Kirkpatrick’s Messaging Strategy for Volume I--an Oral History
Disclosure Yearbook Series (2024)
Sean Kirkpatrick being interviewed by the National Security Space Association
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 2: AARO’s Historical Report Volume I is an Op-Ed not a History
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 was an argument that the public, and especially Congress, should not take the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis or historical UFO cases seriously. The report’s author, Sean Kirkpatrick, made this argument even more forcefully in a media campaign that started in January, six weeks prior to the public release of Volume I, and continued through the end of the calendar year.
Kirkpatrick argues that extraterrestrial UFOs are a fictional “narrative” that was initially foisted on the public through a series of historical accidents but has since been perpetuated by popular culture and a cult or “true believers.” In this chapter, I lay out each point of this argument by stitching together excerpts from his 2024 media campaign. I will let the man speak for himself and present his argument in a way that is faithful to the messages he was trying to communicate. In each interview and print source, Kirkpatrick’s message is consistent. I have selected the clearest, best expressions of his message from each source and arranged these quotes by topic. I will reserve my editorial comments for the following chapter.
In this archive I am only going to include quotes from the 2024 calendar year, January to December, even though it seems likely Kirkpatrick will continue to speak out and write about these views for the foreseeable future. The views expressed below can be considered semi-official Department of Defense positions since they align with the findings of AARO’s Historical Report Volume I, and because Kirkpatrick was briefing Congress and serving as an unpaid consultant to AARO while he was conducting the majority of these interviews.
Steps in Kirkpatrick’s Messaging Strategy:
Step 1: Explain the Origins of the UFO Narrative
Step 3: Deny Secret US Government UFO Programs & Coverups Exist
Step 4: Dismiss Tic Tac & Navy UAP Videos
Step 5: Wall off AARO’s Mission from UFOs
Step 6: Blame UFO Stories on Circular Reporting
Step 7: Blame a UFO Lobby Group
Step 8: Cast UFO Belief as a Religion & a Grift
Sean Kirkpatrick’s Media Campaign, January-December 2024:
Print Source #1: Sean Kirkpatrick’s op-ed in Scientific American
Published: January 19, 2024
Audio Interview #1: In the Room, with Peter Bergen, an Audible Original podcast
Released: January 23, 2024
Print Source #2: Ellie Cook’s Exclusive on Kirkpatrick in Newsweek
Published: January 26, 2024
Audio Interview #2: Science Quickly, with Daniel Vergano, a Scientific American podcast
"The Government's Former UFO Hunter Found Something More Concerning than Aliens."
Released: February 5, 2024
—March 8, 2024: AARO releases its UAP Historical Report Volume I—
Audio Interview #3: SpaceTime Series, with Chris Williams, a National Security Space Association event
Released: March 14, 2024
Audio Interview #4: Daniel Lavelle’s audio recording of his interview with Kirkpatrick for The Guardian
NOTE: Lavelle shared this audio and a transcript with Mick West, which he posted on his website Metabunk.org
Recorded: March 2024
Print Source #3: Daniel Lavelle’s Exclusive with Kirkpatrick in The Guardian
“He quit heading the Pentagon’s UFO office. Now a report of his has shaken up ufology”
Published March 22, 2024
Audio Interview #5: Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, with Iro Postor
“Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. - Science And Technology For Emerging National Security Threats”
Released: April 23, 2024
Audio Interview #6: Steven Greenstreet, New York Post
“Pentagon UFO Hunter Reveals What He Knows About Aliens” Part 1 | Part 2
Released May 8, 2024 & June 12, 2024
Audio Interview #7: Marik Von Rennenkampff
“A Discussion with the Pentagon's ex-UFO Hunter, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick”
Released: July 19, 2024
Audio Interview #8: Brian Keeting, Into the Impossible podcast
“Pentagon’s Former UFO Chief Speaks Out | Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick”
Released: August 11, 2024
—August 26, 2024: Dr. Jon Kosloski becomes AARO’s permanent director; Sean Kirkpatrick ends his unpaid consultant role for AARO and is not longer affiliated with the office—
Print Source #4: Michael Hiltzik’s interview with Kirkpatrick for The LA Times business section
Released: September 20, 2024
Audio Interview #9: John Michael Godier’s interview on his podcast, Event Horizon
“What a Pentagon Scientist Found Out About UFOs with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick”
Released: October 31, 2024
Audio Interview #10: Dave Adalian, EarthSky podcast
Released: December 24, 2024
Step 1: Explain the Origins of the UFO Narrative
In which Kirkpatrick explains why people started to become concerned about unidentified objects in the sky.
Anxieties driven by WWII and 20th Century military technologies:
“Keep in mind in the ‘40s you know the United States was just coming out of World War II, everybody's raw, there's still sensitive feelings about being caught by surprise, you know Pearl Harbor, what all the things that had gone into that era. The other thing that happened was there were some new technologies that were used during that time that hadn't been used in that way in a serious, significant fashion: rockets, aircraft, other Aerospace types of activities, balloons even. So people are sensitive to contextually being caught by surprise, there's really new technologies that are breaking into everyday life that they're just starting to wrap their heads around, and as you start to see the these things pop up everywhere, people get nervous, they start reporting them, they start trying to figure out what they are, they don't know.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“One of the original stealth planes, F-117, state-of-the-art stealth fighter being developed and tested out in Area 51 [maiden flight 1981], and everybody saw it thought it was an alien spacecraft. In fact, that is one of the key programs that gave rise to the whole conspiracy, starting back then, that was the platform everybody was pointing to saying this is alien technology. You know it's understandable if that is the first time anybody ever sees that sort of shape, nobody would believe it could even fly, and so how do you--to see something like that--One, it doesn't look like an aircraft. Two, you don't think, if it is an aircraft, can it fly? And then you see it fly. People get all kinds of notions in their head. Well why would you think it's any different today?” [Keeting-Interview #8]
The psycho-social need for an explanation:
“Now there is a human condition that I don't, you know I'm not a psychologist so I would have to defer to somebody who's better versed than I am, but there is a human condition of if you see something you don't understand, and in the lack of an explanation you are going to fill that void with a belief. What is that belief and where does it come from? …They want to have an explanation to address the fear of not understanding what that thing is, and I think you're seeing a lot of that as well. And so what we're seeing out of that finding is the response to new technologies, and now here we are, fast forward today we have a whole bunch of new technologies that people are trying to wrap their heads around, you know long-distance drones, drones that are starting to use new aerospace principles, AI, all the things that are starting to see—space travel, we are seeing more space launches and more types of space launches that people don't necessarily understand. Do you know how many Starlink satellites and deployments got reported as UAP? I mean dozens of them because people don't—they see a string of lights in the sky and they don't know what that is and you correlate that back to a Starlink deployment. So we're seeing I think the same phenomena. I think we're seeing—as a contributing factor, not the sole factor, but a contributing factor.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“And the story goes something like this, the U.S. government has been hiding as many as 12 UFOs possibly, going back to the mid-sixties and maybe even the forties, if you include Roswell. The story goes, the U.S. government's been trying to reverse engineer these to no avail, have failed, and as a consequence, they abandoned the effort to industry, who wanted to continue to look at this. And then somewhere around, earlier this turn of the century, there was a push to bring that material back into government oversight because the allegation goes that Congress had no knowledge of any of this, and this was all a hidden program.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
Step 2: Deny UFOs Exist
In which Kirkpatrick explains that extraterrestrial UFOs do not exist.
Complete lack of data to support the existence of UFOs:
“So I laid out three main buckets of hypotheses. On the right end of the spectrum you have the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. On the left end of the spectrum you have advanced technology from an adversary who's had a breakthrough. And in the middle you have everything that we know, known objects that just have never been measured, whether they're drones or balloons or birds or whatnot.…Pretty much everything we've seen matches to a signature associated with known objects. There have been a few, and I've said this in the past and hearings, right there's been a few things that give indications of potential foreign activity. Those are being investigated and of course we can't really talk about those. I've seen nothing, no data that suggests anything on the right end of that Spectrum.” [Postor-Interview #5]
“Nine times out of 10, or more, that turns into an optical illusion that we call parallax. There's about two to five percent of all the reports that we have, all the cases that we have, are what we would call truly anomalous. There's things that we need to investigate.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“Nothing would made me happier than to uncover the evidence to say hey here I found them [aliens], here they are, let me roll them out for you. But that didn't happen. The evidence does not support that, none of the evidence. And it's important to note it's evidence, just because somebody said you know something and they heard it from somebody else or they saw something. Humans are fallible, they are fallible, they are subject to optical illusion, they're subject to their own interpretations of sensors, their own sensory perceptions, but it's data that is the coin of the realm especially in something like this.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
“It's a valid hypothesis [the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs], it could be a hypothesis. What is the data that supports that and what would those signatures look like? What kind of propulsion would be evident, what kind of signatures would that propulsion give, what kind of refueling and energy harvesting would need to be done, why would one put a probe here?... Put some peer-reviewed scientific papers into the into the domain that point to if there was a probe in Earth's atmosphere how would it get here, what are the three most probable ways it would get here, what are the three most probable ways it would maneuver around the earth, what are the three most probable ways it would harvest energy and take all of that and figure out what the resulting signatures and indicators would be, and then marry that to the data that we have. And what you'll find is none of that matches, and so what you're left with is okay well then that hypothesis, while it's still a valid hypothesis, has no data to support it as being the answer to what you're seeing. …when the data doesn't support that hypothesis, in the scientific community that means that hypothesis is not correct and that you have to change your hypothesis. It doesn't mean your data you have to change your data. And this particular topic area [UFOs], for reasons that are fascinating from a psychological perspective, the human condition wants it to be an answer that data does not support.” [Godier-Interview #9]
No evidence of anomalous flight characteristics:
Chris Williams: “Have any UAPs demonstrated capabilities that are beyond our technical understanding?”
