Reactions to Volume I
Disclosure Yearbook Series (2024)
To read more from this series about AARO’s historical report, follow the links:
Jump to Chapter 1: Objective Summary of AARO’s 2024 Historical Report (Volume I)
Jump to Chapter 2: AARO’s Historical Report Volume I is an Op-Ed not a History
Jump to Chapter 3: Kirkpatrick’s Messaging Strategy for Volume I--an Oral History
Jump to Chapter 4: The Aims and Effectiveness of Kirkpatrick’s Strategy
When AARO released its first official UAP report, on January 12, 2023, it was heralded by a chorus of glowing press releases from AARO’s cheering section in Congress. Senator Mark Warner, Senator Marco Rubio, Representative Andre Carson, Representative Adam Schiff, and Representative Mike Gallagher all released same-day statements offering public encouragement for AARO’s efforts.
This was a big moment, which garnered a lot of press attention for a dry, run-of-the-mill government report, because it was the first time that the office Congress set up to study what was commonly understood to be UFOs released its first set of findings. Looking back, the 2022 UAP Report (it was turned in a few months late), was not about UFOs at all, but was in fact just as a dry, run-of-the-mill government report. It stated that AARO had 510 UAP reports in its database but “more than half” of these were known common objects like balloons, and while some UAP “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics… many reports lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty.” This was Kirkpatrick’s sensor calibration campaign in action, but back then it was seen as an exciting start to a process of discovery, as evident in congressional press statements.
Sen. Warner: “I am encouraged to see an increase in UAP reporting – a sign of decreased stigma…”
Sen. Rubio: “The report highlights 510 UAP national security incidents reported since 2004, a significant increase… I am committed to ensuring we get to the truth for the American people.”
Sen. Gillibrand (before the report’s release): “He’s [Kirkpatrick] extremely serious and very focused. I’m optimistic that it will be a thorough and thoughtful approach and one that will have a public lens.”
Rep. Gallagher referred to AARO’s new mission objectives in the just-passed 2023 NDAA: “The whistleblower protections recently passed into law are an essential step forward to solving this decade-long mystery.” In a reference to the historical report, he told The New York Times, that a “comprehensive timeline” of unidentified aerial phenomena in U.S. government records was needed.
This flurry of press releases was a strategic and concerted effort by policy makers to leverage AARO’s report to build momentum for AARO’s mission within the government and the public sphere, to put wind to AARO’s back to do the work Congress had charged it to do. Each of these policy makers had read or at least been fully briefed on the contents of the 2022 UAP report before they spoke about it. I bring this 2023 history up because none of it happened when AARO released its much anticipated historical report.
Congress Reactions to Volume I
Like AARO’s first operational report, its first historical report was highly anticipated, and seen as a tool Congress could wield to help bring about UFO disclosure. Instead, Volume I garnered almost no reaction at all, despite reporter Matt Laslo’s efforts to get a quote after its public release on March 8.
Rep. Andre Carson: “I’m still reviewing it. Stay tuned.” (March 13)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: “Haven’t read it yet.” (March 14)
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: “I’m skeptical.” (March 21)
Rep. Jared Moskowitz: “I didn’t see the latest report. But now that you said that, I'll read it on the plane.” Laslo: What do make of AARO these days?” JM: “Well, we don't know.” (March 22)
You might say it sailed over Capitol Hill like a lead balloon.
On May 2 when Laslo asked Gillibrand her thoughts on the how the tone of Volume I “kinda made it feel like case closed,” she said this:
“Oh, it's definitely not case closed. I think that their report was just that, their analysis of everything they were shown and everyone they talked to, cause they had no basis to say there's a secret program. But of note, the two whistleblowers that I've met with did not meet with AARO and refused to meet with AARO. And so maybe the next director they'll meet with, but I can't assess them unless AARO can talk to them, cause I don’t — I mean, AARO knows what they know and what they've seen and what they've been shown. ...so we're gonna try to do something this summer to just, again, keep the public aware of where we are, what we know, what we don't know and how we're going to gather data from here going forward so we have more robust information.”
