Strategy
Jump to Chapter 5: Reactions to Volume I
AARO’s Historical Report Volume I, authored by Sean Kirkpatrick, is a work of polemicism, not history. It reads like an op-ed, making a firm argument on a controversial subject, with cherry-picked quotes and anecdotes that support that argument, and spiced with a dash of innuendo that draws a dividing line between partisans on both sides of the issue.
Volume I presents a three-pronged thesis: extraterrestrial UFOs do not exist; the allegation that components of the U.S. government have gained awareness of extraterrestrial visitations to the Earth in advanced spacecraft and hidden this from the public and from Congress is categorically false; a UFO lobby group has duped Congress into a line of inquiry that is fundamentally unmoored from reality.
These arguments are clear in the language of Volume I, and Kirkpatrick made them even more explicit in numerous media statements given after his retirement in the months surrounding the release of the report (more on that in the next chapter).
Scientists are smart and capable in their way, but they are not qualified to write history. They tend to be unfamiliar with historical data and the standard practices on how to use it to construct historical meaning. Scientists are even (especially) bad at writing history about scientific topics.1 This is because they view a topic through the institutional culture and biases of their field. Kirkpatrick is a physicist, the type of scientist who doesn’t believe anything unless they can shoot a laser at it in the lab. He has also spent most of his professional life as an intelligence agent for the U.S. government. Both of these identities color his perspective on UFOs.
As a result, Volume I reads like a long op-ed rather than an informative work of history. It presents a finely honed argument and takes every opportunity on just about every one of its 42 pages of text to hammer that argument home. Argumentation is an essential and inevitable part of drafting history, but when the historian selects only the information that shores up his argument the work dips into polemicism. There are a few red flags that show Kirkpatrick is more interested in persuading the persuadable to cross over to his side of a partisan divide rather than informing the public about the relevant history that Congress tasked AARO to provide. He utilizes three rhetorical tools of the polemicist: overwrought, unsupported conclusions; selective omissions of evidence; selective quoting of sources. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Unsupported Conclusions
First, Volume I oversells its case. Its conclusions are more absolute than are warranted by the evidence. The “approximately 30 people” AARO interviewed are not nearly enough to produce a history “detailing the historical record of the United States Government relating to” UFOs since 1945. AARO could have easily found 30 people to talk to about the 2004 encounter between the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group and the Tic Tac UFO. Indeed the Tic Tac case is not even mentioned. Nor are other potentially revealing sightings. Just to name two, the 1980 Cash-Landrum sighting near Dayton, Texas, and the 2008 mass sighting in and around Stephenville, Texas were both multi-witness accounts of seemingly impossible, large flying objects that were also pursued by multiple military aircraft. The 1980 case produced a lawsuit against the federal government over adverse health effects the witnesses claimed resulted from their encounter, which in turn launched a multi-agency investigation of the claims; private investigators got their hands on radar data on the Stephenville UFO. In both cases, the U.S. military denied its aircraft were involved in any way. Participants in these two cases, had they been interviewed by AARO, would have offered an important perspective that is missing from the historical report. If one adopts the point of view espoused by Volume I, those civilian witnesses clearly misunderstood what they thought they saw, and so there would be little value in trying to track down and reconstruct the facts of these cold cases. But from Congress’s point of view, they did not empower AARO with its legal permissions so it could play MUFON investigator. AARO was supposed to go straight to the source, find the flight orders, mission logs, cockpit transcripts of the aircraft that were allegedly sent into the Texas skies at the same times as those sightings were said to have occurred. It is no great leap to infer that when Congress mandated a historical report on “successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena” they meant AARO to definitively answer whether or not the military sent its personnel in pursuit of UFO in cases such as these. Instead, AARO interpreted its historical mandate in the narrowest scope possible, limiting its research only to details mentioned by the handful of witnesses who came to AARO with a UFO story, but from this AARO produced the widest possible conclusion that all UFO stories are false.
Some number of the 30 interviewees (it’s not stated how many) claimed to have knowledge of a secret UFO program that turned out not to be the case. From that small sample, Volume I, and Kirkpatrick’s subsequent statements, conclude that no such secret UFO program could possibly exist.
In fact, all Kirkpatrick did was prove that the small handful of people he or his researchers spoke with were not exposed to a secret UFO program (and we have to take Kirkpatrick’s assertions about that on trust). Could there be others who think they have been exposed to a secret UFO program who did not speak with AARO? We actually know that to be the case.