Kirkpatrick: “No.” [Williams-Interview #3]
Daniel Lavelle: “So some of these witnesses have described, you know, hypersonic speeds, and turns at right angles that defy the laws of physics as they see it. I mean, does the US government or other governments have that sort of capability?”
Kirkpatrick: “If you dig into all of those, of the data that we have on those, that it almost always turns out to be an optical illusion, a sensor or anomaly, or some other weird aspect of how that data was collected, and inevitably does not turn out to be that it's traveling in hypersonics and velocities or making right angle turns.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“If it's not resolved, it's either we didn't get to it yet, or analysis is undergoing, or more data is required. There was nothing that was not resolved that I thought could absolutely be—you know, what everybody's claiming—anomalous to the point of extraterrestrial or advanced technology.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“You don't need theoretical physicists because nobody has produced any evidence of anything that violates the laws of physics, not a single shred. So there's a lot of people that say it violates laws of physics, well based on what? What data do you have? You have none. Nobody has produced a single thing, not a radar track, not a video with raw data.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
Asked if Kirkpatrick had seen any evidence of nonhuman technology or anything “weird”: “No. I have--there was nothing. In the over I think by the time I retired I think we were well over 1,300 cases or something like that, and none of them had anything that would give an indication of a non-human intelligence. Now did we see things that were weird within some of the sensors that did produce data? Yes. Were any of those alien signatures? No. Could they have been adversary signatures, could they have been commercial signatures? Uh sure they could have been a number of other explanations that we uncovered.” [Godier-Interview #9]
Occam’s Razor:
“What is more likely—that an adversary has come up with a new technology that is based off of current state of the art that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials? Or even simpler than that, what's more likely—the fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about, or we have extraterrestrials? I mean, how do you make that leap?” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“The last couple of papers I looked at on this [the Drake Equation] was you know estimating based on current Webb telescope measurements somewhere between 30 and 300 planets that can sustain life and may have some form of intelligence in it, that's across one Galaxy. So as a scientist it's just mathematically impractical to believe that there's not other intelligent life throughout the vastness of the universe. Where it becomes interesting is carrying that conversation closer to this solar system and closer to Earth because those same statistics apply and that the probability of there being an intelligent life form out in the universe that has found this particular solar system and this particular planet is just as rare as us finding them. So I can't see or fathom how that rationally translates to the underlying [UFO] stories that pervade public perception today.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“So if I have this conversation about the search for for extraterrestrial life whether that's a intelligent or a bacterium and I'm doing it in the context of the scientific community and NASA's mission to find it, and as long as we're talking about it out in the universe across the Milky Way or even into the vastness of of the universe with all the other galaxies that are there, then it's a very scientific objective, data-driven, evidentiary-driven discussion and analysis. As I move that conversation closer to Earth somewhere around--my conjecture is somewhere around Mars-ish--it becomes more science fiction. Right, you're now, there's an element of science fiction that creeps into the discussion, any number of movies about this have you know happened. And then as I get that conversation closer to Earth somewhere as I cross the ionosphere it crosses into conspiracy theory, and clearly, you know the government's lying and we've been hiding you know alien tech that has crash landed I don't know 12 times in the United States and we're hiding all that. So these are the kinds of things that make it very difficult to have a rational discussion about the evidence and about the data because of that transition from scientific to conspiracy.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“Let's say I have something that's unusual. if I can come up with three different explanations, one of them being okay it's an alien, and we don't know anything about it, the second one being okay well maybe it's this commercial product that this company is advancing and the US government's not really paying attention to and it just happens to be there and we see it, or the third one being it's an adversary that's doing something that we didn't expect them to do but there's evidence that they're doing that. Which one are you going to believe is more likely? Is it the alien or is it the adversary or is it commercial. And you don't know right off, but logic would suggest that one of the more common and simple answers like, I don't know, it's a commercial thing that's just out there and we can go find what it is and here's what it is… That is Occam’s Razor right, so that would suggest the more simple explanation is likely versus an alien.” [Godier-Interview #9]
Step 3: Deny Secret US Government UFO Programs & Coverups Exist
In which Kirkpatrick explains that hidden UFO programs and coverups do not exist.
No evidence of secret US government or contractor UFO programs:
“Are you telling me that 12 of these vehicles traveled interstellar space, found Earth, got to Earth, and they all crashed in the United States in the last mile? That’s just not rational, right? But to your point, if I’m a military serviceman today, or woman, yeah, I would be very outraged to find that there was this technology that would certainly advance our capabilities and prevent loss of life. There is not.” [Vergano-Interview #2]
“We then had the National Archives; we had all military service archives; we had some of the combatant command archives, the Intelligence Community archives, NASA.... We would investigate what they would have to say, going back as far back as those archives go, to identify, ‘Hey, if you came in and named a program, whose program was it? What was it? How did that relate to what the person was describing?” and document all that—which we did. So in it, there is a bunch of programs that were named. Those are all classified. We found what all of those programs are and reported those back up to Congress. Congress’s concern is that there was a program that they did not have insight into, and that is not the case. What we’ve found is that everything that’s been named or identified has a legitimate oversight committee. It’s been reported out. It may be state-of-the-art capabilities that if somebody were [to] see, [they] didn’t understand, but that’s the scope of the investigation. Again, a lot of these things are real R&D or real state-of- the-art programs, not extraterrestrial, but it is completely understandable why someone who did not know that would draw that conclusion.” [Vergano-Interview #2]
“Let me be clear, we found no evidence of any of these allegations, none, and I had access to everything there was to have access to… Everything that witnesses have come forward and said ‘hey this is this hidden program,’ and it turns out none of them are those hidden programs, none of them. All of them have turned out to be other things that have nothing to do with extraterrestrials, reverse engineering, and all of them have been reported to Congress.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“We were looking for any data to substantiate any claims that were being made to Congress or in the social media arena.” AARO turned up “no evidence of anything extraterrestrial,” Kirkpatrick says. Of reports that the office ruled to be unexplained, the reason “came down to not having enough data to even make an assessment.” [Hiltzik-Print Source #4]
Asked if AARO faced roadblocks from any agency or department: “No. In fact everybody across multiple departments--Homeland Security, DOE, DOD, IC, everybody, NASA, everybody--was fully open and transparent because they wanted to to put data to this problem, they wanted to address this problem because frankly they wanted to stop having to answer the questions, they wanted to move on with the the missions that were really important to them--I don't know like a couple of world wars and and some conflicts and maybe going back to the moon and things of that nature. So I never ran into any hesitation. I was given access across the board on everything that we needed. Everything that we came across if I came across something that I didn't already have access to I would get access to it and we analyzed and assessed everything.”and it's it's fascinating to me how folks try to hide behind that, and I don't know how many ways I can say this clearly: every program that people named as being potentially part of this conspiracy we had full access to, pulled the programs out of the archives in many instances got exactly what they were, and when I wrote up the final assessment you know there was a very classified version that had all of those programs that were identified in there and what they actually were and what the conspiracy theorists were claiming they were and that is with the congressional leadership with the Department leadership and with the IC leadership.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“A lot of these folks especially in the contractor communities I've known for many many many years, had working relationships with. They bent over backwards to try to not only help me find records or evidence but also people who had knowledge you know kind of firsthand knowledge of story origins and what was actually happening at the time that this a particular event was said to have occurred and got them to come in to talk to us so that we could document all of that and write it down and and investigate it and cross reference it. So we actually untangled quite a bit of one of the the allegations for a contractor you know hiding in this technology and where that actually came from and how it was linked to some of these other stories that don't have any validity.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“We had coordinated with a number of countries and we were trying to get kind of a level set of what does each country actually see, what do they have data to support, and what kind of framework are they putting in place, if any, to do the same sort of [UAP] measurement and analysis that we were. And most all of them--in fact all of them--came back with ‘we don't actually have any substantiating data.’” [Godier-Interview #9]
“There was no organized Pentagon-level concerted effort to perpetrate such a cover story, if you will [claim a classified US government technology was a UFO]. There is some anecdotal evidence of local officers or local commands jumping on that bandwagon in order to hide programs because that was an easy cover story, and it was fun to do, but it came back I think to to really bite them.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“We laid out every one of those programs as this is not this is not an alien program, this is not an alien program, that's not an alien program, every one of those programs are reported to Congress and the appropriate oversight committees so all of these people who come in and said hey that's a program here's the name of it, here's what it is, we went and dug out what it actually was. I actually built a whole table--it's all classified of course--but I built a whole table of here's what a witness said, they named this program, this is what they think it is, this is what it actually is, this is who owns it and which committee on the Hill has oversight. There were three pages, four pages of that and no matter what you put in front of people there are still some who will look at that and go well there's still a conspiracy somewhere. Well no, no there's really not.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
DoD would not keep UFOs secret, and would hand evidence to NASA:
Daniel Lavelle: “If the government had found evidence of aliens and spaceships and whatnot, would they have disclosed it to the public by now? Or is it the kind of thing they would keep secret?”