Gallagher, who expressed eagerness for the “comprehensive timeline” that was to be part of the historical report, said on April 17 that he was frustrated with AARO’s definitive conclusions that seem to fly in the face of contemporary witness accounts: “I still don’t think we have a good explanation for what’s fouling our [military training] ranges. I haven’t heard one. And that’s just a matter of safety for our pilots. And furthermore, like, I don’t think we have a well-enough established process for just cataloging incidents, like, analyzing all the data and storing it in the right way. I still feel like AARO has a long way to go in that respect as well.”
Representative Tim Burchett, on March 12, the same week as Volume I was released, was true to form: “They’re lying — they’re lying to us, man. They’re not telling the truth, and it’s unfortunate. They’re just trying to degrade people. And, you know: debate us, don’t run us down.”
Also on March 12 Representative Eric Burlison submitted a letter to House leadership requesting the establishment of a UAP select committee. The letter complained of the IC/DoD’s “lack of cooperation and evasion of congressional scrutiny… which has only deepened public mistrust.” It said there still needed to be clear answers to how much taxpayer money was being spent “analyzing and investigating UAP,” and that Congress needed to begin an independent, formal investigation through an empowered select committee. It was signed by seven other members, including Burchett, Luna, Moskowitz, and Matt Gaetz. This was part of the “House side” of the UAP debate that Kirkpatrick suggested was most in thrall to the UFO lobby group. Nothing came of this request, and there was no public response to the letter.
If the sustained criticisms from disclosure-supportive policy makers is one indicator of Volume I’s ineffectiveness, another is the silence of disclosure-hostile policy makers who are aligned with Kirkpatrick’s conclusions. In 2024 there were only two House members who have consistently made statements or taken actions intended to actively curtail UFO transparency and investigative efforts, and to stifle the public discussion of UFOs—the chair and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner and Jim Himes. In 2023, Turner derided his colleagues who were interested in this topic as the “pro-alien caucus.” If anyone was going to boost the signal of Volume I it would be these two, but they never released a statement praising it or referenced it in a hearing. On March 12, Turner and Himes conducted the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment public hearing with directors of the lead IC agencies, including DNI Avril Haines, whose office jointly oversees AARO with DoD. It would have been a good opportunity to plug Kirkpatrick’s conclusions, but there was no mention of the just released report. Perhaps they believe the less UAP/UFOs are mentioned the better for their cause— a conclusion Kirkpatrick might agree with.
Conversely, the key disclosure-supportive policy makers indicated they were going to continue their efforts, including climbing back in the saddle with AARO.
Gillibrand revealed to Laslo that she met with interim director Tim Phillips and found him “incredibly competent.” She requested that Phillips present more of AARO’s findings at a public hearing over the summer. Tellingly, she encouraged Phillips to bring UAP data that are “examples of things that were unknown that they've been able to figure out and examples of things that were unknown that they still haven't figured out, so that the public can see the difference.” I perceive this to be Gillibrand trying to help AARO not to succumb to its own worst instincts. Since the IC/DoD began declassifying and sharing public UAP examples in May 2022, all it has ever shared with the public are examples that support its official stance that UAP are misidentified common objects, or UAP cases contain so little data that a resolution cannot be determined but they are probably common objects. In the above quote, Gillibrand is counseling AARO to keep doing that, but to also show that AARO can be transparent about the truly anomalous cases that defy easy explanation. Kirkpatrick has said that during his tenure AARO had no such data. If that is still the case after AARO had been in operation for over two years, then either the anomalous phenomenon Congress is interested in will never be found, or the IC/DoD will never find the will to be transparent about them.
In May, about six months after AARO completed its information gathered that went into Volume I, Senator Rounds suggested that AARO was gaining more access and awareness than was evident in that report:
“From what I can see, I think, they're getting invited into areas where they're getting access to more and more information. Which is good. I don't know if we've solved the problem of the silos that you find within DoD where everything is so secretive at the special access level, between the IC community and the DoD community, in general, that there is not a lot of overlap between folks who see the different programs. And, I think, AARO is recognizing that. And I think they're probably going to be able to shed some light without threatening national security with some of the information.”
The reason those special access silos are so hard to extract information from, according to Rounds, is because, “you have to ask the right questions to the right people in the right setting in order to get an answer.” And he was holding a trust-but-verify stance as to whether AARO would be able to do that:
“I think the preponderance of the evidence is that AARO is on the hunt… I'm not saying that I have full confidence in it. I'm just saying, right now, the evidence is that they're trying hard and that they seem to be making some inroads, but time will tell and we're not going to let up on our interest in it.”