On May 2, when reporter Matt Laslo asked Senator Gillibrand about Volume I, she gave a much more accurate description of what AARO’s first historical report actually does: “I think that their report was just that their analysis of everything they were shown and everyone they talked to, cause they had no basis to say there's a secret program. But of note, the two whistleblowers that I've met with did not meet with AARO and refused to meet with AARO.” Chris Mellon introduced four witnesses to AARO who completed their interview process, but he wrote in April that two of his recommendations, described as very compelling witnesses, “still refuse to meet with AARO because they do not trust the process.” Volume I does mention that a small number of witnesses “never formally sat down with AARO to provide official, signed statements” but it uses this fact to cast a pall of suspicion over their motivations. It states that these witnesses “repeatedly voiced these claims” in the media and other places but “have not provided any empirical evidence of their claims to AARO.”
In an actual op-ed Kirkpatrick wrote for Scientific American to reiterate Volume I’s conclusions, he made his suspicion of whistleblower claims and motivations even more clear, scare quotes and all: “As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’ and statement for the record despite numerous invitations. Anyone that would rather be sensationalist in the public eye than bring their evidence to the one organization established in law with all of the legal process and security framework established to protect them, their privacy, and the information and to investigate and report out findings is suspect.”
Rather than qualify his conclusions to match the quality and quantity of his sources as a historian should do, Kirkpatrick treats his opinion of the sources as historical evidence. His suspicion of people telling UFO stories is treated as essential supporting evidence for his thesis that the stories are not true. This is not terribly novel or surprising rhetoric, as it is the primary tactic skeptics have long used to dismiss UFO sightings, but it is not what Congress was hoping for when it requested an official history.
Selective Omissions
The second red flag is Volume I’s lack of historical rigor. In my work designing history curriculum for primary and secondary schools, I have coached teachers on how to develop their students’ historical thinking skills, which are derived from AP history standards. One of these is called complex understanding, which has three modes. The first is corroborate: provide additional evidence that makes your argument stronger and clearer. The second is modify: include nuance, multiple variables, or diverse views in order to provide a slightly different (though not contradictory) perspective. The third is qualify: introduce evidence that contradicts your argument so to explore alternative or conflicting views. We teach students to use all three modes in their argumentation, not just because modifying and qualifying an argument can make it stronger, but also because it ensures that the historical product accurately reflects the complexity of people in the world, and our own uncertainty about experiences and perspectives that are not our own. This is what makes the difference between a historian and a polemicist. Polemicists are either overly committed to their argument, too insecure about its weak points, or simply ignorant or willfully blind to let slip any information that could be used to criticize their partisan view.
Volume I only selects evidence that corroborates its thesis. It does not provide any evidence that modifies or qualifies its thesis, even though that evidence is in abundance in the public record. Examples are too numerous to mention, but here are a few.
AARO’s sketch of the 1953 Robertson Panel states, “The panel unanimously concluded that there was no evidence of a direct threat to U.S. national security from UFOs or that they were of extraterrestrial origin.” It does not mention the sources who claim Dr. H.P. Robertson had predetermined that conclusion before the panel was presented with the Air Force’s evidence from January 14-16, 1953. Project Blue Book director Edward Ruppelt had presented some of that evidence. He wrote in his memoir that the esteemed scientists on the panel “said that they had tried hard to be objective and not to be picayunish, but actually all we had was circumstantial evidence. Good circumstantial evidence, to be sure, but we had nothing concrete…” Decades after the fact, one of these “objective” panelists, Dr. Thornton Page made the following claim: “H.P. Robertson told us in the first private (no outsiders) session that our job was to reduce public concern, and show that UFO reports could be explained by conventional reasoning.” Who is right? Robertson and Kirkpatrick, or Ruppelt, or Page? Reading Volume I, you would not even know there is a conflict. So it is with the 1968 Condon Report, which coincided with the standing down of Blue Book, the Air Force’s two decade investigation of UFOs. Volume I quotes Condon’s conclusion, “that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” and that “the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.” No mention of the fact that Condon, like Robertson, came to this conclusion in spite of the many unexplained, anomalous, and scientifically interesting Blue Book cases summarized in the very same report. Robertson and Condon are Kirkpatrick’s co-partisans, and he has no interest in casting any doubts on their views.
