The Aims and Effectiveness of Kirkpatrick’s Messaging Strategy
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 5: Reactions to Volume I
A summary of Kirkpatrick’s message in Volume I and his subsequent media campaign goes like this: The idea that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization is visiting and occasionally crashing their spacecraft on the Earth is not only scientifically implausible, there is not a scintilla of evidence to support it. The U.S government is holding no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft. False UFO stories propagate through the public like a game of telephone, amplified by popular culture. Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes over the decades, and the recent spate of interest in the media and among policy makers is due to the dedicated actions of a UFO lobby group whose members are either misleading others or themselves into thinking their stories are true. False UFO belief takes hold of a certain segment of the population like a religious conviction beyond the reach of evidentiary rational thought. AARO’s main purpose is a narrowly scoped sensor-calibration project to help the IC/DoD personnel reduce misidentifications and increase identifications of hard-to-spot flight hazards or airspace incursions—ergo UAP are not and never have been UFOs.
Kirkpatrick’s message strives for something more important than simply correcting the record on UFO history. He works hard to resolve the four major contradictions in AARO’s mission.
Resolving AARO’s Contradictions
AARO is a schizoid office because what Congress intended it to do and what the Pentagon operationalized it to do are two totally different and incongruent missions.
At the end of 2023 I summarized AARO’s apparent contradictions this way:
“the IC/DoD is claiming they have no data even approximating unambiguous evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, in contention with credible claims that such evidence exists; AARO has elevated the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis to one of three likely causes for UAP, but has not articulated the reason for this; IC/DoD officials continue to compartmentalize UFO history and public perception of UFOs away from their efforts to resolve current UAP cases. … So 2024 could be a make-or-break year for AARO. Will it buckle under the weight of its present contradictions—wherein it continues to maintain it has no evidence of truly inexplicable UAP while continuing to ask the public, and perhaps even Congress, to take its word on that, and while powerful members of Congress continue to doubt how transparent AARO can be? Or will it somehow resolve its contradictions and assuage these doubts? Will it finally get the data that suggests something truly strange is going on in our skies, or will it be able to prove that there isn’t?”
From Kirkpatrick’s point of view, these contradictions only exist in outsiders’ misperception of what AARO is all about. His message campaign is an attempt to coax the public and especially Congress into alignment with the IC/DoD’s view of AARO and UAP—with the ultimate goal of pushing AARO out of the UFO business entirely.
Volume I resolves these contradictions in the following ways.
Contradiction 1: AARO is claiming they do not hold evidence of UFOs that nearly everyone else familiar with this topic believes exists, and that AARO has a much higher standard for what they would consider extraterrestrial proof than the public would consider reasonable.
Kirkpatrick: There are no credible claims of unambiguous evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, and anyone who thinks there are, from Navy aviators to senators, are mistaken. UFOs don’t exist.
Contradiction 2: The Pentagon has a “UFO office” right? AARO has elevated the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as one potential explanation for UAP that deserves serious study.
Kirkpatrick: The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis should not be part of AARO’s science plan and calibration campaign, or it at least should be significantly minimized. UAP have nothing to do with UFOs, and AARO only entertained that they might because Congress requested we keep an open mind on that particular possibility.
Contradiction 3: AARO’s strident agnosticism about the extraterrestrial origins of UAP is paired with a puzzling lack of interest in historical UFO cases. The IC/DoD perspective seems to be that AARO is the blank sheet of paper that the government is pulling out to begin to solve the UFO mystery from scratch, as if the historical cases are irrelevant.
Kirkpatrick: AARO’s purpose has nothing to do with solving the UFO mystery. All the current data suggests there is nothing truly anomalous in our skies, and the only thing useful to be gleaned from UFO case histories is insight into the mass psychology of public delusions.
Contradiction 4: Let’s leave this last contradiction to Senator Marco Rubio, who expressed it in multiple interviews throughout the summer of 2023: “We have a number of people including that gentleman [David Grusch] who have come forward both publicly and privately to make claims. One of two things are true. Either A, they’re telling the truth or some version of the truth, or B, we have a bunch of people with high clearances and really important jobs in our government who are nuts. Both are a problem.”
Kirkpatrick: Senator, the answer is B, and you should be more worried about that than UFOs. Furthermore, the only reason you have been hearing about UFOs from the public and others in recent years is because of the self-interested dealings of a small number of individuals in a UFO lobby group.