We're not going to let up on our interest in it. By this measure, Kirkpatrick failed in one of his main objectives.
Reactions from the Media
There were only a few mainstream news reports written about Volume I. Politico published a straight summation of the report sans commentary or color (US once considered a program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals). The New York Times article (Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up) was written by national security reporter Julian Barnes, a long-time and vocal UFO skeptic who is unashamed (and allowed) to insert his own editorializing thoughts on the topic into his news reports. In 2022 and 2023 he wrote articles that parroted unnamed Pentagon sources who made similar arguments that Kirkpatrick made in Volume I. So Barnes’s coverage reads like a victory lap: “The 63-page document is the most sweeping rebuttal the Pentagon has issued in recent years to counter claims that it has information on extraterrestrial visits or technology. …While many reports of what the government now calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena remain unsolved, the new document states plainly there is nothing to see.” Barnes restates his preferred framing on the persistence of the UFO myth, that the IC/DoD is “reluctant to speak clearly about various [UAP] incidents” because of either classified material or lack of sufficient data, and “in the absence of conclusions, conspiracy theories have flourished, even as scientists and independent investigators made the case that optical illusions, weather phenomena, scientific balloons or drones were reasonable causes of nearly all of the unexplained incidents.” He correctly reports that Congress is continuing its investigation through means other than AARO—namely, NASA and the National Archives—but “none of those efforts are likely to deviate from the broad conclusions stated on Friday.” Barnes, like Kirkpatrick, already knows all the answers.
The Washington Post article (Pentagon report finds no evidence of alien visits, hidden spacecraft) was more interesting. One of the authors was national security reporter Shane Harris who participated in a revelatory panel discussion on UAP with Kirkpatrick at George Mason University in November 2023 (covered in detail in Yearbook 2023). At that event, Harris said he was open minded on the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs, and that half a dozen people had come to him to share details “of a reverse-engineering program, of crashed material, or artifacts, or craft.” He said that some of them had given him codenames for these programs, which provoked Kirkpatrick to tell Harris in a joking-not-joking tone to tell him those codenames after the event. Harris’s article conveys Volume I’s conclusions but not its conclusive tone. Harris does not let some imply all, and he does not pretend to know the whole truth.
“The investigators interviewed about 30 people, including some who had worked on official UAP research programs… Their conclusions were based on a sort of classified game of telephone, in which whispers of secret programs, often based on hearsay, circulated for years in the military and intelligence community. … Confusion appeared to permeate the statements from witnesses who spoke to the AARO investigators. Some of the programs’ code names that interviewees provided turned out not to exist or could be traced back to defunct entities, the report found. One person mistakenly identified a private UAP research program as being run by the U.S. government. The AARO investigators found no evidence to substantiate these accounts and were able to dispute or debunk some of them.”
At the very end of the article, Harris reported on what came of his own sources:
“The Washington Post has previously interviewed six individuals who claimed to have information about U.S. government and private-sector crash retrieval and reverse-engineering activities. While the AARO report does not identify the people its investigators interviewed, several of their accounts match the detailed claims of those who spoke to The Post. The Post chose not to publish these accounts because the individuals provided no evidence to corroborate their claims. Their information was almost exclusively based on second- or third-hand statements, usually from people the interviewees declined to identify. In some instances, congressional investigators who had interviewed the individuals believed they had probably mistaken actual classified programs for those related to UAPs and had reached conclusions about U.S. government activity that weren’t supported by direct evidence.”
Harris’s reporting corroborates Kirkpatrick’s handful of examples of government insiders mistakenly thinking they had brushed up against the secret UFO program. It supports Kirkpatrick’s assertion about how common it is in the Intelligence world to see only components of the whole and not know the real purpose of a program. And it lays bare a challenge for UFO whistleblowers that was already apparent in 2023—there is no substitute for evidence. Codenames are not sufficient.