Kirkpatrick: “They wouldn't keep that secret, because it's not their job, right? I mean, if there was, first of all, if the Department of Defense or the Intelligence found evidence of any sort of extraterrestrial, it's not their job, it would immediately get turned over to NASA. And NASA would immediately disclose to everybody. That's their job. That's why we had a partnership with NASA for, one, for investigating advanced aerospace technologies that already exist. But, two, I mean, that's their job. Right. That's why there was the UAP independent study from NASA.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“I got asked about that by both DOD and IC leadership at the highest levels, you know if you find something what are we supposed to do? And we debated it, and the answer is if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life--a gold star extra credit to any student who knows whose mission that is because it's not the Department’s and it's not the IC's--it's NASA's. So we brought NASA in as a partner early on as you everybody knows I had an NASA liaison in my office. And if we had ever come up with actual evidence of extraterrestrial life, over to NASA, good luck with that, that's your job, that's their job, that's their mission, that's what's in their budget to go do. Now if said life turned out to be hostile well then there'd be an inter-agency process that would probably rise up to president.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
“I've actually had this conversation with multiple folks in leadership both my previous boss the deputy secretary and the under secretary, and the question was just that, right, if we find something or we measure something or we collect on something [a real UFO], what classification is it, what should it be, is is it even classified? And the answer that I think we all settled on was the discovery of extraterrestrial life is not a Department of Defense or IC mission, it is NASA's mission, and so if we had found anything to that sort it would have been turned over to NASA for disclosure and announcement and analysis… so they [DoD/IC] might keep the technology to try and understand how to use it, but the existence thereof would still be turned over to NASA. …when we had this conversation about if we actually found anything what would the classification be and how would we handle it, most of that, apart from you know the part of okay we're going to get you know NASA will take lead, but it's also going to be it's got to go up to the President for a decision on you know is it a national security issue or is it a you know human, you know humanity-civilization issue, and so that's I think what would actually happen is it would get briefed over probably in partnership with the Department, by NASA, up to the President for a decision.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“If there was undeniable evidence that it was extraterrestrial, it would be routed up through the Department of Defense through to the President and the National Security Council to discuss what they were going to do about it, and that's assuming much like all of the other conspiracies that they all crash in the United States, and so therefore it is the United States’ call on what's going to happen. So assuming that it stays true to the conspiracy theory and they all crash in the United States then sure that's probably it would go up to the President, NASA would be involved, the Department and the IC would only be in a support role, you know assuming there was no radioactivity, if there was any indications that something was hostile, but all of those things are the normal business of DOD and the IC for any platform coming from an adversary of any sort, but you know this is all predicated on you're assuming that there's undisputed evidence that this was some alien craft that has been intercepted, which there has been none.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
Step 4: Dismiss Tic Tac & Navy UAP videos
In which Kirkpatrick declares that the three Navy-videos of UAP, including Tic Tac, are not an extraterrestrial UFOs.
On the absence of any corroborating for the 2004 Nimitz Tic Tac encounter:
“Tic Tac—you know there’s some great eyewitness accounts of what was described as the Tic Tac. What was lacking is data, right. …My opinion is that that one is going to remain unresolved because there is no data. There is no radar data. Allegations of the secret black helicopter that came to pick up the tapes, none of that happened. There’s no evidence that somebody pulled the tapes off. What does happen, and this is why we had to change the data retention policy, was all of these platforms have fixed amount of storage, and they only retain the data for any given mission, you know, maybe a day…. The next time the platform goes out, the data is overwritten. There’s no conspiracy in that. That’s just how the military operates with these data tapes.
“So I think the Tic Tac is so far back in time, there’s no data. …There wasn’t a lot of asking or questioning other activities that might have been going on at that time, either naval activities or adversary activities. And both of those needed to be explored at that time, because records of when tests, for example were done, that far back in time, may not be accurate or exist. And record of any adversary activity would be hard to track down with exact date and time stamps.” [Williams-Interview #3]
Chris Williams: “There's several questions from the audience concerning a 2004 Nimitz [Tic Tac] UAP incident …the specific question that a number of folks have asked is that that particular incident was not included in the historical report.”
Kirkpatrick: “The Tic Tac incident, again, there's not a lot that you can put in there that's not already out in the public domain, so I wouldn't expect you're going to get a lot of resolution on that.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“I've told Congress we don't have raw data, we don't have radar data, we don't have any of the data that is claimed to have been taken. The Navy does not have it, the Navy doesn't have a lot of data and it's not a conspiracy it's just that it's very inefficient to keep data for longer than periods than it needs to. So there's nothing really to analyze except that data in the FLIR video, which is not raw data …unless you have the raw data you're never going to get to that truth. The second thing is, I will go back to, you've got pilots, you have humans who are recalling from 20 years ago what they have a high confidence of. I can't accept that in a scientific rigorous analysis. You know it's just not possible. …I can't say that there is any evidence to support what people remember the maneuverability, or the speeds, or the altitudes to be because there are other solutions to that eigenvalue problem. So you know we can debate this all day but you're never going to get to the answer because you don’t have data.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Conventional explanations for the Tic Tac encounter:
“There's no data, there's not enough information to ever come to a conclusion. So we can speculate about it all we want. …In the case of the Tic Tac, there's a lot of other hypotheses that's that are still there that people tend to gloss over, like submersible launched vehicles, other radar artifacts, I mean, one of the things that people, again, don't don't fully appreciate, is a lot of the stuff that we see in these ranges. … And there's a couple of other explanations that don't involve extraterrestrials that haven't been fully explored, but they aren't going to be able to because there's no data.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“It's interesting to note that there are several programs both US and foreign that could--could-- explain that [Tic Tac case]. Especially if you're in an experimental test range where one side of the range doesn't know what the other side of the range is doing. If you're thinking it's a US technology and if it's an adversary, well you know they want to know what we're doing in our test range there are some ways to do that. So there's let me give you an example there was a declassified CIA program back in in that time frame [~2004] where they would launch their balloons with retro reflectors inside of them from the water to monitor what responses would be from ground radars and aircraft responses what would they see and how would they respond. Why would we think we're the only ones that thought of that right. So I'm not saying that I have data to support that that is exactly what it was but that is certainly a more logical explanation than it was aliens. And the problem is I can come up with a couple of hypotheses for what that was, but we don't have any data to analyze, so you're never going to answer that question, we're just not going to be able to answer what that was because there is no data.” [Godier-Interview #9]
On the unreliability of eyewitness accounts:
“My least favorite phrase when it comes to evidentiary-based scientific analysis, is credible witnesses. So credible witnesses are a great starting point, they do not constitute evidence. You cannot convincingly prove or disprove anything based off of what somebody sees. And credible military pilots and others are still subject to optical illusion, to seeing and interpreting things that they don't understand, that aren't aren't alien in nature, they may just be things that they don't normally see. And that's what an anomalous phenomena is. It's a thing that you don't readily understand.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
“What's important for folks to understand is that these these trained military pilots, they do see things that they may not understand what they see any more than their sensors understand what they see. And that doesn't mean that it's unusual, or it's exotic, or it's extraterrestrial, it just means that they don't understand what they're looking at right then.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“The pilots see things and they're highly trained and very professional pilots, but they are still human and they are still subject to error and and optical illusion. And so they're saying they saw something against hurricane force winds, how do we know that? Well what did they save, what data do we have to analyze? Without that this is all the evidence you have.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
On the unreliability of sensor data and “internet data”:
“It was been very frustrating because people then pull on the well somebody saw X and the radar said this and so therefore it must be an alien. I'm like well no it doesn't right because radars make mistakes when the algorithms don't understand what they're looking at. …those reflections are, they're not well defined, they're sporadic and they tend to give a false range, they give a false speed, because the algorithm is trying to fill in the gaps of the missing data and we've shown this time and again in the lab and in the field… folks don't understand that and they don't know that that's how these things operate and they pull on this as it must be factual. So yes that's a long way of saying it's very frustrating.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“This is a very important point that most people in fact even many image scientists don't understand. When I'm looking at a two-dimensional video and I'm looking at an object, unless I have an unambiguous range to that object or a reference point for that object, then any speed or altitude measurement you calculate is wrong because you don't have the range data. And that's where parallax comes in--in some sense, because there's also the optical illusion of you're going faster than it--but from a range perspective the way you solve a parallax problem is you have to actually recreate the flight path of the camera that's taking the image. Well, the platform that camera is on, the angle the camera is pointing at, and where the object is is moving, but you have to recreate that for every layer of range because you don't have range. And then you have to match each one of those to what you see to figure out where in that range it most likely is. And every time we did that, every time, including I think it was the GOFAST one, it turns out to be that the most logical, the one that matches most to the data is the object is moving very slow or moving with the wind and the the platform is moving faster and rotating and so you're you're getting that parallax, because there's no frame of reference against the water.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Response to Rennenkampff’s analysis of GIMBAL UAP video: “How did you get the range? So here's my problem with all of that. Couple of things. One, it doesn't take into account the sensor and how the sensor works. A lot of these sensors they do the same thing, all of the FLIR pods, all of the imaging sensors, because they rotate as the platform rotates, and so I would just be cautious about that one. Two… you don't have the raw data. You're using internet data, so anything that's choppy is from image compression. It has absolutely nothing to do with the raw data… the steps that I think you're referring to is not, may not be real, and that's what I'm getting at. So what I'm trying to get to is those videos that everybody is over-analyzing until they're blue in the face is not raw data, and without raw data you have image compressed data that's out on the internet and image compression does all kinds of weird stuff to videos. There's image compressions videos where you can see shadows of people after the people have gone by. There are image compressions of people where things, objects where they get pixelated or they blur or they jump because you've missed a frame because it's compressed. So unless you have the raw data it is really hard to draw a conclusion about things that might look like optical effects.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“Any compressed video that you get off the internet is not analyzable for anything that's defendable because image compression does all kinds of interesting artifacts to your video, and a lot of people don't know that. You end up missing frames so things look like it's moving differently than it is. You're missing the bit depths, you don't know what the--none of the reflectography or the spectral analysis, none of that matters on a compressed image. You just can't do it. I've got a great example of this… it'll go through a really great example of a thing that we really thought was maybe this was it, maybe this was the evidence we needed, and it turned out, no it was image compression that made it look like it was doing something it wasn't, and once you got--we had to go get the raw data, we've actually finally tracked down some of the raw data, it didn’t do anything that they thought it did.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
Rennenkampff: “…the odds of that [GIMBAL] matching the flight path, which matches what is seen on radar, which the aviators have extremely high confidence was at six to eight nautical miles, that's extraordinary right?”