After the 1990s, the cultural relevance of UFOs waned significantly. The topic had no way to break out from the subset of the population who were activists or hobbyists steeping themselves in the minutia of the old case histories and who were on the lookout for details about more recent sightings. The December 2017 New York Times article about a secret Pentagon UFO office was a major turning point. It sparked a steady increase in public, media, and congressional interest in UFOs. This period not only made UFOs culturally relevant again, but there were new factors that began to draw non-believers into the topic for the first time. The first factor was that military personnel were going on camera telling some pretty wild stories about their recent UFO encounters, the Tic Tac case being Exhibit A. The second factor was that the military and NASA seemed to be seriously studying UFOs. The third factor was that policy makers in Congress were making public statements and passing legislation that explicitly raised the possibility that there might be some truth to the long-running UFO narrative. Each of these factors were unprecedented, and they made people who had never thought much about UFOs sit up and pay attention, especially in the media and news industry.
With Volume I and his media campaign, Kirkpatrick was trying to put the UFO genie back in the bottle, to persuade the persuadable, especially the newly piqued members of the media, scientific, and policy establishments, to return to their pre-2017 stance on UFOs. He did this by presenting a non-UFO perspective on each of the three factors that were driving people toward UFO acceptance. One, the military pilots may be credible but they are not infallible. They are all simply wrong in their conclusion that they witnessed something anomalous. He singles out the Tic Tac case as a likely misidentification, one that we should not even talk about anymore because there is no hard data from that case to guide a rational conversation. Two, the military is not studying UFOs as commonly understood, but is focused exclusively on unidentified terrestrial objects. Third, congressional interest in investigating the long-running UFO narrative is misguided at best, deeply irrational at worst.
The IC/DoD’s non-UFO “Sweet Spot”
In standing up AARO in 2022, Kirkpatrick took the core requirements stipulated in legislation and tethered those to specific mission objectives. He concisely defined these in what he called a score card, that was published as a slide deck presentation on AARO’s website in 2023. The four mission objectives are: operations; science & technology; analyses; strategic communications. Each of these have a set of “integrated” strategies for how AARO implements the mission objective. I’m going to home in on the Science & Technology strategies because these highlight how the IC/DoD, Congress, and the public hold very different definitions of the UAP terms unidentified and anomalous.
Here are some key phrases from AARO’s description of its Science & Technology strategy:
“Elusive signatures, advanced-technology exploitation tools”
“Identification of existing and emergent technology”
“integrates emergent technical capabilities into ‘real-world’ operations”
“Comparatively analyzes newly-exposed signatures, characteristic, and behaviors with known phenomena”
“Leads development of theorems for defining characteristics of known, anomalous phenomena”
“Directs exploitation of recovered enigmatic technologies, leveraging cross-sector partnerships and the latest developments in theoretical and applied physics, engineering”
Enigmatic technologies, elusive signatures, emergent technology, anomalous phenomena—when we hear these words in the context of a UFO investigation, they conjure up images of mysteriously shaped objects hovering through the fog or zipping across the horizon—of extraterrestrial spacecraft. When intelligence officers like Kirkpatrick use these words—when they talk about “Unknowns” or “the unknown”—they are not talking about UFOs at all. They are talking about unknown man-made technology that poses the threat of technical surprise to IC/DoD leaders and policy makers. This is clear in the descriptions and illustrations of AARO’s mission brief document, and was made even more clear in Kirkpatrick’s public explanations of the science component of AARO’s mission.
On Iro Postor’s science-based podcast (aired April 23, 2024), Postor asked Kirkpatrick about the role of the STEM fields in the U.S. Intelligence Community. Kirkpatrick lit up at the question, as it has exemplified his entire career, and he used it as an opportunity to explain what the concept of the unknown means to intelligence officers. There are 18 Intelligence Community organizations across the military branches and non-military agencies of the government. Each one has a Science & Technical Intelligence Center staffed by SnTI officers. Here is how Kirkpatrick described their role (emphasis added-JS):
“They focus on the technology that adversaries may be deploying, developing or using. …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 [technology]; 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.”