This also demonstrates that there is an awful lot of chatter among people with security clearances about government-held UFO evidence. Harris is not the only national security reporter with sources whispering about these claims. Recall that Congress also has sources, a number of whom did not share what they know as part of AARO’s historical report. Powerful senators who sit on the national security committees keep reminding the public that they find these sources credible, and that they are motivated to continue to draft legislation to try to bring their evidence to light. Some of these sources are mistaken, but it has not been proven that all of them are mistaken. We do not yet know that “there is nothing to see” here.
Still, the tenor of the news reports about Volume I, especially the Newsweek and Guardian exclusive with Kirkpatrick, conveyed AARO’s conclusions uncritically. No mainstream news reporting challenged Kirkpatrick’s underlying assumptions. (Anecdotally, my parents, who only follow this topic on the evening news, reported back to me over Easter holiday that the government had just announced all UFO stories were made up.) By this measure, Kirkpatrick’s messaging campaign was successful.
Reactions from the UFO “Lobby Group”
Kirkpatrick blamed the fact that Congress was “spun up” about UFO allegations on a small group of individuals who have “lobbied” policy makers on this issue. He did not name the members of this group, but anyone who has been paying attention since 2018 knows some of them. Unlike actual lobbyists, a few of these individuals have made themselves public figures and have been upfront about their efforts to educate and persuade policy makers. They do not all share the same objectives. They are not all part of an interconnected network. They do not hatch their plans in the back room of a Capitol Hill private club. Skeptics, whose theory of the case relies on a coordinated disinformation campaign, tend to lump them all together in a rogue’s gallery.
Volume I said that members of this group “have worked with each other consistently in various UAP-related efforts,” and that a number of them declined to provide testimony to AARO. But in his public statements Kirkpatrick went further—by calling them “true believers” who have succumbed to a host of motivations from financial gain to religious certainty; by arguing that their delusions make them national security threats. These were attacks not only on their person but to their disclosure goals. Some of them chose to respond forcefully.
On March 8, Lue Elizondo released a statement. He called Volume I “intentionally dishonest, inaccurate, and dangerously misleading.” He said of Pentagon leadership and Kirkpatrick, “Their goal is clearly to minimize Congressional and public scrutiny, and to cover up the truth.” Elizondo claimed that he and others who have “worked the UAP topic for the government are aware of the ample classified evidence that has been provided to AARO and contradicts this report.” He added, “Senior members of Congress have also had access to this evidence.” As stated above, they certainly seem to be behaving as though that is true, however the word access belies the thorny complexities and legal nuances around actual access to such evidence, especially considering that Congress also is reliant on AARO to grant them official or sanctioned access to the same evidence. Elizondo closed with a promise “to keep working to help Congress in their efforts to achieve disclosure.”
On March 8 and 9, Chris Mellon tweeted out his initial reaction to Volume I: “it is pathetic.” He was struck by the odd gaps in this supposed history, and by Kirkpatrick’s lack of curiosity about publicly documented cases that likely have a classified internal IC/DoD paper trail: “For example, I am confident that many military personnel, such as the F-16 pilots in the famous Stephenville, TX, UAP case, have been compelled to sign NDAs concerning UAP.”
Mellon criticized the historical report as “a case of the DoD and the IC investigating themselves.” He reiterated the criticism that AARO reached its conclusions without speaking to all of, or the right set of, whistleblowers who are sharing their information in backchannels:
“Further, many witnesses did not trust AARO and would not meet with them. For example, one former senior USG official years ago not only told me the rumors are real, he also provided details including the name of the USAF “gatekeeper.” But he refused to speak to AARO about this because he claimed he did not trust the process. Some of the witnesses who refused to meet with AARO did meet behind closed doors with members of Congress, however. That is why some in Congress take the issue so seriously.”
Like Elizondo, Mellon said the report has motivated him “and others to redouble our efforts to assist Congress and the public in learning the truth.”