SK: “I wouldn't say it's extraordinary because, one, I don't have high confidence in what the aviators are saying because they don't have a laser lock on it, they don't they don't they don't use the FLIR laser in midair, it's just not used in midair. …so they don't have laser ranging of these things, and if you don't have, if you didn't turn your laser ranger on, you have no unambiguous range, none. …when it comes to things like this, you got to turn all your sensors on if you're seeing something, turn it all on and save it. They don't have unambiguous range. A pilot estimates range with his thumb and speed with his thumb, and I can't, you can't put any credibility into that. As much as I love our pilots and they're the best pilots in the world, when you're talking about trying to apply a guesstimate to something that somebody remembered from however many years or decades ago in a scientific, rigorous and technical evaluation, you're gonna come up with all kinds of interesting things.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Response to Rennenkampff’s analysis GOFAST UAP video and 2014-15 incursions into east coast training ranges: “You know where those objects come from? They follow the jet stream. I mean we get them all the time. So this is why pattern of life analysis is so important, why you've got to have 24/7 coverage of these things all the time, of these areas all the time, so you can count the number of stuff that comes through there. And when we've been looking, it's a lot. I mean when people say there are [raises hands to make scare quotes] ‘daily incursions’ sure there's crap in our airspace all the time, all the time. Finding out where it is and what it is is what the challenge comes down to. It always turns into slower-moving objects than people think--and not anything that's super exciting to be honest.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“A test range is huge, it's like several hundred square kilometers, I mean it's huge. And so there will be tests, multiple tests can occur on a test range simultaneously by different owners, different organizations, and not everybody knows what everybody else is doing on a test range, that's the reason it's called a test range. There are very few people that understand the entire scope of everything that's happening, like the range test director, the commander who has to know everything that's happening in their area of responsibility. …But now I've got to think of it from the adversary side. I've got my test range where I'm going to be testing all of my advanced technology so if I'm an adversary I want to know what's going on in your test range. Well I'm going to try to get into it, how am I going to do that? Well I can float a balloon in there, I can fly a drone in there, I can do all kinds of stuff. And we have to try to sort out, hey is that a threat and do I need to shoot it down or is that just a piece of trash that's flying through the air?” [Keeting-Interview #8]
“The pilots see things and they're highly trained and very professional pilots, but they are still human and they are still subject to error and and optical illusion. And so they're saying they saw something against hurricane force winds, how do we know that? Well what did they save, what data do we have to analyze? Without that this is all the evidence you have.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“Unless you have something that measures that range, unless you have the radar data, then you know you're at best medium confidence, and even then you don't have a lot to go off of, so you can over analyze these videos until we're all dead, but we're never going to get an answer and that is what I have told Congress. If you don't have the raw data, if you don't have the original data, you're not going to get an answer. It is too far back in history. There is nothing much to go on there.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Step 5: Wall off AARO’s Mission from UFOs
In which Kirkpatrick explains what AARO is for.
Domain awareness & flight safety mitigation:
“Let’s start with flight safety. The biggest risk is stuff that is in the air that we don't know is there. And why don't we know it's there? Because it's not something we would track. It's not something we would pick up. Balloons are one of the biggest hazards right now, and it's growing. So there's a big concern, of flight safety, and that's one of the key things that AARO had been focusing on. When I identify all these things as being hazards, that has to get transferred over to the safety people to do something about, and so working with, you know, FAA and NASA and the Air Force on what are you going to do?” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“I designed a calibration campaign that my S&T group went off to on where we took F-35s and F-22s and EGIS Cruisers and ground radars, and designed a campaign by which each one of those sensors we would measure these known objects in—here's what a weather balloon looks like in an F-35 traveling at Mach 1, and all of the data associated with that, so that we have signatures empirically measured of all of those known objects, which we didn't have because those platforms are not designed for those things.” [Postor-Interview #5]
“I hate balloons. I chased more balloons than I think anybody else. My team and I just got sick of balloons. Every, almost everything just was turning out to be balloons.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
“The radars the sensors have never been calibrated against balloons, ever. That was one of the things that we stood up AARO to go do, was go calibrate all this stuff, and why is that important, because a weather balloon is made of different material depending on the altitude at which it needs to go. Some of them have metal strips in them some of them are mylar, some of them are not, and they're just latex. For those not familiar, mylar is a metal, it's like aluminum foil, but much thinner and the metal strips all of that gives spurious radar returns… If those radar returns are spurious or are missing, it calculates something that is nonsensical, and oftentimes that leads to--we've even had data, reports where they provided data and the data says hey this thing went from you know half a mock to one mock. Well when you pull the raw data out and you look at the radar returns it turns out that some of those radar returns are missing, or many of them are missing, and what that means is when it does its calculation and it displays it on the HUD it says it went from five 0. five to one. Well the only reason it did that is because it missed some of that and it's estimating where its next place should be. And so those are errors that are built into the system because the systems are not designed for slow moving balloon-like objects.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“This is a domain awareness problem plain and simple. Doesn't matter if you're talking about UAP or you're talking about a stealth aircraft, this is a domain awareness problem, and what that means is we have a lot of data from a lot of different sensors—whether or not we have data for a particular event is a different question—but in general we have lots of data across lots of sensors and we need to train the sensors and the data exploitation tools to look for some of the signatures that they aren't currently looking for. And what do I mean by that? Our air domain awareness sensors are trained and operators are trained to look for missiles, aircraft, fast moving, you know a big drone, you know even large drones, not small drones—they're meant to look for those things to prevent somebody from launching missiles into the United States. They are not trained to exploit the data to look for a quadcopter, and so understanding what does a quadcopter look like in those kinds of sensor systems is part of the design space that we laid out … you have to identify what it is you're looking at, and you have to identify signatures that relate to a particular country so you have attribution, and then you have intent, and those are the things that you have to go investigate if you're going to make that case.” [Williams-Interview #3]
Chris Williams: “Is there a significant collection of sightings or radar collections or other sensor collections in space that are of concern?”
Kirkpatrick: “That is a domain awareness problem. There's a lot of data associated with everything from [orbital] debris to satellite tracking on orbit. The question is the same to the space community as it is to the air community, of okay well how much of that data are we training our algorithms to look for anomalous behavior? And the answer is actually on the space domain a lot more than in the air domain because it's easier to define what is anomalous in the space domain because you have laws that you have to baseline against. So a piece of debris that suddenly starts maneuvering is an anomalous thing and should be investigated. But that's what U.S. Space Command does. So it's a question of is there anything that falls outside of that purview that we need to then look at. And the answer is largely no…we've had no evidence of any space UAP that substantiates into an actual UAP.” [Williams-Interview #3]
Mitigate technical surprise from adversaries:
“Where STEM comes in, in a lot of different areas, and in fact the Service Intel Centers—Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Marines—they're all what we call Science and Technical Intelligence Centers, and they focus on the technology that adversaries may be deploying, developing or using. And so as an SNTI intelligence officer your role across any of those organizations is to understand what is somebody else doing based off of all the different types of collection you could put against it, as well as understanding the open-source literature, what's the state-of-the-art, what's our commercial state-of-the-art, how do I apply that, is somebody else applying, you know, commercial drone technology for example to different applications, or are they making modifications, and if they're making modifications what are they doing and how are they doing it, and if they're developing new platforms or new sensors how does one go about doing it? And this is an interesting research area because it leads you to really the sweet spot of SNTI intelligence and the scientific world at large, which is understanding the unknown, right, and understanding the unknown and how do I apply the scientific method to do that and research it?” [Postor-Interview #5]
The Science and Technology Group had a couple of things that it had to do: one was understand state-of-the-art of current technologies, whether that's propulsion whether that's flight dynamics, whether that's platforms, what have you, and then if there was any you know kind of, sort of cutting-edge capabilities or technologies that we were finding, understanding what are the fundamental physics that drive that, is this something that the U.S. is working on or somebody else is working on, and what is that, what does that look like?” [Postor-Interview #5]
“On the adversary end of the spectrum I tasked the IC to go take a look at okay look we we follow where everybody's research is headed, we have an idea of where different, you know, directions different people are taking as far as what they're trying to develop, and we know where there may be going to be in 10 or 20 years. So hypothetically what would happen if there was a breakthrough and what we thought somebody was going to develop in 10 years they were actually able to do today, and what does that look like, and are there signatures associated with that that are unique that I could pull on? So now I have IC vetted analyses on one end of the spectrum that point to here's where the technology surprises could come from.” [Postor-Interview #5]
“The operations group is dealing with standardizing reporting, making sure they have feedback with the operators, the operators feel like they can report and they know what they have to report, bring in all of that data. The analytic group focused on how do I stand up an analytic framework that does both the intelligence pieces as well as the science pieces and how do I balance both of those and then get a peer review of that, so that the cases as we develop them the operational cases then can be adjudicated and closed and resolved.” [Postor-Interview #5]
“This is where the real rub is, and this is really what AARO is kind of focused on, is let's make sure that the adversary is not doing something, we need to make sure that the adversaries aren't jumping ahead in a technological advancement in say I don't know propulsion or signature management that we weren't tracking or else we were tracking but they had a breakthrough that we didn't anticipate. Now something that was looked at as an evolutionary technology has suddenly become revolutionary because they had a leap ahead and they're employing it against us. Well that would be bad right from a national security perspective.” [Godier-Interview #9]
Hand off UAP mitigation to combatant commands:
“So AARO was required to help drive and develop what that mitigation [of UAP] is. AARO doesn't do the mitigation, right, and so we were trying to institutionalize all of this through the geographic commands… So what we were doing was establishing the processes and the requirements through the Joint Staff, which then issues the orders to all of them to say here's what we have to do from a reporting and a data retention requirement. So we got all of that done last year [May 2023]. That's followed by, okay now we need to work into all of the planning efforts by all of these commands, what are your mitigation responses, so that we were leading into how do you expand counter-UAS [unidentified aerial system] into counter-UAP writ large? And then the commands start to own the planning, then they can write the requirements which the services then have to provide capabilities for. So I would not dictate to a service you must provide X number of lasers and X number of jammers to this combatant command. I would work with the Joint Staff and the commands to establish what they're plan would look like for mitigation and then they would work with their service providers to get whatever capabilities they think they need to do so. Again, trying to not invent new things but to incorporate it into existing processes and procedures as much as possible, because ultimately this was a gaps-and-seams problem. There was nobody in charge of this particular problem. Part of the theory, part of the vision [behind AARO] was to institutionalize all this into existing processes and procedures and organizations at which point you no longer need a special office to go after.” [Postor-Interview #5]
“We're not going to build a bunch of standby people on the off chance that we're going to encounter a UAP that requires special handling from believing that it was alien in nature. So what we did was to satisfy the congressional requirement, there are real battlefield recovery programs …we would always want to go collect what a foreign adversary left on the battlefield, so that is a standing existing recovery program and reverse engineering program for foreign adversary capabilities. So in order to satisfy the congressional language and the intent, our mitigation and response plan was to contact the appropriate combatant command who would be in charge of whatever area globally a thing might have fallen out of the sky or got shot out of the sky and have them go recover it. That plan that was the standard plan, and that's no different than any other battlefield recovery plan.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
AARO’s mission is not finding aliens:
“The office's mission is not to prove the existence of extraterrestrials. The office's mission is to minimize technical and intelligence surprise. That is the primary mission.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“AARO's job was to prevent intelligence and technical surprise, and improve and prevent flight safety risks.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
“There are two different things happening here that we're talking about. So the [2017] The New York Times article covered a lot of the stories on pilots, right, pilots concerning things that they're seeing as they're flying around. So that all falls under the operational mission of AARO, right, there are real safety and security issues that AARO is trying to address, that the department is trying to address of hey what's in the airspace, is it dangerous, is it hostile, is it an adversary, or is it just something that could cause an accident in the air, what is that, how are we going to get our arms around it, and what are we going to do about it? Because the pilots were concerned and they had valid concerns about that. The historical piece of this, where you know, wrapped in the allegations of government cover up and conspiracy, are the things that are mostly unfounded, and are woven into the same narrative as what the pilots are seeing. And these are not the same things. These aren't even close to the same things.” [Greenstreet-Interview #6]
“I don't doubt and I do not disagree with their [pilots] frustration with the bureaucracy within the Navy, the Air Force, or the DoD at doing something. I absolutely understand that frustration but you've got to separate that frustration from science and fact. So that is what led to Congress telling us to go do something about it, so now they're doing something about it.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“Look, if you're gonna take this as a serious thing—which it is, you have safety and security issues attended to stuff that we aren't tracking in our airspace or in our space or in undersea—then you have to deconvolve that from the conspiracy theory. So right now if I have this conversation with the scientific community on the search for extraterrestrial life and as long as I'm having that conversation in the context of NASA's mission looking for life out in the universe and what signatures are attended to that, that is a very academic, a very scientifically based, a very rational conversation, right, peer-reviewed papers, scientific communities all over that we spend you know billions of dollars on space missions of which part of that is the look for life in the universe. As that conversation passes in, gets closer to Earth and passes into the solar system somewhere around Mars, maybe even Jupiter, it starts to get in into the science fiction realm. It goes less from the scientific and more starts tending to start getting hints of more science fiction. And then as you cross the ionosphere of the planet and you get into our upper atmosphere, it crosses squarely into conspiracy theory, and nobody wants to have the conversation. However AARO was designed and actually directed by Congress and by the Department and the IC that the primary mission is safety and security. Its mission was not to prove or disprove alien life, but it's also not to exclude that out of hand, right, we had to incorporate in the series of hypotheses that that is a possibility, all right, you have to have that open, we have no evidence that anything supports that but you have to keep it from a scientific perspective you have to have identified that as a hypothesis.” [Postor-Interview #5]
Steven Greenstreet: “I think the problem is that that real [domain awareness] problem initially was branded under the umbrella of paranormal, of aliens, and so people were looking this way instead of looking that way.”
Kirkpatrick: “That’s right. That's correct. And that's an important distinction you need to make sure it is clear with your readers, of you know, look these are two separate things and why people make that leap of ‘hey I don't understand what I'm seeing therefore it must be an alien’ there's a whole range of other possibilities between ‘I don't understand what I'm seeing’ and ‘it's an alien.’ There's all kinds of other stuff that happens in there right. Why people make that jump, I don't know. It's a very interesting psychological study, a PhD thesis for somebody, but it's not our job. Our job was to try to decouple the two.” [Greenstreet-Interview #6]
AARO’s historical UFO research was a distraction:
“I enjoyed the operational mission. The historical research, while interesting, coupled with the allegations, became most of my time, which is not where I needed to be. And the rest of my team, you know, I kept them focused on the operational mission because that's where they needed to go. That was the most important part of AARO, and still is today, is the safety and security and the national security issues attendant to that. But the team of debriefers and I focused on the research, and again, while, interesting, at the end, we're spending a lot of time and effort because of a group of people that have lobbied into the attention of Congress to make this go.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“This is really just a microcosm of a really large problem of distrust of government, distrust of how we conduct operations, investigations, how we govern and our capacity to do so. And I think some of the publicly expressed sentiment by policy makers that completely lacks any sort of rational thought or common sense just reinforces that concern. I would probably still be there if it weren’t for this irrationality and this cloud of conspiracy that detracts from the real mission. I’m both an intelligence officer and a scientist, and so hunting for the unknown is the sweet spot of, really, my career. This would be lots of fun if that’s all I had to worry about—but it’s not.” [Vergano-Interview #2]
“I would just ask the audience, you know, this is a very difficult mission area. This past assignment [AARO] there's a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of stigma still associated with that area. Trying to apply a rational, critical-thinking based, scientific approach to addressing that problem is really the only way to combat the information space that's being filled with stuff that's just not sustainable. The people that are doing that, my old team, they have sacrificed a lot to do that and they are absolutely some of the best people that I've worked with in the past. I handpicked a good number of them and I think the audience in the United States public owes them a debt of gratitude and owes them some respect for having to take this on.” [Postor-Interview #5]
Step 6: Blame UFO stories on Circular Reporting
In which Kirkpatrick explains how UFO belief is “spun up” from circular reporting of conspiracy theories.
False UFO evidence is perpetuated by hearsay and circular reporting:
“‘There is a lot of classified information we have uncovered that are real, non-extraterrestrial programs that have had unauthorized disclosures that we have pulled together and are providing to leadership to make a decision on what to do,’ Kirkpatrick said. But this information gap between sighting and understanding is filled by people with ‘vivid imaginations,’ Kirkpatrick argued. ‘If the government that owns that program does not have an appropriate explanation or story, then it’s going to be filled by the public imagination.’” [Ellie Cook’s Newsweek article]
“The report [Volume I] demonstrates that many of the circulating allegations described above derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology. Some are misrepresentations, and some derive from pure, unsupported beliefs. In many respects, the narrative is a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard, but the information often ultimately being sourced to the same small group of individuals.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“If you can't prove it, it's just hearsay. And everybody, everybody that we talked to, it was all turned into circular reporting, you know, somebody came in and said ‘I know that this happened because somebody else told me,’ and then you go talk to that person, we know that happened because somebody else told them.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“So from this perspective Senator Schumer [sponsor of the 2023 UAP Disclosure Act] is listening to his staffers, his staffers are listening to these people, yeah and when they come forward and they say hey we have credible people, okay you have credible people, I have credible people, the government is full of credible people all of them are experienced in what their role is in government. They do not necessarily know when they come across something from another part of the government, especially when we're talking about United States ability to maintain technological superiority against adversaries, and the research and development that goes into that, you know some of these credible people don't have any idea about what they're looking at. In fact I know all of these credible people and there's not one of them that's a real physicist, yeah so I have a hard time explaining that to the general public because they want to believe hey there's some guy claims he's got you know information about this that's true but none of them have presented any evidence, nothing that is actionable, nothing that we can go on, so all of this legislation is all coming from people saying they've seen something or saying they know about something or saying that they saw something but not one of them have provided any actual evidence, and all of the evidence that we investigated and track back down and and pulled out of archives and declassified… none of them turned up anything that was positive none of them turned up anything that had any credibility as far as this is an extraterrestrial reverse engineering program.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
False UFO evidence gets “spun up” by sensationalism and media interest:
“Somebody sent me some pictures that were taken from the space station… So, people [astronauts] are taking pictures of debris from the space station because they take pictures of everything from the space station, and somebody got a hold of it and tried to make a claim that it was, you know, a UAP that was coming down from orbit. Well there was no radar data to support that the piece of the object, you know, tracked back to a piece of debris. Those are the kinds of things that, you know, we didn't even bother to go much further than that… Those are the kinds of things that get spun up as space things.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims…The result of this whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or third hand retellings of the same, was a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims—as if we didn’t have anything better to do.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“All of this is without substantiating evidence, but, alas, belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume in which it is transmitted and the number of times it is repeated, not the actual facts.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“The operational mission Congress has assigned AARO is important. Accumulating observations by highly trained U.S. military and other credible personnel of unidentified anomalous phenomena at or near sensitive national security areas and activities calls for a serious effort to understand what’s going on. Simply put, “unidentified” is unacceptable, particularly in these times of heightened geopolitical tension. Part of the problem we face today, however, is that the modern media cycle drives stories faster than sound research, science and peer review time lines can validate them.” [Scientific American op-ed]
Peter Bergen: “Do you think by setting up this office [AARO], paradoxically, you just increase the media interest and is this sort of fueling the fire of these kinds of people who think there probably are aliens out there?”