Kirkpatrick had worked in and managed these SnTI Centers throughout his entire career, so when he stood up AARO he built a Science & Technology Group within AARO that would focus on the UAP problem set. Here is how he described this group’s work to Postor:
“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 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? …On the adversary end of the spectrum I tasked the IC to go take a look at… where everybody's research is headed. We have an idea of where different directions different people are taking as far as what they're trying to develop, and we know where they 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.”
This aspect of the work clearly motivated and excited Kirkpatrick. Engaging with the unknown in this way, with clear national security stakes and the potential for real-world U.S. advancement, was much more interesting to him than old stories about UFOs, which from his point of view have no meaningful connection to intelligence work.
He said in another interview: “I’m both an intelligence officer and a scientist, and so hunting for the unknown is the sweet spot of, really, my career. [AARO’s operational mission] would be lots of fun if that’s all I had to worry about.”
For the small group of people from Intelligence Community organizations who have spoken publicly about UAP—Avril Haines, Ronald Moultrie, Scott Bray, Sean Kirkpatrick, Tim Phillips—this is all they meant by unknown and anomalous. Until such time when someone in the employ of the IC/DoD establishment very explicitly begins to define UAP in a way that includes nonhuman technology, we have to assume that any reference to UAP is strictly limited to conventional objects that are uncalibrated to sensors and advanced adversarial technology.
But doesn’t AARO currently think of itself as helping the IC/DoD spot and positively identify UFOs? Not at all, as you will see below.
Kirkpatrick’s Interpretation of AARO’s Mission Diverges from Congress’s Intentions
AARO and the wider IC/DoD establishment had built a comfortable non-UFO niche for itself in the UAP mission space, but this was contrary to Congress’s intentions. And in 2023 Congress began to push back.
The 2022 NDAA, passed into law December 2021, required the IC/DoD to create a new office to study UAP. The law defined UAP as truly advanced and anomalous technology, with trans-medium capabilities “to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water.” The law required an comprehensive annual report on all UAP activity that occurred in the previous year, including attempts to capture and exploit UAP, health effects of UAP encounters, and UAP near U.S. nuclear assets. Now, the reason these requirements were written into law was because policy makers who drafted them had been told a set of UFO stories: UFOs observed transitioning down through the atmosphere and into the ocean; UFOs over nuclear missile sites; UFOs causing health effects on military personnel. In 2021 and 2022, these policymakers spoke and acted in ways that demonstrated they took these stories seriously and that they found them to be credible and worthy of investigation.
Three months after passage of the 2022 NDAA, in March 2022, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald Moultrie, hired Sean Kirkpatrick to stand up the new UAP office that Congress was requiring. In 2021 and 2022, no one in the IC/DoD spoke or acted as though they accepted the UFO premise behind Congress’s requirements, though they were very careful not to contradict or criticize it. When it comes to UFOs, they promised that their minds were open and their slates were blank. They had no data but would be open to it should such data ever arise. We now know, through Kirkpatrick’s statements in 2024, that they molded the 2022 NDAA requirements to fit their own purpose, to use AARO as a space where intelligence officers could work out how to calibrate sensors to capture a wider range of targets, and how to study the evolution of foreign adversary technology. This was a mission space they were comfortable with, one that intel officers like Kirkpatrick and his team could get excited about. In hindsight, UFO hunting was always going to be an unnatural fit, a task they would be institutionally incapable of taking seriously.
By December 2022, Kirkpatrick had spent much of the year building AARO to carry out the non-UFO sensor calibration mission. On December 16, Moultrie convened a press roundtable to introduce Kirkpatrick and AARO to the public. When asked if UAP were extraterrestrial in origin, Moultrie answered, “At this time, the answer’s no, we have nothing…. If we find something like that, we will look at it and analyze it and take the appropriate actions.” When asked if the military had detected UAP demonstrating technology they were unable to explain, Kirkpatrick answered, “There are things that appear to demonstrate interesting flight dynamics that we are fully investigating and researching right now…. Some of that could be sensor phenomenology. Some of that could be flight dynamics of the platform. Some of that could be just an illusion. There’s lots of different ways that we have to investigate all of those in order to get to that truth.” And so the stage was set. Kirkpatrick and AARO were ready to spend the next year or more merrily tinkering away on their sensor phenomenology project.