On April 12, Mellon published a long critique of Volume I in The Debrief (The Pentagon’s New UPA Report Is Seriously Flawed). This is probably the most comprehensive takedown of Kirkpatrick’s conclusions and process. He points out that Volume I was overly focused on secret government programs at the expense of the pressing question of what has been flying around in our skies since at least the 1940s, an issue that he considers “ distinct and critically important regardless of the truth about allegations of recovered extraterrestrial, nonhuman technology.” Mellon goes further to suggest that Volume I intentionally uses these secret program allegations as a strawman to swat away genuinely perplexing cases. He writes, “AARO is confusing secrecy-bred lurid rumors of aliens with a careful sighting of a UAP, up in the air, at an exact date, time, and location, having unexplainable motions and appearance, and backed up with scientifically valuable directional data involving speed, size, altitude, sensor data, radar tracking, etc.” None of which, Mellon points out, is deemed worthy of mention in the report. He calls out the laziness of using mere suggestion to dismiss UFO sightings as top secret technology without any factual basis to support the claim: “There is not a single known sighting of a U-2 reconnaissance plane reported as a UAP… and no one can even cite a date for one such purported U-2 sighted and reported as a UAP, let alone the implausible notion that U-2s accounted for ‘more than half’ of all UAP reports.” He vouches for the historical and even scientific value of eyewitness accounts: “That is the objective scientific approach which witnesses weren’t given credit for – reporting what they saw, not presuming to make PhD-level scientific interpretations or judgments of what it was…. Why ask pilots to report UAP if we are going to then discard these reports because they do not meet some strict but narrow-visioned academic and scientific standards? Why is it that the human mind and intellect can contribute to intelligence assessments of any other topic but UAP?” This particular criticism stings because if it were to become widely accepted it would imperil AARO’s ability to collect data on contemporary UAP cases. AARO’s case revolution report for the Eglin Air Force Base UAP (released in April 2024) is a case in point. Air Force witnesses were so rattled by their sighting, and so distrustful of the reporting process, that they called in their Congressman. The Congressman said that what he was shown looked like nonhuman technology. AARO said the witnesses had been fooled by a lighted balloon. The Congressman replied that what he saw did not match what is in AARO’s case revolution, and yet the Pentagon considered the Eglin case closed. What is a witness to make of this except to conclude that reporting to AARO is a waste of time. The same can be said for witnesses to secret programs.
Elizondo tweeted his endorsement of Mellon’s article: “We all had initial hopes for AARO in the beginning. But this shows unequivocally the bias and missteps of its former leader. Everyone in Congress, who cares about the truth, should read this.”
If Kirkpatrick’s objective was to provoke the likes of Elizondo and Mellon, mission accomplished.
Reactions from the IC/DoD
Considering how Kirkpatrick was attempting to shift the official conversation around UAP firmly into UFO skepticism, the most interesting and important reaction ought to have come from the IC/DoD establishment who remained in the government’s employ in the wake of Kirkpatrick’s exit. This is a tight-lipped bunch generally, but there are clues as to how they played the cards Kirkpatrick dealt them.
The task of introducing Volume I to the press fell to AARO interim director Tim Phillips. The Pentagon made him available to press for the first time at a media engagement on March 6. He read prepared remarks and then took questions from a small, handpicked group of reporters from mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post (in the past two years, UFO journalists and activists have been able to join some of the UAP press availabilities, but not this time). Phillips repeated Volume I’s core claims:
“AARO assesses that alleged hidden UAP programs either do not exist or were misidentified authentic national security programs unrelated to extraterrestrial technology exploitation. …We assess that claims of such hidden programs are largely the result of circular reporting in which a small group of individuals have repeated inaccurate claims they have heard from others over a period of several decades….AARO assesses that the majority of historical UAP sightings result from the misidentification of ordinary objects or phenomena. Some are likely the misidentification of new or experimental technologies.”
He said AARO was still interested in speaking with whistleblowers, and tried to assuage concerns that AARO would treat them as hostile witnesses: “Anybody with knowledge of UAPs or the government covert attempt to reverse engineer or to exploit these materials, we would love to talk to them. So, aaro.mil, you go online. I'd give my phone numbers, but I've been told I can't do that, but contact us. We want to talk to you. And I will tell you, you know, I'm a guy from Tucson, Arizona, and we treat people — we are government civil servants. We treat the citizens that come in with respect. We listen to their stories. And if we can prove what they're telling us, we'll do everything we can to do so. You know, we don't have barriers. We aren't biased. We'll let the evidence take us where it takes us.”
And yet, Phillips also expressed relief that the historical part of AARO’s research is behind him: “Half of our office is almost dedicated to doing the [historical] research and then drafting and finalizing the report. In a way, I'm really happy to get this behind us because, look, I want to support the warfighter. I want to go after the cases that we received this week. …Doing it forensically after the fact is difficult.”
