This is an excellent Q&A in Politico in which Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, was asked some pointed questions, chief among them whether he regretted penning a scientific paper about the possibility that “alien probes” might be visiting Earth.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/12/sean-kirkpatrick-ufos-pentagon-00126214
Here is a key exchange between Politico writer Lara Seligman and Kirkpatrick:
(Seligman: Is that why you wrote that paper with Harvard professor Avi Loeb about the theory that UAPs are probes from an alien mothership?
Kirkpatrick: That was the start of that work where we were looking at, if you want to believe these hypotheses, what are the signatures that you would expect to see from that? Because if I don’t see any of those signatures, with any of the data that we see, then that’s not a valid hypothesis. That’s how science works. Right? You have to have a hypothesis. You have to have measurables with that hypothesis, and then your data has to meet it. And you have to lay that out in a peer-reviewed journal so that you have something to pin it against.
Seligman: That paper though with your name attached made it look like you were backing the theory. Is this something that you regret?
Kirkpatrick: That paper was in draft when it was leaked. We hadn’t actually finished that paper and it needed a lot of editing before it went out.
Seligman: It wasn’t leaked. Avi Loeb posted it online.
Kirkpatrick: Well, yeah, he posted it without permission.
Seligman: Do you regret your involvement in that?
Kirkpatrick: No, because it’s the same principle. We are standing up for the facts. We are standing up for the scientific method. And this is how you go about doing it. You either do it or you don’t.)
You could argue that this paper was possibly a form of disinformation, intentional or otherwise, that fits perfectly into a playbook going all the way back to 1952, when generals in full military panoply told a roomful of journalists that those flying saucers over Washington, D.C., were nothing more than an atmospheric phenomenon called a “temperature inversion.”
I propose it was actually a demonstration ordered by then President Harry Truman, much as he had ordered a similar demonstration of the flying wing aircraft in 1949, when the plane buzzed the White House in attempts to prove its potential prowess.
So, why would the Pentagon want us all to think UFOs just might be E.T.? It could all be an elaborate diversion engineered to maintain secrecy because when you entangle the subject of UFOs within the intellectual quagmire of extraterrestrial visitations, you relegate the entire subject to the fringe. Then, instead of wondering whether the Pentagon might have achieved a series of propulsion breakthroughs, the conversation gets mired down with incessant questions about aliens, time travelers, interdimensional beings, ruminations over what the Vatican knows, and various “we are not alone” scenarios.
In articles about his upcoming departure, Kirkpatrick has suggested that the UFOs encountered by U.S. Navy pilots over military training ranges are either space aliens or foreign adversaries.
Excuse me, sir, but there’s another possibility. That these could be top-secret U.S. military platforms that harness a different kind of propulsion technology. Knowledge of such weapons could be ultra-compartmentalized so that even the pilots who encounter these objects don’t have a “need to know.”
And these are not necessarily “experimental” platforms, but rather fully operational weapons. After all, these objects were encountered over military training ranges.
So, this notion of E.T. visitation – the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs that has dominated the conversation so far – could be nothing more than a powerful myth created and reinforced by popular culture and the Pentagon’s own disinformation apparatus. I would argue that when you consider the pattern of UFO encounters going all the way back to 1947 that the U.S. has had some form of advanced field propulsion technology – call it antigravity, if you like – either in development or in operation since then. If this is true, then these systems have evolved entirely within the Pentagon’s “black budget,” keeping them hidden from Congress.
According to this “terrestrial hypothesis” for UFOs, the evolution of these vehicles began during the immediate postwar period and they have been kept under wraps since that time, all the while becoming more and more sophisticated while shrouded entirely from Congress, the executive branch and the public.
As to why the Pentagon would be flying these weapons over populated areas, maybe it’s real-world training, a “living lab” to perfect tactics and to study how well they perform against state-of-the-art, white-world technologies like F-16s. There are many examples of military training exercises taking place over populated areas. This article in The War Zone documents one such exercise over Los Angeles: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38753/those-mysterious-gray-helicopters-were-landing-on-multiple-downtown-la-rooftops-last-night
Anyway, it’s as good a theory as space aliens traveling trillions of miles across the gulf of space to hang out over obscure U.S. military training ranges, inexplicably tormenting the denizens of places like rural Texas.
There have been tantalizing clues that the Pentagon could be harboring top-secret weapons under cover of national security. For example, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has fairly recently made some VERY intriguing comments that appear to support the idea that some of the UFOs encountered by Navy pilots could be the product of “secret access programs” developed and operated entirely in the dark.
(Her comments can be heard in this video recorded Aug. 14, 2023, by The Post-Star newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y., https://poststar.com/u-s-sen-kirsten-gillibrand-discusses-uaps/video_a1403028-3adc-11ee-95e2-6f6281509e11.html)
In essence, Sen. Gillibrand said information about these weapons could be restricted to those with a need to know only. She also, VERY interestingly, compares the covertness surrounding secret access programs to extreme measures taken during the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. The senator appears to be saying that potential whistleblowers may be literally afraid to come forward, citing “under penalty of death” language in non-disclosure agreements.
Here is a segment that I transcribed from the video posted by The Post-Star newspaper:
Gillibrand: “So, Oppenheimer is about developing the bomb during World War II. And all those scientists who worked on that project had to sign non-disclosure agreements. And what I’ve heard about those non-disclosure agreements is that because it was wartime it had provisions that said including if you disclose under penalty of death. And so the big worry is that the people who signed non-disclosure agreements to work on any type of program for the military that it had language in there that made them think that that was true. So, there is a lot of fear.
So, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it. I don’t know if we’ll ever get the information about special access programs that are need-to-know only, that Congress is not read in on. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it. I put a provision in the defense bill this year that said you can’t fund any special access programs if you don’t go through Congress …”
Sen. Gillibrand seems to be alluding to a conflict between Congress and the Pentagon, with the Pentagon restricting access to information that is directly related to UFO sightings.
Getting back to Dr. Kirkpatrick and AARO, he and it can’t really “get to the bottom” of the UFO mystery in this country because, in doing so, they would be revealing top-secret U.S. weapons.
At the same time, the American media have been unable or unwilling to plumb the depths of this issue. For example, there have been NO articles about whether the foreign military branches in, say, Europe and Asia, are experiencing the same epidemic of UFO encounters as the U.S. Navy.
I’m not talking about thirty years ago, but now. Are the foreign military branches CURRENTLY experiencing the same sort of mysterious encounters in their own restricted airspace?
This would seem to be a logical question. After all, it’s a big planet. Are we to believe that E.T. is focusing solely on the U.S. military?
Balderdash!
We know of at least one foreign military that apparently isn’t having the same sorts of UFO incursions into its airspace: Australia’s.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Faustralia-ignored-the-united-states-led-five-eyes-meeting-v0-cj8xo0tc8pvb1.png%3Fs%3Dae4671b2245bdb09754c9976b78c993e1ef4f9cc
Don’t you think, if the other major military powers thought they were being harassed by E.T. on a regular basis, that they would be freaking out, calling for some kind of urgent global investigation?
They aren’t.
And, when you come right down to it, the ONLY reason the Pentagon decided to “take UFOs seriously” is because it was forced to by a clueless Congress.
Now, why might that be?
Perhaps because the Pentagon already knows exactly what these are.