But on the day before, December 15, Congress had just handed down another set of requirements for AARO that tossed UFOs right back in their lap. It resulted in a secondary mission focused on genuine anomalous technological signatures, historical UFO cases, and UFO whistleblower protections. And this mission could not be batted away with a slick mission brief slathered with stealth bombers and Pentagon jargon. The 2023 NDAA was Congress’s attempt to dial up the pressure on the IC/DoD to take UFO stories seriously, and it would ultimately result in Kirkpatrick’s exit.
The 2023 NDAA created a slew of additional requirements for AARO. One of them was to develop a science plan that will produce scientific theories that could “account for characteristics and performance of unidentified anomalous phenomena that exceed the known state of the art in science or technology, including in the areas of propulsion, aero dynamic control, signatures, structures, materials, sensors, countermeasures, weapons, electronics, and power generation.” This would not have been a problem for the Pentagon since it dovetailed with what AARO was already designed to do, and it fit squarely in the “sweet spot” for how the IC/DoD preferred to think about UAP. Other requirements would prove much more problematic for them.
Policy makers had heard yet more UFO stories, this time from government insiders coming forward as whistleblowers. These stories had to do with classified Special Access Programs, and off-the-books private contractor programs, designed to conceal, study, and potentially reverse engineer recovered UFO technology. So the 2023 NDAA called for AARO to find and report back to Congress “any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a department or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including with respect to material retrieval, material analysis, reverse engineering, research and development, detection and tracking, developmental or operational testing, and security protections and enforcement.” Also, the Defense Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence were required to create and publicize a reporting mechanism through which current and former government employees could share their knowledge of any such secret programs. Such an individual “shall not be subject to a nondisclosure agreement” and shall not be subject to any reprisals such as “the revocation or suspension of security clearances, or termination of employment.” This process was officially termed “authorized disclosure” in the law. Finally, the 2023 NDAA required a historical report on government involvement with UFOs going back to the dawn of the flying saucer era (1945), including “any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress.”
Over the course of 2023, the secret UFO program/whistleblower mission gradually came to overshadow AARO’s operational UAP mission. Senator Gillibrand used a Senate hearing in April 2023 to remind Kirkpatrick of Congress’s wishes: “As you know, Dr. Kirkpatrick, Congress has mandated that your office establish a discoverable and accessible electronic method for potential witnesses of UAP incidents and potential participants in government UAP-related activities, to contact to your office and tell their stories. Congress also set up a process whereby people subject to non-disclosure agreements, preventing them from disclosing what they may have witnessed or participated in, could tell you what they know without risk of retribution from the…or violation of their NDAs.” When the website portal for government insiders went live in October, Kirkpatrick described it as a “reporting mechanism… for people who think they have firsthand knowledge of clandestine programs that the government has been hiding.” (A portal for civilians to report UFO sightings was then and still is under development.)
Attention on the whistleblower mission was supercharged when David Grusch came out as a UFO-program whistleblower in June 2023. He participated in a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on July 26, during which he suggested that AARO should have no trouble making the same discoveries he had about secret government and government contractor programs in possession of nonhuman technology and nonhuman biologics. In February 2024, a reporter asked Senator Marco Rubio if his or other committees in the Senate were making progress investigating the testimony of whistleblowers like Grusch. His answer put the ball back in AARO’s court: “These are people that have clearances—high clearances—in the United States government, and it's not one…. it's not one person; it's multiple people. There's a whistleblower complaint filed by one of them, and, ultimately, I mean, we haven't spent a tremendous amount of time on it lately but I was hoping that’s what AARO would do!”
What was Kirkpatrick thinking as AARO’s mission was being shifted so dramatically out of his “sweet spot”? His public statements before and after his retirement are quite revealing, as what he said after his retirement was quite different from what he was willing or able to say in 2023 when he worked for the government. As Director of AARO, Kirkpatrick was in the public eye, engaging with the media, Congress, and other groups, from December 2022 until his retirement in December 2023. During that time, he would speak at length about the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) being one of three legitimate explanations for UFO sightings, the other two being misidentifications of common objects and foreign adversary technology. He said he did not think the ETH was especially likely, but he was open to it. There was a sense that Kirkpatrick was only putting ETH on the table because Congress wanted it there, but he did not say this explicitly. Back then he would say that as a DoD employee he could not comment on pending legislation, and he certainly could not criticize passed legislation that stipulated his job description. In 2023 he presented as a dutiful servant, but there were moments when he came off as the put upon servant. He told Gillibrand at her April hearing, “thank you all very much for referring the witnesses that you have thus far to us. I appreciate that… What I would ask, though, is, as you all continue to refer to us and refer witnesses to us – I’d appreciate if you’d do that – please try to prioritize the ones that you want to do, because we do have a small research staff, dealing with that.” After the July hearing in the House, he penned a scathing personal rebuttal that said it was “insulting” to the AARO team to suggest they were not being honest or effective in carrying out their mission. He included the following counter-accusation: “some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to AARO, raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”
As is now clear, these frustrations continued to build throughout the year, and clearly had an impact on how Kirkpatrick drafted Volume I of the historical report.