You can hear in his remarks a subtle sense that Phillips, like Kirkpatrick, believes that AARO’s operational mission has nothing to do with finding UFOs, and has everything to do with battlefield awareness and readiness:
“What we're trying to do is increase domain awareness. We just can't afford to have an unidentified object, a UAP, operating in proximity to our operational forces, our military forces, or our critical infrastructure. The world is too dangerous of a place to have that happen. And our job is to detect it, identify it, and then help the department deal with it. …I want to have my officers out in the field, you know, talking to witnesses, trying to gather and preserve evidence, trying to work with the services and the other departments in the government on how to preserve data when there is an incident, helping to write force protection standards so I can capture this in real-time. ...as a marine and as an Intel officer, I want to be ahead of my opponent.”
AARO’s official stance is that UAP are only worth understanding because doing so will help the U.S. military counter technological advancement of foreign nation adversaries. Anything else is ancillary to supporting the warfighter, and in the minds of AARO’s director and staff, UFOs are not relevant to that mission because AARO has no evidence that UFOs exist.
Phillips’s words on the page (there is no audio or video of him) read as congenial. He is not exactly contrite, but you get a sense he is aware that with Volume I AARO has exposed itself to criticism. He evinces an Aww Shucks sensibility: I’m just a guy from Tucson who can talk to anybody about anything and be respectful, but at the end of the day I’m about supporting the warfighter. It seems there may have been some effort to engage in a charm offensive, particularly with Congress.
After the report’s release Phillips met with staunch AARO allies like Senator Gillibrand. On April 17, Phillips went to AARO’s harshest critics in the House to sell the conclusions of Volume I. The venue was a SCIF briefing in the basement of the Capitol. Known attendees were
Representatives Burchett, Luna, Garcia, Ogles, and Burlison. Phillips brought some back up, Maj. Gen. David W. Abba, the Director of Special Programs and the Director of the Department of Defense Special Access Program Central Office. We cannot be told what Abba discussed in the SCIF, but it’s safe to assume that his role was to allay concerns about a secret UFO program hidden from Congress, and to support the assertion that AARO looked everywhere for such a program. Phillips said on March 6 that AARO’s researchers “had unprecedented access to classified programs,” that “[n]obody blocked where we could go or the questions we asked,” and that he was “just amazed at the access we had to some of our nation's most sensitive programs.” Abba could corroborate those statements.
After the briefing, Burchett remained unconvinced: “I just don't get a lot of information from them. …I just feel like the whole thing is disinformation. I mean, it’s so compartmentalized that we're not going to get information, and we’re told stuff in the SCIF that shouldn't be classified and it is.”
Burlison, who has been predisposed to think UFOs are misidentifications of secret technology, was more open to AARO’s argument: “My skepticism was probably more validated. I went into the hearing to confirm the extent of which they investigated, how far did they go [in the AARO Historical Report], and I feel we got some good answers. …I think that there was quite a few things, sightings that we've seen that have made their way to the public that they were able to dispel to me in such a way that I feel fairly certain that they're probably right. ...probably the vast majority of this, of the photos and videos, the vast majority are fake. Or are photos of things that are not necessarily UAP.”
So, AARO’s new leadership and the Pentagon went all in on Kirkpatrick’s conclusions, just putting forward a less grumpy disposition. But recall that AARO is jointly managed by the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). What did they say about Volume I?
All congressionally mandated UAP reports since June 2021 have been officially produced and released by ODNI. This is because ODNI is the government agency responsible for the intelligence data and analysis that go into official reports about intelligence matters. Judgements based on intelligence must adhere to a formal set of analytic tradecraft standards, and one office within the IC/DoD nexus has to be the ultimate owner responsible for those judgments—that is ODNI. In recent years Defense Department officials have been all too happy to respond to questions about whether UAP are extraterrestrial by saying that is not up to them, go ask ODNI. In 2023, after Congress had reiterated that AARO was to be a joint venture, the annual reports were stamped with both the ODNI and the Defense Department logos.
Volume I, like those other reports, is a congressionally mandated UAP report. Unlike those reports, the DNI did not attach its name and did not put out a press release. Is this significant?
