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“Is the Pentagon really hiding crashed alien spaceships? Sean Kirkpatrick is one of the best guys on earth to answer that question. He set up the Pentagon’s new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. But he rarely gives interviews. Until now. You’ll hear what his investigators found out about sightings going back to Roswell, and what he thinks is the biggest UFO conspiracy of all.”
That’s the description of a recent episode of In the Room with Peter Bergen.
Sean Kirkpatrick, a laser and materials physicist, was the first director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established on November 23, 2021, – AKA the Pentagon’s UFO office.
On December 1, 2023, Kirkpatrick stepped down from his post. Now he is the Chief Technology Officer for defense and intelligence programs for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory – a federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Prior to that he was Defense Intelligence Officer for Scientific and Technical Intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency and Deputy Director of Intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Command. He has also worked for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
So he’s seen some things. Yet despite that background, apparently none of those things were aliens.
Speaking to Peter Bergen, Kirkpatrick says lawmakers are being influenced by a “a core group of people” (i.e. conspiracy theorists) who “have been working behind the scenes with Congress to write legislation.”
He says they encourage UFO whistleblowers like David Grusch, despite there being no actual evidence to back up their claims.
“They’re the same people that worked with a US company and the US army to explore a piece of material that they claim was a UAP and really is a piece of missile casing from the 1950s,” said Kirkpatrick. “They’re the same people that have been influencing some of these whistleblowers who have come forward to say: ‘Hey, I don’t have any first-hand evidence, but all these people are telling me this.’”
He continued, “Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter.”
Kirkpatrick would also add, “The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens, and I could have rolled them out, but there’s none. There is no evidence of extraterrestrials. There is no evidence of aliens, and there’s no evidence of the government conspiracy.”
After leaving his office at the AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick wrote an op-ed for Scientific American titled “Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter.”
In it, he explains why he stepped down from his post.
“After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative,” he wrote.
As for aliens or spacecrafts of non-human origin, Sean Kirkpatrick claims, “Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter.
“Members have a responsibility to exhibit critical thinking skills instead of seeking the spotlight. As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’ and statement for the record despite numerous invitations.
“Anyone that would rather be sensationalist in the public eye than bring their evidence to the one organization established in law with all of the legal process and security framework established to protect them, their privacy, and the information and to investigate and report out findings is suspect.”
Not that he doesn’t believe something is out there.
Last year, Kirkpatrick co-authored a research paper with former Harvard Astronomy Department Chair Professor Avi Loeb that claimed alien “motherships” could currently be flying through our solar system.