Documents / Official release
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.
21 Scheduling@TP.One 800.FOR.DEPO www.TP.One (800.367.3376) 1 Senator Gillibrand: Thank you so much, Dr. 2 Kirkpatrick. 3 Can you just give us some raw numbers of how many UAPs 4 you have analyzed, how many have been resolved, and sort of 5 in what buckets and then how many are still left to be 6 resolved? Just an update from your January public report 7 where it was 366 or something and about 150 were balloons 8 and about two dozen were drones. Just give us an update if 9 you have one. 10 Mr. Kirkpatrick: Sure. So as of this week we are 11 tracking over -- a total of 650 cases. Now, the report in 12 January basically said about half of the ones at that time, 13 about 150, were balloon -- were likely balloon like or 14 something like that. That does not mean they are resolved. 15 Senator Gillibrand: Oh, I see. 16 Mr. Kirkpatrick: Okay. So what -- let me walk 17 everyone through what our analytic process looks like. 18 We have, essentially, a five-step process. So we have 19 -- we get our cases in with all the data. We create a case 20 for that event. My team does a preliminary scrub of all of 21 those cases as they come in to sort out do we have any 22 information that says this is in one of those likely 23 categories -- it is likely a balloon, it is likely a balloon 24 -- a bird, it is likely some other object or we do not know. 25 Then we prioritize those based off of where they 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
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.