Chris Mellon thinks so. He wrote in his April 12 article, “this appears to be the first AARO report submitted to Congress that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not sign off on. I don’t know why, but Avril Haines and her Office were quite right not to in this case, having spared themselves considerable embarrassment in the process.” Mellon is implying that ODNI might not want to be on the hook for all of the strident conclusions, inaccuracies, and potential misinformation contained in Volume I.
A significant question lingers: are the strident conclusions in Volume I the Intelligence Community and Defense establishment’s final answer to the UFO question? Is it considered a work product that other officers and agencies will use as a factual foundation to build future conclusions and future work products? Is it agreed upon as settled history within the executive branch?
On June 7, Douglas Dean Johnson posted a long article about AARO’s current and future status (What’s Next for AARO?). Johnson did some fresh reporting for the piece with quotes from policy makers and other insiders, including Kirkpatrick. To my mind Johnson posed the most important question not only about Volume I but about the full scope of the IC/DoD involvement with UAP (and true to form, Johnson posed it the most precise and insightful manner possible):
“What level of government authority ‘stands behind’ these assertions?... Are Congress and the public being told these things merely on the authority of a single civil servant, holding substantial scientific credentials but also displaying a measure of bias, and also constrained to produce assessments within a very limited time frame and with very limited resources? Or, are Congress and the public being presented with these conclusions with the full backing of senior government officials–at a minimum, officials appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate?”
On the one hand, Volume I is an official report produced by an authoritative office charged by Congress with answering the specific questions it did in the report. On the other hand, Volume I’s production history is unusually tied to the whims of one man, its primary author, Sean Kirkpatrick. For Johnson, the formal and official wrappings of Volume I mean that its conclusions ought to be considered, well, formal and official. Kirkpatrick wrote his Scientific American op-ed as a private citizen. He wrote Volume I as the director of a government office. Johnson writes that executive branch sanction “does not necessarily mean that the assertions are accurate–but it does make it an even bigger deal if any of them turn out to be fundamentally wrong.”
To settle this question, Johnson went to the source. On March 22, he queried ODNI the following: “Do the Director of National Intelligence and the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence support the findings and conclusions of the UAP historical report…?” On April 25, an ODNI spokesperson replied with a single sentence: “ODNI fully supports AARO’s UAP work and looks forward to the publication of the Historical Record Report, Volume 2.” Johnson sent the same question to the Pentagon and was never answered.
Kirkpatrick downplayed the significance of this question in an email exchange with Johnson. He wrote that AARO “signs off” on the historical report, but that his bosses, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of Defense, have to approve it, which they did by allowing it to be disseminated. He counseled Johnson, “I think you might be reading too much (or little) into the DNI response. …The report was endorsed by both of my bosses—the DSD and the PDDNI. The findings and the evidence are clear.”
So it’s a muddle as to whether ODNI/DoD have endorsed Volume I conclusions as their own. The official stamp matters less than what ODNI/DoD chose to do next with those conclusions. Going forward, will officials repeat Kirkpatrick’s conclusions publicly, formalize them, use them to shape policy and planning? Will they back away from them, ignore them, modify them, or try to take a mulligan and draw different conclusions. It’s going to be one or the other. Time will tell.
What Could Have Been
It’s easy to forget the hope and excitement that was generated by the Congress’s initial mandate for the historical report when it became law through the NDAA in December 2022. It was assumed, and not incorrectly, that a summation of the U.S. government’s relationship with UFOs dating back to 1945 would include, at long last, a factual account of what government officials were doing, saying, and thinking during key events in the known UFO public record—be that Roswell in 1947, the Washington D.C. wave in 1952, the Malmstrom nuclear missile site encounter in 1967, or the Stephenville sightings in 2008. While many people who are familiar with the historical record were skeptical that this one report would constitute UFO disclosure in one fell swoop, there was a palpable sense of cautious optimism that it would add significant new facts to that historical record, some of which could be smoking gun evidence that would trigger more revelations, more official investigations. Reading the text of the NDAA, it was easy to think this is what UFO disclosure looks like as a practical matter.
This was not to be, at least not in 2024.