Kirkpatrick: “Yeah, that's a really good question. We've actually debated that on many, many occasions of, you know, are we, are we adding more fuel to this fire or not?” [Bergen-Interview #1]
Step 7: Blame a UFO Lobby Group
In which Kirkpatrick makes the case that increased interest in UFOs post-2017 is due to the machinations of a self-interested UFO lobby group.
Original Culprits were the Robert Bigelow/Harry Reid/AAWSAP nexus:
“During a full-scale, year-long investigation of this story (which has been told and retold by a small group of interconnected believers and others with possibly less than honest intentions—none of whom have firsthand accounts of any of this), AARO discovered a few things, and none were about aliens.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“…this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace. In 2009 then senator Harry Reid asked the secretary of defense (SECDEF) to set up a SAP (special access program) to protect the alleged UAP/UFO material that AATIP proponents believed the USG was hiding. The SECDEF declined to do so after a review by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), and DIA concluded that not only did no such material exist, but taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. This is well documented in open sources, particularly in records available on DIA’s electronic FOIA Reading Room. After the negative response by SECDEF, Senator Reid then enlisted the help of then senator Joseph Lieberman to request that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set up an SAP for the same purpose. The administrative SAP proposal package was informed by the same individuals who had been associated with AATIP. AARO’s archival research has located the administrative proposal for the DHS SAP [KONA Blue], complete with the participants, which has been declassified and is being reviewed for public release.” [Scientific American op-ed]
“Senator Harry Reid wanted to set up a Special Access Program with the Department of Defense to protect alleged information that the then AATIP/AAWSAP program was supposedly uncovering, and to provide a compartment under which the alleged spacecraft could be returned to government oversight. So the big concern here from Reid and from Congress was if this program existed there was no congressional oversight, so he sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense and said ‘hey we want to set up this Special Access Program.’ Secretary of Defense said no and then had a review of the [AAWSAP] program with DIA and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and said ‘yeah, not only are we not going to do that, but we're we're going to stand this program down because this has nothing to do with, you know, aliens and extraterrestrials, this was supposed to be something else.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“Senator Harry Reid, who was a true believer and thought that, ‘Hey, the government is hiding this and from congressional oversight.’ None of that, actually manifested in any evidence, but it did cause a number of things that people could point to and go, ‘Hey, see, there's a compartment over there that's supposed to be holding, you know, extraterrestrial material.’ But none of it had anything in it. It's all window dressing, if you will. No substance.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“Some of the people involved in these allegations, those people have all been working this problem, if you want to call it a problem, for 20 years and most of them are associated with some of the original work done under Bigelow and the former, past Senator Harry Reid, and are in a position to benefit from this type of of language, which then drives for further investment by Congress and further investigation being directed at AARO at the Pentagon at the IC to go and and look at this.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“These are all pieces of a story that contribute to the larger narrative, none of which is true when you dig into it. It has different aspects that are colored by different people’s perception and interpretation of a number of events. It contributes to this story why? Because we [AARO] had several interviewees come in who named Kona Blue as the program that is housing the, you know, reverse engineering and the nonhuman intelligence bodies, of these craft, and that is absolutely not the case. …But that's where that came from and why it contributes to this story because then you come forward in time to now and interviewees are naming Kona Blue as one of those programs, and it's not.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“If you follow the information, and these are data points that we've laid out in the historical report [Volume I], if you follow the information, you've got people that talk to people who come in to tell the story or tell the media and other people come in, but it turns out none of them have any firsthand evidence or knowledge. They're all relaying stories that they've heard from other people. And if you track where all those people know each other, they all goes back to the same core set of group set of people.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“They're some of the same people that worked for Robert Bigelow under the DIA program. They're some of the same people that have been working behind the scenes with Congress to write legislation. They’re the same people that worked with a U.S. company and the United States Army to explore a piece of material that they claim to have knowledge that it was a UAP and it really is a piece of missile casing from the 1950s. They're the same people that have been influencing some of these whistleblowers who have come forward to say, ‘Hey, I don't have any firsthand evidence, but all these people are telling me this. Here's what I know.’ [Bergen-Interview #1]
“When you pull the thread on all of that, it all comes down to again that same kind of group of people we identified in the paper [Volume 1]. They had their fingers in all of this. And it all is self-consistent within the story, but once you start pulling the threads on the facts, it doesn't hold together.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
Rennenkampff: “Is it fair to say that the individuals leading this effort are all publicly known?”
Sean Kirkpatrick: “I would say the bulk of them are … Some of them are obviously very vocal in the public domain, some of them are not as vocal in the public domain, but they're all linked. The core of the people that have been really advocating and have their fingers in a number of these pies are all connected and are many of them are public. So you know there's really two camps but the camp that's mostly public is getting a lot of their information right from these other folks [who are not public] but these other folks have no evidence, and all of those folks are are doing the same thing, I heard a story, I knew a guy. There was only a couple of people that came close to having what we would call firsthand knowledge but what they had firsthand knowledge of was not what they thought they had firsthand knowledge of. It turned out to be some other program that had nothing to do with aliens, but it's advanced technology, it's part of the US's push for technological superiority, and they're not going to understand those things when they see them if they don't know what they're looking at.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
“The people that you've named [Harry Reid, Robert Bigelow, Tom Delonge], I can't think of anything that they've done that I would say is positive in the search of answer to this question.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
“So [David Grusch] he's one of the individuals that I think this core group of people have influenced him, have told him this information. And I don't, you know, he may have misinterpreted things that people have said, or he may have just fallen to the influence of what these folks have been telling him. In either event, at the time I left, he had not come in to speak to AARO, so I can't say with 100 percent what he has to say, only what he's put out into the media.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
Steven Greenstreet: “I read your report, I see your 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.” [Greenstreet-Interview #6]
Ways the lobby group have manipulated Congress:
“I think what you'll find is you can probably do the analysis and figure out who's who, and I'm sure there will be people that will try to do that. But that's not my job. And our job was to document everything, investigate it, and protect the identities. Now, interestingly enough, some of the legislation including the extension of the whistleblower protections to these folks was actually ghost written by some of these same people who had lobbied Congress. So they managed to write themselves in their own protections to allow them to go do some of this stuff.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“...we're spending a lot of time and effort because of a group of people that have lobbied into the attention of Congress to make this go. So if you look, in the historical report [Volume I] on page 36, you'll see 1,2,3,4, 4 or 5 main bullets there that speak to this same group of people who had their hands in everything from purported material exploitation to congressional lobbying and writing of legislation, to expanding legitimate special access programmes or purportedly for alien, and extraterrestrial exploitation, which they weren't supposed to do. You know, there's a lot of things there that all of the same people were involved in, including some of the same ones were involved in the think tank study, that's called out in there. It was just it's, it's all the same group. Look, once the Department [of Defense] understood what was happening, they put a stop to it. What's really the new part of this is that DHS piece, which had been alleged, as being you know, one of the hiding places or extraterrestrial bodies, turned out to not to be that, it turned out to be this kind of same group of people trying to stand up a programme under DHS, because the Department of Defense shut it down. So there's, there's, you know, a little bit of investigative work that we have laid out, kind of put all these pieces together. There's no evidence to support any of the allegations or any extraterrestrial reverse engineering or non-human biologics or whatever you want to call it. But what's interesting is that some of the language that was used in the open testimony like Mr. Grusch, and others, is actually the same language that was in the original story back in the ‘60s, and then again in the ‘80s, ‘90s. So if you look at this story, historically, and some of that is in historical record, it's online now. You see this story crop up every couple of decades and it's pretty much the same story.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“And here's where this gets really interesting, is some of that same core group of individuals that we were talking about earlier, right, had reached out to one of these industry partners and convinced them to take a look at a piece of material that they claimed was part of a crashed UFO. And then turned around to point to that company and say, hey, they're exploiting, you know, that reverse engineering crashed UFOs? Well, they were the ones that gave it to them. And then once we actually got control of that little project and took a look at it, it turns out, that's not really a UFO, it's most likely a piece of a missile casing from an Air Force test back in the ‘60s or ‘50s. So this is the kind of circular accusations that have been going on. You got a group of people that start something, and then they go out and say, they're doing this. So the same group of people who expanded this Special Access Program that they weren't supposed to, then go out and say there's a hidden Special Access Program that has UAP/UFO stuff? Like, well, yeah, 'cause you expanded it.” [Lavell-Interview #4]
“There are people that that sat in my office and gloated over the fact that they wrote a lot, ghost wrote a lot of the legislation that I had to deal with and pushed it through Congress through back channels, and had you know they enjoyed the power of being able to manipulate the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community through Congress and they enjoy that because of some of the relationships and backdoor you know accesses they had developed.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
Peter Bergen: “So, has there been a sort of self-reinforcing loop in your view that produces pressure from Congress to investigate what the hell's going on? Then that becomes an office. That office is the office that you then ran…. What you're saying is actually quite ironic, because the kind of true believer view is there's a current conspiracy by the Pentagon to suppress information about UFOs. What you're portraying is a conspiracy of like-minded individuals in the government and elsewhere to say that there is a conspiracy to suppress information about UFOs. I was searching for the right metaphor, but I think this is known as a self-licking ice cream cone. …The self-licking ice cream cone is a Pentagon term of art for a program that exists only to perpetuate itself.