Moving ahead to the present day, Volume I almost completely ignores the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), except for this statement: “This effort was not a recognized, official program, and had no dedicated personnel or budget.” This description is either false and misleading, or literally true (depending on how Kirkpatrick defines the words official and dedicated) and misleading. There is much we do not know about the Pentagon’s UFO activities in these years. But we do know that Luis Elizondo has said that he was brought in to manage AATIP in 2010. His personal website states he and a “dedicated team of intelligence professionals” spent years “collecting data, interviewing military personnel on UAP experiences and working with various intelligence agencies to bring the issue to light.” We also know that he resigned from the government in 2017 due to leadership’s lack of support for AATIP. His resignation letter to Defense Secretary Mattis tried to ring alarm bells over “unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond next generation capabilities,” and which may pose “an existential threat to our national security.” Volume I makes no attempt to clarify Elizondo’s role or explain why he was so concerned.
To the undiscerning eye, which is anyone not steeped in the minutia of this period, Volume I’s many and consistent references to “AAWSAP/AATIP” would lead readers to think that AAWSAP and AATIP were the same program. As commonly understood, AAWSAP was run by James Lacatski and Colm Kelleher from 2008 to 2010, and AATIP was run by Elizondo after 2010, and each program had different missions though both were focused on the study of UFOs. A key primary source document for this period is Lacatski and Kelleher’s own book, which has a chapter subheading titled “AAWSAP Was Not AATIP.” As a point of fact, Volume I is not actually saying that AAWSAP and AATIP were the same program. Volume I is saying that AAWSAP was sometimes referred to as AATIP in documents, which is true, and that the post-2010 AATIP did not exist as “a recognized, official program,” which is contrary to the public record. Historians usually try to untangle such messy threads of history for the sake of clear understanding, but polemicists use history’s confusions to support their predetermined argument.
Volume I also skips over one of the most important years in the history of the U.S. government’s relationship with UFOs—2018—when Navy UFO witnesses and others participated in numerous meetings on Capitol Hill that persuaded members of Congress to take the issue seriously. Also in 2018, in the aftermath of Elizondo’s departure, Pentagon leadership asked Jay Stratton, a civilian intelligence official with the rank equivalent to that of a two-star general, to take over Elizondo’s role. This was first reported in April 2021 by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, who wrote that by January 2018 “the Pentagon’s U.A.P. portfolio was reassigned to a civilian intelligence official with a rank equivalent to that of a two-star general.” His identity was unknown until Stratton came out in February 2023. Stratton formed a new UAP program that was informally referred to as the UAP Task Force. This group contributed to the first modern-era UAP report, issued by the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021. One of its conclusions was that “[s]ome UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,” and could represent “breakthrough aerospace technology.” This was an eye-popping statement in 2021. Two UAPTF members, Stratton and chief scientist Dr. Travis Taylor, later went on the record to explain how they came to that conclusion. Neither man proclaimed they had proof of alien spacecraft, but they did say that UAPTF sensor data on the observed behaviors gave no indication they could be balloons, drones, or foreign peer technology. However, Volume I says the UAPTF only existed from 2020 to 2021, which is literally true only if you count the start date of the version of the UAPTF that was mandated by Congress in the 2020 NDAA. Of the 2021 UAP report, Kirkpatrick sums up its conclusion this way: “in a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics; although those observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis.” Again, in a literal sense the 2021 report did say these things, but Volume I lays all the emphasis on its qualifying statements and caveats at the expense of accurately depicting the full thrust of the report, and the impact that report had on the public, the media, and government.
Notice how Volume I completely memory-holes Stratton’s role, and the fact that there was a UAP effort that bridged AATIP and the congressionally mandated UAP programs of the official UAP Task Force and AARO. According to the history presented in Volume I, AAWSAP was an unserious, essentially rogue program that was canceled due to “lack of merit,” and after that the Pentagon had no UAP program at all until August 2020. Elizondo’s AATIP and Stratton’s UAPTF do not exist in this history, despite ample evidence in the public record that they did exist. Why?
After he retired from government, Kirkpatrick did a months-long media campaign about Volume I, during which time he recorded interviews with a collection of seven journalists and podcasters (the contents of those interviews will be explored in detail in the next two chapters). He fielded softball questions tossed by interviewers who never challenged his conclusions or methods—except for one moment. Steven Greenstreet of The New York Post is one of Kirkpatrick’s co-partisans on the UFO question. He is a skeptic and debunker, especially of activities in the modern UFO era. Greenstreet is in full agreement with Volume I’s theses, but he wanted to know why Volume I let Stratton, whom he calls a “ghost hunter,” off the hook. This exchange from their interview is illuminating because it exposes Kirkpatrick’s polemicism.