Douglas Dean Johnson argues that Volume I fails not only as history but also compliance with the NDAA requirements: “The report falls very far short of the comprehensive history mandated by the law. Much of the discussion is superficial. There are huge gaps. The report fails to address or explore known and potential document troves, both public and classified, including those dealing with nuke-associated cases.” He expressed optimism that this “seriously deficient” history could be corrected in the future, but that would not happen on its own: “…that would require adjustments in mindset and recourse to a broader range of expertise from outside the government. It would also require statutory and administrative changes to provide much more time and greater staff resources. Alternative approaches to uncovering UAP-related government records (and artifacts, if they exist) are under consideration in Congress.”
Mellon heaped plenty of criticism on Volume I, but did write that in hindsight, Congress asking AARO to do this historical investigation was naive:
“...a subordinate DoD or IC office finding its superiors innocent was never going to satisfy the critics anyway. Moreover, a disruptive secret of that colossal magnitude affecting every person on the planet would never be revealed in a report to Congress from a mid-level official or organization. Only the President, or an independent Congressional investigation, could reasonably be expected to reveal such a profound and transformative issue. If Congress wants to be confident it knows the truth, it needs to conduct its own independent investigation.”
It is a supreme irony that what Congress wanted the historical report to be—and what Congress, AARO, or some other agency or office may yet have to produce—the template for it was laid out in great detail in the very same Proposed Special Access Program that Volume I spent a great many of its pages delegitimizing. Kona Blue was authored by the AAWSAP team led by DIA intelligence agent James Lacatski, and it envisioned a wide range of objectives related to the empirical study of UFO evidence. A central pillar of the work was to be the compilation of an archive of UFO sightings, particularly of records and data that resulted from military UFO encounters, including:
“Historical and recent cockpit recordings and ECM [electronic countermeasures] recordings from Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Army.”
“Records, reports, raw data and threat analyses”
“...gain access to and inventory all existing caches of [UAP] materials and documentation within CONUS [continental U.S.], whether residing in archive storage or under active program investigation in National Laboratories, government organizations and/or contractors…”
“...present holders/stewards of [UAP] hardware, materials and documentation…”
“Collect retirees’ oral histories on recovered technology and present location”
Kona Blue proposed an extensive effort to collect eyewitness and government insider testimony in what it called the Oral History Initiative. It is worth reading the full description, as a comparison to AARO’s whistleblower mandates and the contents of Volume I.
“In support of the above activities, a well-structured Oral History Initiative will be undertaken both to compile a dense database of information acquired to date, and to assist in identifying additional sources for information acquisition, whether it be the identity of individuals, contractors or government units and activities, foreign as well as domestic.
“Over past decades a number of high-level individuals in the military, intelligence, and even political sectors of our government have had various levels of exposure/access to this subject area. This has included agency directors, members of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] and very senior individuals in the Executive Branch. To this can be added certain foreign heads of state, as well as select members of the contractor community in the electronics and aerospace sectors. Oral histories from individuals of the caliber referenced above are critical to this mission.
“Data collection from an already identified and calibrated list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor and intelligence community individuals. The oral history project will include gathering all information pertaining to the location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples, including records, files, reports, photographs, as well as physical samples.”
The Kona Blue proposal circulated through executive branch agencies in 2011. It was a wishlist of UFO evidence that was never approved to become an official Special Access Program (but was classified Top Secret until 2023). Its authors included the above wishlist of UFO evidence because they believed that evidence existed and they wanted to find it. Ten years later Congress drafted a similar wishlist of UFO evidence. Policy makers did so because they had reason to believe such evidence existed and they wanted to find it. Sean Kirkpatrick did not believe in such evidence and so concluded that undergoing the kind of search proposed in Kona Blue would be a waste of time. His historical report does not contain gaps so much as it tries to tell an entirely different version of history, one that gets to the very heart of the problem as Kirkpatrick sees it—how it came to be that government insiders could dream up such a document as Kona Blue, and why they and their conspiracy continue to wield influence.
If Kirkpatrick is wrong about that, it is just a matter of time before someone will have to dust off the Oral History Initiative and put it into practice. Whoever those future UFO investigators will be, whether they work for AARO or some other effort, if they are to be successful they will need to be open minded about what evidence is out there and actually want to find it. The lesson from Volume I is that there is no amount of clearly worded legal mandates that can make a government official go find something that they do not want to find.
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