He first expressed his thoughts about the secret UFO program aspect of AARO’s mission in an exit interview with Politico, published November 12, 2023. This was a few weeks before his retirement, when he was putting the finishing touches on Volume I. He said, “If you are talking with NASA or the European Space Agency, and you’re talking about looking for life out in the universe, it is a very objective, very scientifically sound discussion and discourse. As that discussion gets closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it turns into science fiction. And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory.” By this he meant that most scientists including himself believe it is a mathematical impossibility that life does not exist somewhere else in the universe; since astrobiologists are fairly confident life does not currently exist on Mars, that is the realm of science-fiction; and the notion that aliens have crash landed on Earth and this has been covered up by the U.S. military exists in the realm of conspiracy theory. At the time, he intimated that he was happy to have the conversation on the topic of the conspiracy theory—crashed UFOs, secret government reverse engineering programs, etc.—and that AARO’s role was to “raise the level of the conversation” by applying scientific rigor. There was a sense, a very tentative suggestion, that maybe he would uncover some hard evidence that might corroborate aspects of the UFO stories Congress was so interested in.
But now we know how he really felt—that the conspiracy theory around UFOs was just that, and a waste of AARO’s time and resources. Volume I laid out a case for how the conspiracy theory was constructed and perpetuated. Kirkpatrick wrote in his Scientific American op-ed (January 19, 2024): “Science cannot be left on the side of the road in the mad dash to uncover some great conspiracy.” Kirkpatrick said in his interview with Peter Bergen (aired January 23, 2024): “the bulk of my time and a handful of my officers and researchers, you know, was spent on that historical mission because of the strong feelings on either side of that.” Kirkpatrick told Daniel Vergano of Scientific American (aired February 5, 2024): “I would probably still be there if it weren’t for this irrationality and this cloud of conspiracy that detracts from the real mission.” Finally, with Iro Postor, Kirkpatrick returned to his star chart analogy of astrobiology to science-fiction to conspiracy theory (aired April 23, 2024):
“If you're gonna take this as a serious thing… 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 … as that conversation gets closer to Earth… and then as you cross the ionosphere of the planet and you get into to 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 [of Defense] and the IC, that the primary mission [of ARRO] 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.”
To paraphrase what Kirkpatrick is saying in the above quotes: In the defense, intelligence, or scientific establishments, nobody wanted to have the conversation about UFOs and government coverups. Some in Congress had strong feelings that AARO should investigate that, therefore we had to incorporate the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis into our study of contemporary UAP and the historical report, even though we had no evidence that anything supports that.
Kirkpatrick in post-retirement had no qualms shaming Congress for their irrational UFO interest. When Vergano accused “grandstanding congress people talking about UFOs and distracting you from the other mission,” Kirkpatrick co-signed this read of the situation. He wrote in his Scientific American op-ed that it was “worrisome” that Congress was willing to “make judgments and take actions on these stories without having seen or even requested supporting evidence,” and he scolded policy makers for failing “to exhibit critical thinking skills” when it comes to UFOs. He told Steven Greenstreet (aired June 12, 2024): “Congress is continuing to beat this drum despite evidence contrary.” He told Marik von Rennenkampff that Congress had lowered its evidentiary threshold (aired August 11, 2024): “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…. They are however in many instances being, I would say, misinformed by people who may have different motives than finding the actual truth.”