Greenstreet: “The UAP Task Force, did some of the same individuals involved in AAWSAP go on to lead in or work on the UAP Task Force?” [Kirkpatrick’s initial response did not answer the question, so Greenstreet asked it again.]
Kirkpatrick: “I believe so.”
Greenstreet: “How does that happen? Who put them in there in those roles?”
Kirkpatrick: “No idea.”
Greenstreet: “Okay. Are you aware that, you know, you mentioned some of the third parties that came in, are you aware that some of those third parties that the UAPTF brought in were a number of people with fringe beliefs like ghost hunters and psychics, and they were brought in to be analysts?”
Kirkpatrick: “I was not part of and don't know anything about how they ran the Task Force. I was actually out in Colorado during all that.”
Greenstreet: “Okay, because, just from for an outsider like me, amateur researcher from the outside, it looks like, you know I read your report, I see you’re on-record statements, and you're like man this group has just been telling tall tales, and you know, and taking advantage and pushing their stuff and inappropriately spending money. And then I see that same group involved with the UAP Task Force, and I see them more or less doing the same exact thing all over again. You would think that after AAWSAP and the Pentagon goes ‘oh my God, what is this group doing?’ that they would be the last people in charge of an official Task Force after that.”
Kirkpatrick: “Yeah, so I don't know. Like I said, I don't know who made those decisions. What I do know is when I was asked to come in [in 2022] and the Task Force was officially stood down, you know I started from scratch.”
In other interviews Kirkpatrick vouched for the completeness and thoroughness of his report. He said he spent the majority of his time at AARO researching Volume I, and that “it goes through everything, to very high level of detail.” And yet there is literally no mention of this apparently quite active recent ten year period in the Pentagon’s UAP efforts. When Greenstreet pushed him on this Kirkpatrick passed the buck to his successors.
Greenstreet: “But during your AARO historical report, you didn't see any of that information?”
Kirkpatrick: “I think the rest of that, part of the review will come in Volume II.”
Greenstreet: “Oh really? So there's more on the Task Force coming in Volume II?”
Kirkpatrick: “I don't know for certain. I have to direct you back to AARO.”
It is highly improbable that Kirkpatrick’s replacement has additional information in 2024 about the UAPTF that Kirkpatrick did not have access to in 2023. Watching this exchange, it is clear that Kirkpatrick is flailing for a response that will get him out of Greenstreet’s line of questioning without revealing more. He’s been caught in a contradiction that makes his partisan objectives plain, and he knows it.
The AATIP/UAPTF era is a puzzling omission. And we don’t really understand why he made it, except that bringing it up would challenge his argument that the military has only ever taken UFOs seriously as a domain awareness issue except for a very brief period after 2008.
One more example of selective omissions (though we could keep going). NASA’s UAP Study Team submitted its report just three months before Kirkpatrick completed Volume I. His summary of this report stated that it “focused on discovering the best data streams available and discoverable to resolve UAP cases.” He fails to mention that the NASA Study Team members were collectively persuaded that UAP may represent a real, anomalous phenomenon worthy of study, and this view influenced their recommendations. One was to create a platform for crowdsourcing UAP data from civilian sightings that would allow for “effective corroboration within a robust reporting and follow-up framework based on systematically gathered data”—to simplify, a cell phone app for UFO sightings. Another was to transition FAA employees from their current reporting system, which the panel criticized as biased against reporting UAP, to “a confidential, voluntary, non-punitive reporting system” for sightings. Both of these recommendations are predicated on the view that people are seeing something real—over houses and backyards, from a car or airplane—and that the barriers to deriving usable data from those sightings are solvable. Dr. Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator, Science Mission Directorate wrote in the forward to the Study Team report, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) are one of our planet’s greatest mysteries.” This statement, and the recommendations, would make no sense if NASA believed most UAP sightings were no greater mystery than parallax. No one on the NASA team publicly endorsed the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, but their views were much more nuanced than how Volume I represented them.
Selective Quoting
A third indicator that Volume I is a long op-ed rather than history is its selective quoting of sources in a way that shores up its thesis.
You can always tell which side of the partisan divide on the UFO question a writer is based on how they quote Edward Ruppelt. This is because Ruppelt seems to have been a genuine agnostic on UFOs. He had gathered enough data on sightings to suggest UFOs might be interplanetary spacecraft, but not enough to clinch the case scientifically. Kirkpatrick, who presented as an agnostic in public appearances up until Volume I, emphasizes the latter of Ruppelt’s perspective and ignores the former.