Sean Kirkpatrick: “That is a self-licking ice cream cone. Exactly.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
Step 8: Cast UFO Belief as a Religion and a Grift
In which Kirkpatrick explains why people succumb to belief in UFOs.
UFO believe is akin to a religion:
“There's there are a number of things to take away from this, not the least of which is that the complexity of the different contributing factors that go into the general belief and conclusion and continued persistent conspiracy theory, is it comes up periodically. So if you look back in time, the contemporary allegations that we're dealing with today had their roots 60, 70 years ago, and it waxes and wanes with some variation on that story over time. And every time, the little variations that go into that tend to not, you know, bear fruit, they end up being not true. But the fact that no one will recognize that means that there's some other fundamental factor at play here, because the truth is contrary to the belief. And so I think the thing to take away from this is there is a belief without evidence that is never going to go away.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“And it becomes frustrating, and even to the point of maddening, of where some people come out on ‘well it can't be that, it must be aliens,’ and there's no logical reason why one can make that leap, none at all, other than belief.” [Godier-Interview #9]
“I mean, how do you make that leap [to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis]? Right? That makes me scratch my head sometimes when people do that. And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them, here's the company in Florida that builds exactly what you've described. And their response is, ‘well, no, no, no, it's gotta be extraterrestrials and you're covering it up.’ There is absolutely nothing that I'm going to do, say, or produce evidentiary, that is going to make the true believers convert, if you will. I have, it's almost like a religion. It is, it is basically a religion. And it is a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought. And so that group of people you're never going to convince.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“There's lots of writings, throughout literature and throughout history, of observations around mankind filling the void of the unknown with beliefs that give them comfort for not knowing what that is. Whether it's the early, religious deities or it’s the fairy in the fields, or the stars above, it's all predicated off of mankind's need for an answer. That's at least my sense of where that comes from, and it's deeply rooted.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“Because people want to believe. They want to believe in things like alien technology, because they don't want to be alone in the universe, and they want to believe that there's a reason things are the way they are.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“It's belief, and once you get into it’s belief and not evidentiary based fact, now you're almost into a religious discussion because you can't combat belief. …you can put all that out and people are still going to believe and they're going to believe because they want to believe. I've actually heard this from a couple of people, I mean I get emails all the time, and I've had a number of people concerningly--because you know it actually makes me worried about where these people are headed--but I've had people say, look the state of the world today is such that I'm scared, this is horrible, we're all going to die, this is all bad, and you know aliens are going to save us. It's not necessarily that they believe aliens are going to save us, they want to believe somebody is going to save us.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
Motivated reasoning for UFO belief:
Daniel Lavelle: “I'm gonna ask you to speculate, but what do you think their motivation is? I mean, are they grifters? in the purest sense of the word, they know they're lying that they're trying to fool people? Or do they genuinely genuinely believe this stuff and just a bit irrational about it?”
Kirkpatrick: “So, much like UAP, there's no one explanation. …So there's clearly monetary value, there's a huge market to keep this kind of conspiracy going. Everything from TV shows, the movies and whatever. Companies that are stood up to go investigate things. There's fame. There's influence in the sense of, ‘hey, if I can get some people on the Hill excited about this, whether it's staffers and members, and they want to keep talking to me,’ then there's a, it's not really a power but an influence motivation. There's the absolute true-belief, which I would suggest is more akin to a religion than an actual factual thing. And those are the people that you're never going to convince, no matter what you put in front of them… And then there, you know, there's people that have, there are some that unfortunately have clear issues... what can only be described as mental health issues. So I mean, you know, take your pick, it could be any of those, it could be none of those, it could just be ‘I want to go do this.’” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
“Some of them are naive, some like to influence power and legislation, some are in it for money, some for fame, some may even be true believers,” Kirkpatrick says. They almost never admit to error, because “they’ve made this central to their life’s purpose.” They inject their convictions into politics and the legislative process “through access to higher authorities,” to drive the Defense Department and the intelligence community “to do things and spend money.” [Hiltzik-Print Source #4]
“So why do they do it? I get asked this question a lot. I got asked it in Congress, I got asked it behind closed doors, on camera, off camera, all the time--why do people do it? And my job was not to determine intent, let's be clear, my job was not to determine intent, my job was to determine truth and then let other people figure that out. People do things for a variety of reasons. There's fame, fortune, there's power. The drive for power is, you would be surprised how much that one comes up in this, you think it'd just be money and fame, but the ability of people to say I helped ghostwrite the legislation that forced the Pentagon to go do this, right I've had three people tell me that, and they like to say it a lot. It's like okay well that's great but you know what we all, if you're in the government long enough you pretty much all end up helping write legislation at some point.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
“Why would people believe this if all the evidence that we lay out is true, which is pretty much incontrovertible, then why would they go down this road? And there are generally four reasons that I've come up with that people go down this road, at least of all of the people that we interviewed and all of the investigations we looked at for the historical piece [AARO Vol. 1 historical report] there were generally four reasons. One is clearly just fame, they you know people like to have the spotlight. Fortune. People are trying to make money off of it. Power. There are people that that sat in my office and gloated over the fact that they wrote a lot, ghost wrote a lot of the legislation that I had to deal with and pushed it through Congress through back channels, and had you know they enjoyed the power of being able to manipulate the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community through Congress and they enjoy that because of some of the relationships and backdoor you know accesses they had developed. So power, and it was more than one person it was at least three that that were very happy about to share this with me. And the last one is pure belief. And you have to look at it through the lens of this is akin to a religion, and as you know you cannot compete with a religious belief. If somebody has a religious belief their entire life is inculcated in that, they're not going to budge off of that and this is really the behaviors are really no different right they are they are really no different in that no matter what evidence you put in front of them.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
Step 9: Cast UFO Belief as a Dangerous Societal Problem
In which Kirkpatrick explains why UFO belief poses dangers for society as a whole.
Society-wide loss of critical thinking skills:
“This is a larger problem than just AARO what you're describing is, and it's as I pointed out in my op-ed, it's a systemic loss of intellectual capacity, critical thinking skills, rational thought and even common sense. And the general populace has lost respect or even understanding of scientific method science and how do you go about discerning truth from fiction, and it is getting worse, and it pervades every aspect of our society. I am depressed because I don't see that improving. The only way that's going to improve is through education, information and whatnot, and we are hamstringing ourselves in educating and in providing information and in validating truth, and instead we are we are getting our gospel from social media or the internet, or the 24/7 news cycle, and how many clicks can I get, instead of actually stopping and asking yourself does this actually make sense? And if so, where's the evidence? So all these people, right, great you want to believe what you want to believe. Believe it. Stop wasting taxpayer time and energy to chase it for the purposes of getting some of that taxpayer dollars you know put into your pocket which is a whole other story. But people need to start questioning, where's the data, where's the evidence, where? I've seen everything these people have said they had, and there was nothing there. There was nothing. Some of these people gave me information after information after information after information, we went and investigate everything and not a single thing turned out to be true. So why? That goes back to your question. So I’m depressed because I don't think the future looks too good from a cognitive perspective across the populace unless people start relearning critical thinking.” [Keeting-Interview #8]
There’s nothing wrong with people asking the government to “definitively investigate some of these things and put some evidence on the table and show what is true and what isn’t,” he says. “Where it becomes an issue is when it is a continuous hammering of this until they get an answer that they like, even though everything uncovered to date points to the contrary.”
That points to “a larger problem with public opinion about scientific inquiry — science by social media versus science by scientific method,” he says. “You’re seeing the degradation of critical thinking skills and rational thought when it comes to analyzing what’s out in the world.”
When scientific data confound received beliefs, he says, “people cry ‘conspiracy,’ or ‘the data is wrong,’ or ‘scientists are making it up.’... Well, some of these scientists have been around for 30 or 40 years. If you don’t believe they know what they’re doing, then what are you going to base your decisions on in the future? Just pure belief and speculation?”
