UFO office leader reveals sighting numbers are up — but no evidence of aliens
Jerry Dunleavy
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The leader of the Pentagon office responsible for identifying and attributing UFOs says that total sighting numbers are up again since the last intelligence community update, but argued there was “no credible evidence” of these being space aliens.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the recently formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, appeared as the sole witness in front of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Wednesday, where he revealed new details about his role in investigating the items dubbed “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “unidentified anomalous phenomena” by the United States government, but which are more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.
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Kirkpatrick revealed that AARO is tracking a total of over 650 UFO cases and said he had “prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous, interesting value.” This figure is well over 100 more cases than the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had reported earlier this year.
He also said he had no evidence that extraterrestrials were to blame for any of this, but he did warn of “concerning indicators” that some of the UFOs might be Russian or Chinese in origin.
ODNI had released a “preliminary assessment” on UFOs in June 2021, stating that 144 UFO reports originated from U.S. government sources, and a report said “a handful” of the UFOs “appear to demonstrate advanced technology.”
A follow-up report by ODNI in January of this year revealed that, in addition to the 144 UFOs listed in its 2021 report, “there have been 247 new reports and another 119 that were either since discovered or reported after the preliminary assessment’s time period” — for a total of 510 UFO reports as of August 2022. That number is now even higher.
Kirkpatrick displayed a slide on Wednesday revealing data from 1996 to 2023 that laid out some more details about what these UFOs look like and where they are spotted.
The most typical size of a UFO is said to be between 1 and 4 meters in size, the most typical coloring is white, silver, or translucent, and the most typical form of propulsion has “no thermal exhaust detected,” according to Kirkpatrick’s chart.
He said 52% of UFOs are shaped like orbs or spheres, 23% of them are the result of “ambiguous sensor contact” and so their exact shape isn’t known, 6% were categorized as having an “other” shape, and 5% were described as “lights.” UFOs were shaped like ovals, cylinders, disks, or triangles 2% of the time, respectively, according to the chart, and 1% were shaped like rectangles, squares, polygons, or Tic-Tacs, respectively.
“What you’ll notice is that there is a heavy what we call collection bias both in altitude and geographic location. That is where all of our sensors exist,” Kirkpatrick said, noting that “most of our sightings occur in the 15,000 to 25,000-foot range, and that is ultimately because that is where a lot of our aircraft are.”
A heat map he displayed showed that most sightings are off the coasts of the U.S., near the Persian Gulf (where the U.S. has numerous bases), and in the region surrounding the Korean Peninsula and Japan, where there is a heavy U.S. military presence.
“AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA,” Kirkpatrick said.
No senators asked Kirkpatrick about a draft paper for Harvard University he had co-authored in March that speculated about the potential for an alien “mothership” in the solar system and “extraterrestrial technological probes” visiting Earth.
Kirkpatrick called it a “great question” when asked if Russia or China was behind some of the UFOs.
“Part of what we have to do as we go through these, especially the ones that show signatures of advanced technical capabilities, is determine if there is a foreign nexus. That’s really hard if what we observe doesn’t have a Chinese or Russian flag on the side of it. I think it is prudent to say of the cases that are showing some sort of advanced technical signature, of which we’re talking single percentages of the entire population of cases we have, I am concerned about what that nexus is, and I have indicators that some are related to foreign capabilities,” he said.
Kirkpatrick warned that “there are emerging capabilities out there that Russia and China, well, China in particular, are on par or ahead of us in some areas.” He added, “Are there capabilities that could be employed against us in both an ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and a weapons fashion? Absolutely. Do I have evidence that they are doing it in these cases? No. But I have concerning indicators.”
He said that “we have to investigate that with our IC partners, and as we get evidence to support that, that then gets handed off to the appropriate IC agency to investigate.” He said that the goal of AARO is to turn “UAP into SEP — somebody else’s problem.”
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When the U.S. intelligence community began releasing information on UFOs in U.S. airspace, the most prominent possible culprit in the popular imagination was extraterrestrials, but the Chinese spy balloon saga indicated more attention could be paid to Beijing’s possible role in some of these instances.
Kirkpatrick said he consulted with U.S. military leadership when the Chinese spy balloon was spotted but that AARO was not involved in the decision on what to do about it. The balloon was ultimately shot down off the East Coast after it had traversed the continental U.S.