For example, Volume I describes aspects of how Ruppelt managed Project Blue Book in a way that redounds as praise for how Kirkpatrick managed AARO. Volume I states (emphasis added): “[Ruppelt] realized that he needed a range of scientific expertise which he sourced through a contract he dubbed Project BEAR [with the Battelle Institute]. Capt Ruppelt set a policy that was intended to foster objectivity. Unlike the previous Project GRUDGE, he allowed his staff to create an ‘unknown’ category of cases which he hoped would dissuade the forcing of a particular answer to any case.” And then Volume I ascribes a conclusion to Ruppelt and Blue Book that is strikingly similar to Kirkpatrick’s own conclusion: “There was no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the USAF that sightings represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of then present day scientific knowledge.”
But that was only half of the story of the early years of Project Blue Book, as demonstrated by the following excerpts from Ruppelt’s memoir The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, published in 1955. Before we get to how Ruppelt defined the Unknown category, let’s look at one of his examples of an Unknown. As director of Blue Book, Ruppelt investigated Air Force reports of a UFO encounter that occured on August 5, 1952 over Tokyo Bay. A bright, circular object was observed visually from the ground and the air, and was tracked by multiple radar and sensor systems. The object was seen “traveling so slowly that it almost hovered and then speeding up to 300 miles an hour.” It outpaced a jet interceptor. And in a final flourish, the object separated into three “pieces,” each of which sped away in different directions. The Air Force could not explain the sighting. This is what Ruppelt meant by an Unknown, and Blue Book compiled hundreds of such cases over the years. He wrote: “I could go into a long discourse on the possible explanations for this sighting; I heard many, but in the end there would be only one positive answer—the UFO could not be identified as something we knew about. It could have been an interplanetary spaceship. Many people thought this was the answer and were all for sticking their necks out and establishing a category of conclusions for UFO reports and labeling it spacecraft. But the majority ruled, and a UFO remained an unidentified flying object.”
Elsewhere in his memoir Ruppelt explained Blue Book’s parameters for categorizing a UFO sighting as an Unknown: “The excitement and serious interest occurred when we received UFO reports in which the observer was reliable and the stimuli could not be identified. These were the reports that challenged the project and caused me to spend hours briefing top U.S. officials. These were the reports that we called ‘Unknowns.’” Many years after Ruppelt retired, Blue Book was still using this definition, as in this 1966 Blue Book report (emphasis added): “A sighting is considered unidentified when a report apparently contains all pertinent data necessary to suggest a valid hypothesis concerning the cause or explanation of the report but the description of the object or its motion cannot be correlated with any known object or phenomena.” Unknowns were a distinct category that were not conflated with reports categorized as insufficient data. If they were Unknowns, by definition they had sufficient evidence to determine the objects were behaving in ways that could not be explained.
From 1947 through the early 1950s, Ruppelt wrote that Unknowns made up 15-20% of the total Blue Book case count. However, he modified this statement when relevant facts presented themselves. For example, during the 1952 UFO wave, as sightings increased across the country, he noted that “Unknowns were running about 40 percent.” He also mentioned a study conducted by the Air Technical Intelligence Center, which housed Blue Book, that concluded “ATIC received reports of only 10 percent of the UFO sightings that were made in the United States.” The implication was that there were many more Unknowns than Blue Book even knew about.
The Unknown UFO case count of U.S. government investigations have long presented a great mystery and a greater tension: how can it be that military experts confirm that something impossible was observed, but they cannot venture a guess as to how or why this is so? As the years dragged on, with no answer one way or the other, there was pressure to bring the percentage of Unknowns down. Volume I alludes to this by including the detail that Ruppelt felt “he was expected to explain away every report… in alignment with the USAF’s position” that UFOs were not extraterrestrial visitors. Despite this, Volume I cites but does not question the statistic that by the time Blue Book closed only 5.5% (701/12,618) of its cases were categorized as “unidentified and never solved.” Volume I is silent about this tension and how it impacted reporting and analysis.