So, members of Congress have fallen prey to a conspiracy theory, duped by mere stories from a cult of true believers. Kirkpatrick could not say this while he was still Director of AARO, required to report to Congress, but he felt it needed to be said—this dilemma explains the odd timing around his retirement and the release of Volume I. Turning in his version of the historical report literally on his way out the door, and then going on a seven month media campaign to expound upon the report’s conclusions, afforded him the chance to convey these controversial messages free of professional restraints but still in a semi-official capacity. He was able to speak truth (as he saw it) to power (Congress) but from such a distance that they could not haul him in to say it to their faces at a hearing. He was able to say what future AARO leadership, or anyone in an IC/DoD office would not be able to say, but are probably glad someone did. This explains why Kirkpatrick chose to complete this report six months early. (It does not explain why he felt the need to carve out the opportunity for Acting Director Tim Phillips to write a follow up report, Volume II, which is not required by the legislation. This may only become clear if or when we get to read Volume II.)
Kirkpatrick’s Intended Targets
Kirkpatrick had another, perhaps more important audience in mind beyond Congress. Remember, as the Pentagon’s most recent “UFO hunter” he could have gotten airtime anywhere in the media ecosystem: The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, The Today Show, any of the late night shows. Instead, he eschewed that kind of mass audience for a more targeted group that he knew would amplify the exact message he was trying to convey: the scientific-journalism community (Scientific American, Daniel Vergano, Ellie Cook, Daniel Lavelle); the scientific-national security policy nexus (Peter Bergen, Chris Williams, Iro Postor); mainstream UFO skeptics (Brian Keeting, Steven Greenstreet).
By this campaign, Kirkpatrick provided aid and comfort to the skeptics, and gave them fresh ammo to redouble their attacks on the UFO true believers, a group Steven Greenstreet likes to deride as “people with fringe beliefs like ghost hunters and psychics.” To the scientific community, he offered assurances that despite all the intriguing new stories and piqued curiosities in recent years, UFOs are the same old hoax they always have been. There is still no reason for them to take this topic seriously. As Daniel Vergano put it, “a tremendous game of telegraph that’s been… spun up now from the world of ufology to entertainment, to the Congress.” To the national security policy establishment, he set the record straight about AARO’s true mission. It was never intended to be a UFO office and should not be confused as such going forward. As Peter Bergen put it, the purpose was to create a “boring,” “normal,” and “routinized” official inter-agency discussion about airspace clutter and incursions. AARO was always about airspace safety and security, and only had to incorporate UFOs because of Congress’s peculiar, misguided, and hopefully short-lived interest in the topic.
The Marik Von Rennenkampff interview was unique in that Rennenkampff was the only pro-UFO personality Kirkpatrick chose to engage with, but this was an intentional choice that served Kirkpatrick’s messaging aims. Rennenkampff is well known in the UFO community for researching the apparent anomalous behavior exhibited in the three Navy UAP videos (he also writes UFO op-eds for The Hill). One would think Kirkpatrick would have gone into this interview prepared to debate data, facts, and figures—to go toe-to-toe with Rennenkampff over the minutia of the videos. But he didn’t. He sat through the hour-long interview unflustered by (and uninterested in) Rennenkampff’s complex 3-D models and math equations. Instead he jiujitsu’d the painstaking analysis of the three videos to calmly and confidently hammer home variations of the same point: the three videos are nothing more than “internet data” that is “useless” as the basis of scientific analysis. Anyone trying to prove they show anomalous behavior is wasting their time. Lots of people have seen those Navy videos. They are constantly referenced in everything from news segments to Hollywood movies. Kirkpatrick used the Rennenkampff interview to assure anyone curious about those videos that they’re not mysterious at all, and they reveal much less about UFOs than they appear.
And I suppose Kirkpatrick was trying to convince the general public, people like me, to step back from the brink of UFO belief. Before 2018, it never occurred to me to take UFOs seriously. I had accepted the stigmatizing narrative that UFO belief was a trap for sad, lonely people and conspiracy-minded types who “want to believe” for their own broken reasons, and that such belief had faded from its faddish heights in the 1990s. But then I read in The New York Times that the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars to study UFOs in the last ten years. I saw highly credible Navy aviators on 60 Minutes telling a very compelling story about an encounter with a tic-tac shaped UFO. I listened to powerful senators who sit on the national security committees talking about UFOs in a serious manner. Then I started reading the UFO case histories going back to the 1940s and even before that, which are chock-full of witness accounts that are hard to dismiss in the aggregate, and which I never would have been exposed to if not for recent events.
Was Kirkpatrick’s messaging strategy effective? Volume I was a bank shot from across the center line right at the buzzer. Did he sink it in the basket? In the next (and final) chapter in this series I will examine the response and reactions to Volume I.
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
