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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.

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1 is.
2 Next slide.
3 So I am going to walk you through two cases that we
4 have declassified recently. This first one is an MQ-9 in
5 the Middle East observing that blow up, which is an apparent
6 spherical object, via EO sensors. Those are not IR.
7 If you want to go ahead and click that and play it, you
8 will see it come through the top of the screen -- there it
9 goes -- and then the camera will slew to follow it. You
10 will see it pop in and out of the field of view there.
11 This is, essentially, all of the data we have
12 associated with this event from some years ago. It is going
13 to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based
14 off of that video.
15 Now, what we can do and what we are doing is keeping
16 that as part of that group of 52 percent to see what are the
17 similarities, what are the trends across all these, do we
18 see these in a particular distribution, do they all behave
19 the same or not.
20 As we get more data we will be able to go back and look
21 at these in a fuller context. How are we going to get more
22 data? We are working with the joint staff to issue guidance
23 to all the services and commands that will then establish
24 what are the reporting requirements, the timeliness, and all
25 of the data that is required to be delivered to us and
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.