Unlike those earlier investigative efforts, AARO resolves this tension in the present day by dispensing with the Unknown category altogether. AARO reports assure us that its UAP database only has misidentifications, foreign aircraft, and cases with insufficient data. Kirkpatrick has made repeated public assertions that AARO has zero cases of UAP for which, in Blue Book’s terms, “the object or its motion cannot be correlated with any known object or phenomena.” For AARO’s hard-to-resolve cases, which they claim is only due to lack of data, AARO has released zero details, let alone evidence. If AARO has a modern case as perplexing as the ones Ruppelt studied, they are not sharing it. Ruppelt wrote up every detail of the 1952 Tokyo case, which he used to explain to the public why an Unknown category was justified. AARO tells the public nothing about its hard-to-explain cases. All we have to go on is Kirkpatrick’s word that he does not have anything like the Tokyo case in AARO’s database.
Volume I goes even further by heavily suggesting that Ruppelt did not really have any Unknown cases either, including the Tokyo Bay example. It was a misidentification of a guided missile, a balloon, or a component of the nuclear weapons program or one of the 22 secret programs listed at the end of Volume I. Kirkpatrick makes no effort to prove this about any particular sighting. The conclusion is merely accepted uncritically as the most rational explanation—a conclusion so rational and right-seeming that a detailed historical excavation would be a waste of time.
The real Edward Ruppelt was just as open to the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors as he was critical of those who were close minded to the possibility. He did not know the answer, as illustrated in the following excerpts from his memoir.
“The Air Force didn't take any side, they just shrugged. There was no attempt to investigate and explain the various sightings. Maybe this was because someone was afraid the answer would be ‘Unknown.’ Or maybe it was because a few key officers thought that the eagles or stars on their shoulders made them leaders of all men. …‘It's all a bunch of damned nonsense,’ an Air Force colonel who was controlling the UFO investigation said. ‘There's no such thing as a flying saucer.’ He went on to say that all people who saw flying saucers were jokers, crackpots, or publicity hounds. Then he gave the airline pilots who'd been reporting UFO's a reprieve. ‘They were just fatigued,’ he said. ‘What they thought were spaceships were windshield reflections.’ This was the unbiased processing of UFO reports through normal intelligence channels.”
Like Kirkpatrick, Ruppelt had interviewed many pilots who were certain they had seen something inexplicable and impossible. Unlike Kirkpatrick, Ruppelt was not so quick to believe they had been fooled by their senses. He wrote about a case where a pilot described how his jet was outpaced by a UFO:
“This is one of the most typical UFO reports we had in our files. It is typical because no matter how you argue there isn't any definite answer. If you want to argue that the pilot didn't know where he was during the chase—that he was 3 or 4 miles from where he thought he was—that he never did fly around the northern edge of the field and get in behind the UFO—then the UFO could have been a balloon.
“But if you want to believe that the pilot knew where he was all during the chase, and he did have several thousand hours of flying time, then all you can conclude is that the UFO was an unknown.
“I think the pilot summed up the situation very aptly when he told me, ‘I don't know what it was, but I've never seen anything like it before or since—maybe it was a spaceship.’
“I went back to Dayton stumped—maybe it was a spaceship.”
This side of Ruppelt is never mentioned in Volume I. Instead, Kirkpatrick included this anecdote from Ruppelt’s memoir: “His primary goal was to ensure that there would be ‘no wild speculation’ and that if his staff were ‘too pro or too con’ regarding the off-world origin of UFOs, they would be let go. He claimed to have fired three staff.” I would humbly recommend this sentence from the same passage in the memoir: “If anyone became anti-flying saucer and was no longer capable of making an unbiased evaluation of a report, out he went.” The irony is that if Kirkpatrick had been assigned to Project Blue Book in 1952, Ruppelt would have fired him for being too anti-Saucer.
Whether or not these three polemical techniques are the result of a singular motivation, they do work together to a singular effect—the erasure of all of the historical examples for why so many people in and out of government have long taken the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis seriously. Since all of these witnesses and investigators across eight decades were either mistaken, fooling themselves, or fooled by others, there is no reason to take the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis seriously now or in the future. This is Kirkpatrick’s ultimate objective, and he strives to achieve it with the dogged determination of a polemicist.
If you like my commentary & analysis, check out my recent book on Amazon: The UFO Disclosure Yearbook | 2023: A Reference Guide, Oral History, and Commentary on this year in UFO Disclosure
From Richard Holmes, Age of Wonder: “This question bears on the whole nature of science history and biography. Michael Hoskin has suggested in his essay ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’ (1980) that most histories of science continue to be ‘uninterrupted chronicles’, which run along ‘handing out medals to those who “got it right”’. They ignore the history of error, so central to the scientific process, and fail to illuminate science as a ‘creative human activity’ which involves the whole personality and has a broad social context-Journal for the History of Astronomy 11 (1980).”