THE GOVERMENT'S FORMER UFO HUNTER FOUND SOMETHING MORE CONCERNING THAN ALIENS

 February 5, 2024

Sean Kirkpatrick looked into the skies and deep into government archives for extraterrestrials. What he found is, to him, more concerning than little green men.

By Daniel Vergano & Jeffery DelViscio

Dan Vergano: You’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Dan Vergano.

For the past decade, reports of UFO sightings have filled headlines and news broadcasts, and some of these have come from a surprising place: the Pentagon. Former defense officials have made a number of claims about, and released videos of, strange sightings made by military pilots.

These days, the objects are officially called UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

But regardless of the new branding, Congress has demanded answers on these objects, especially after one former official this summer claimed that he believed that the U.S. possessed “nonhuman” spacecraft and possibly their “dead pilots.”

We’re talking today to physicist and former intelligence official Sean Kirkpatrick, who, until last December, headed the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office that Congress told to find some answers to all this. He recently published an op-ed in Scientific American called “Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter.”

Hi, Sean. Welcome to the podcast.

Sean Kirkpatrick: I’m glad to be here.

Vergano: Can you talk a little bit about your office’s search through past records? What’d you find in—what did Congress ask you to look for?

Kirkpatrick: Sure. The Congress really gave us two main missions. There was an operational mission, which is to investigate contemporary sightings with military pilots, operators [and] sensors to understand what’s happening in our domain. You can think of that as the current time going forward.

The second mission was a historical mission, which was to look at everything the United States government has done on this topic, going back to 1945, as well as look at whether or not there’s been any sort of hidden program by the government that’s been kept from Congress on investigating UAP/UFOs or reverse engineering of said things.

In that second mission, in that historical mission, anybody who had previously signed nondisclosure agreements that protect classified information, they were allowed to come in—if they thought what they had access to was supporting evidence for this investigation—to come in and tell us all about that. And then we would go and investigate what they had to say.

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, and that was the last report that I signed out when I retired.

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.

[text from Science Quickly belonging to Scientific American]