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…
15
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1 to do it right. It means adhering to the scientific method
2 and the highest standards of research integrity. It means
3 being methodical and scrupulous. It means withholding
4 judgment in favor of evidence.
5 It means following the data where it leads wherever it
6 leads. It means establishing scientific peer-reviewed
7 theoretical underpinnings of observed data, and AARO is
8 committed to all of those standards.
9 I am proud of AARO's progress over the last nine
10 months. Much remains to be done but the hard work is
11 underway.
12 Thank you for your continued support, and before we
13 turn to questions I am going to walk you through some of our
14 analytical trends in a couple of cases that we have
15 prepared.
16 [Chart is shown.]
17 Mr. Kirkpatrick: So one of the things that AARO does
18 is high-integrity analysis, as I have said. This chart
19 represents the trend analysis of all the cases in AARO's
20 holdings to date.
21 What you will see on the left is a histogram of all of
22 our reported sightings as a function of altitude. So most
23 of our sightings occur in the 15,000- to 25,000-foot range
24 and that is ultimately because that is where a lot of our
25 aircraft are. 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.