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.

18
Scheduling@TP.One 800.FOR.DEPO
www.TP.One (800.367.3376)
1 retained from all the associated sensors.
2 That, historically, has not been the case and it has
3 been happenstance that data has been collected.
4 Next slide.
5 This particular event, South Asia MQ-9 looking at
6 another MQ-9, and what is highlighted there in that red
7 circle is an object that flies through the screen. Unlike
8 the previous one, this one actually shows some really
9 interesting things that everyone thought was truly anomalous
10 to start with.
11 First of all, it is a high-speed object that is flying
12 in the field of regard of two MQ-9s. Second, it appears to
13 have this trail behind it, which at first blush you would
14 think that looks like a propulsion trail.
15 In reality, if you want to play the first slide we will
16 show you what that looks like in real time, or first video.
17 So we are looking at that. There it goes. Why do you not
18 play it again and then pause it halfway through? Right
19 there. All right.
20 You might be able to see that trail there behind it.
21 That is actually not a real trail. That is a sensor
22 artifact. Each one of those little blobs is actually a
23 representation of the object as it is moving through, and
24 later in the video as the camera slews that trail actually
25 follows the direction of the camera, not the direction of
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

About this file

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.