Documents / Official release

Office of the Secretary of Defense: 022_SASC_Transcript_2023

Department of Defense. Office of the Secretary of Defense. · 2023 · 50 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a stenographic transcript of an April 19, 2023 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, on the mission and budget of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. AARO released it in full in 2025. Director Sean Kirkpatrick testified that AARO has found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity and that most reports resolve into mundane objects. He also presented trend data and two declassified MQ-9 videos, one of which was resolved as a commuter aircraft.

  • p. 3 …Kirkpatrick is the director of the All-Domain 10 Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Congress established…
  • p. 7 …6 The recent downing of the Chinese surveillance balloon 7 and three other objects underscores the…
  • p. 11 …we will have greatly 19 advanced the capability of the entire United States 20 government, including…
  • p. 26 …A handful of them 8 have made it all the way out to the other side…
  • p. 27 …19 Is it possible that the Chinese or Russian advanced 20 technologies could be causing some…
  • p. 28 …17 The adversary is not waiting. They are advancing and 18 they are advancing quickly. If…
  • p. 30 …5 And, unfortunately, the existence of advanced UAPs in 6 the U.S. airspace and over…
  • p. 48 …our advanced weapons and 12 manufacturing industry, monitor it using advanced means like 13 the -- 14…
11
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1 AARO's ultimate success will require partnerships with
2 the interagency, industry partners, academia, and the
3 scientific community as well as the public.
4 AARO is partnering with the services, intelligence
5 community, DOE, as well as civil partners and across the
6 U.S. government to tap into the resources of the
7 interagency.
8 The UAP challenge is more an operational and scientific
9 issue than it is an intelligence issue. As such, we are
10 working with industry, academia, and the scientific
11 community which bring their own resources, ideas, and
12 expertise to this challenging problem set.
13 Robust collaboration and peer review across a broad
14 range of partners will promote greater objectivity and
15 transparency in the study of UAP.
16 I want to underscore today that only a very small
17 percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could
18 reasonably be described as anomalous. The majority of
19 unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane
20 characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems,
21 clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable
22 sources.
23 While a large number of cases in our holdings remain
24 technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of
25 data associated with those cases. Without sufficient data
Page determined to be Unclassified
Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO
IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841(a)(1)(C)
Date: 2/6/2025
022

Cases discussed

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Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 50 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.