“I see what I was doing on UAP and misinformation as a microcosm of many other issues that challenge the U.S. today. That is, the division across belief lines where evidence suggests a contrary opinion that conflicts with one’s own belief system or political system.” [Hiltzik-Print Source #4]
The danger of UFO believers in US government positions:
“True believers are not just outside of government. Many of them are inside government. Many of them are in places of authority and decision-making. And you don't know who they are until they come into the office and have a discussion about this.” [Bergen-Interview #1]
“There is a belief without evidence that is never going to go away. I think the thing that is most troublesome to me is the number of people that are in government, that I may have worked with for decades, that I did not know had that belief until they sat down in my office and told me, ‘you know, I'm not going to help you because you're part of the government coverup of all the alien technology.’ And for somebody who I've known for a while, and worked on highly sensitive national security problems on, to say that without evidence as a belief is disturbing and should be a flag for the National Security Community because how can you then trust those people if they are not objective enough to understand evidentiary based assertions like that, or lack of evidence in those assertions, how can you trust them with our national secrets? I think that is a point of research by somebody else at another time but I think that is certainly a concern.” [Williams-Interview #3]
“That is one of the more frustrating and I think one of the more disheartening things that came out of my job was the number of people that are in positions of of authority and power and decision making who have completely lost all rational thought and critical thinking skills when it comes to something like this, where we laid out an answer, here's everything that you've claimed or somebody has come and claimed to you that you have believed at face value because they're a credible person, with no shred of evidence that they've provided, and yet we've laid out all of this evidence, we dug through every archive every program every access every capability, and you lay all that out and that is insufficient in the eyes of a true ‘I believe this must be right.’” [Adalian-Interview #10]
The danger of foreign interference and exploitation:
“There is the potential for intentional disinformation… because it's so divisive. It's just another example of how, you know, somebody could use this in a system, in a societal divide, to exacerbate anger against the government.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
Those conflicts can be exploited by foreign adversaries or domestic actors seeking political gains or personal fortunes. “It’s a common and increasing trend that’s worrisome from a governance perspective,” Kirkpatrick says, with a passionate edge to his voice. “How do you govern when those gaps and seams are not only being exacerbated and exploited, but are amplified through social media and media with influence over political powers in the U.S.?”
Having devoted his career to the national security, the trend leaves him concerned and appalled. “The public needs to understand how science works, and if it goes against their belief, it’s not a conspiracy,” he says.
“They need to understand that their beliefs are being exploited, either by people in the U.S. or people in other countries for gain. If the American public understood fully that they’re being taken advantage of, they address things differently. Because Americans don’t like to be taken advantage of.” [Hiltzik-Print Source #4]
Step 10: Shame Congress
In which Kirkpatrick tries to persuade factions within Congress to listen to reason and let go of UFO belief.
Lack of evidentiary critical thinking in Congress:
“Carl Sagan popularized the maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This advice should not be optional for policy makers. In today’s world of misinformation, conspiracy driven decision-making and sensationalist-dominated governance, our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking is eroding, with deleterious consequences for our ability to effectively deal with multiplying challenges of ever increasing complexity. [Scientific American op-ed]
Vergano: “I mean, from the outside, it looks like grandstanding congress people talking about UFOs and distracting you from the other mission, your main mission, of actually determining what these things are that are affecting our pilots. I got to say, as someone who’s interviewed a lot of people [in] the Air Force, in the Army [for the] last three decades, it seems kind of insulting and crazy to think that they would hide a technology that would protect soldiers and pilot’s lives. I mean, is that an unfair thing to say?”
Kirkpatrick: “It’s not at all, but you’re trying to put logic and reason to a conspiracy. …I think some of the publicly expressed sentiment by policy makers that completely lacks any sort of rational thought or common sense just reinforces that concern. I would probably still be there [at AARO] if it weren’t for this irrationality and this cloud of conspiracy that detracts from the real mission. I’m both an intelligence officer and a scientist, and so hunting for the unknown is the sweet spot of, really, my career. This would be lots of fun if that’s all I had to worry about—but it’s not, right? So most of my time [was] spent trying to figure out how to investigate conspiracy, and you can’t prove a negative, right? So now you’re faced with laying out as much evidence as you can, but you find that the policy makers have this belief that is completely unfounded and irrational.... I’ve had senior leaders sit in my office and accuse me of being part of the cover-up for the last 40 years. I’m not that old. So, you know, this is just not rational. We laid out a very clear, scientifically based plan that is being executed to do everything from calibrating our sensors and training our operators on known objects to investigating what state-of-the-art technologies are happening across the world that we may not know about or not recognize. And so my team and I put all that in place, and that’s all been executed and analyzed and done in a rational sanction. What happens to that is where I get frustrated because where that goes beyond that—and does it fall on the deaf ears of these policy makers? You know, I’ve got better things to do. So I’m hoping that once this report [Volume I] gets delivered, there will be an unclassified version that goes to the public that will help clear up at least some of this. [Vergano-Interview #2]
Rennenkampff: “The evidentiary threshold I feel like should be fairly high for these individuals [Senators Rubio, Gillibrand, Schumer, Reid, McCain, Liberman] to stick out their necks.”
Sean Kirkpatrick: “That is what I walked into them every time with, you need to have evidence. And they don't have any, and we didn't find any, but that's not scratching the itch because you have these [raises fingers in scare quotes] ‘highly credible people’ who keep coming forward. But you know some of these highly credible people still wouldn't come in to talk to us because they know that our threshold, certainly my threshold for evidence was scientifically based, logically based, critical thinking based, rational, and we could prove it.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Some in Congress are being manipulated:
Vergano: “And it just seems like a tremendous game of telegraph that’s been going on for a long time. And it’s spun up now from the world of ufology to entertainment, to the Congress and genuine congresspeople, who aren’t in the intelligence world that you describe, sort of pounding the table and demanding answers on this. Is that unfair?”
Kirkpatrick: “No, that’s not unfair. We have legitimate concerns by some of the more rational-minded members of Congress, mostly on the Senate side, about the contemporary observations. I have trained military pilots, intelligence sensors that pick up things that we don’t identify. Now just because we don’t identify it, you shouldn’t leap to ‘it’s an extraterrestrial.’ There are a lot of things that we can’t identify, and that’s part of the problem.” [Vergano-Interview #2]
Responding to a question about a UAP recovery team: “There was somebody who was super excited about having pushed into Congress direction to do things like that. It was all congressionally directed, so if you go back and look at the congressional language, it directed me to stand up Fly Away teams, recovery teams that in the event of a recovery of a UFO, or a shoot down of a UAP, we could go out and collect it. Well that's just ridiculous. We're not going to build a bunch of standby people on the off chance that we're going to encounter a UAP that requires special handling from believing that it was alien in nature. So what we did was to satisfy the congressional requirement, there are real battlefield recovery programs …That plan that was the standard plan, and that's no different than any other battlefield recovery plan.” [Adalian-Interview #10]
“I want to be clear that the senators on the Hill are trying to do their job. They are however in many instances being, I would say, misinformed by people who may have different motives than finding the actual truth.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
Some in Congress are being willfully ignorant:
“More worrisome is the willingness of some to make judgments and take actions on these stories without having seen or even requested supporting evidence, an omission that is all the more problematic when the claims are so extraordinary. Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter. Members have a responsibility to exhibit critical thinking skills instead of seeking the spotlight. [Scientific American op-ed]
“Kirkpatrick is critical of these statements. AARO has the authority to receive information of all classifications, but many figures making jaw-dropping statements have long refused to cooperate with the office, he said. Such a reluctance is suspicious, he said, adding he would "criticize any of the policymakers that enable that behavior by giving it a platform, instead of making use of the tools that they put in place to go in and investigate." [Ellie Cook’s Newsweek article]
“There are a lot of good people in Congress that are trying hard to get to the truth of this, and most of them were on the Senate side. You know, the Intel and defense committees in particular, are very, very concerned about the safety and security aspects of this mission space and rightfully so. You don't want this to be an intelligence surprise. You don't want this to be a technology surprise. That being said, there's a handful of folks that are, you know, in Congress, but are mostly on the House side, very true-believing, Pentagon's lying, there's a government conspiracy and a cover up and, you know, why would we ever believe that? …You know, those folks, they never ever asked for a briefing from AARO in the entire time I was there. They never asked for an update. They never even bothered to inquire about anything that they put out into the public space before they did it.”
Daniel Lavelle: “Is this [Tennessee Congressman] Tim Burchett, et al.?”
Kirkpatrick: “This is, yeah, this is the House side. Predominantly, this is the House side, right… First of all, Congress stood us [AARO] up to go investigate. And you should make use of the tools you stood up to get to answers that you want. Or at least the truth that you want to find out, and may not be the answer you want. And often, that's the case. The other piece of that is, you know, they really need to spend some time listening to what has been found before they jump out into the public space and decry the Pentagon is hiding something from them.” [Lavelle-Interview #4]
Steven Greenstreet: “This all started in 2017, this current phase of things, and it's been a non-stop UFO and alien fest… Why didn't the Pentagon just shut all this nonsense down six years ago?”
Kirkpatrick: “Well, those are all great questions. I don't have answers for them other than Congress wrote a lot of it into law, and told the department and the IC to go do. And so they have to the best of their ability. So you know I think what you're seeing is the executive branch, in particular the Pentagon and the IC, are very much trying to address Congress's concerns. Congress is continuing to beat this drum despite evidence contrary.” [Greenstreet-Interview #6]
“We convinced Congress last year [2023] not to go down that road because in that Schumer Amendment [UAP Disclosure Act] last year was additional legislation if you recall that directed NARA [National Archives] to stand up you know and turn over all of its--but they had already given that responsibility to AARO, so it was duplicative in that they were now directing two different organizations to do the same thing. And we told them that's ridiculous, we have already started working with NARA, we at that time, we'd already uncovered more documents that NARA had put out there, had already set up their web portal, linked it to our web page, we already gone down this road. There was no need for additional legislation. …Now, they got upset and they're like well we're going to just reintroduce it, and why? Because you got the people like you know Tim Burchett and [Anna Paulina] Luna who are all on the House side who are making all of this noise…. so here we are again, where they're gonna introduce this law, maybe it gets through the NDAA, maybe it won't, or it'll be some form of it I'm sure.” [Rennenkampff-Interview #7]
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
