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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 rest of the community so they can see what is going on.
2 In a nutshell, that is the process. So because of
3 that, that takes time. So of those over 650 we have
4 prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous
5 interesting value and now we have to go through those and
6 go, how much do I have actual data for because if all I have
7 is an operator report that says I saw X, Y, or Z, my
8 assessment is A, B, or C, that is not really sufficient.
9 That is a good place to start but I have to have data.
10 I have to have radar data. I have to have EO data. I have
11 to have thermal data. I have to have overhead data, and we
12 need to look at all that.
13 Now, from a big picture perspective I still have --
14 that is all -- they are still very valuable data and we are
15 looking at applying a lot of things -- new tools, analytic
16 tools, like natural language processing. So I can go across
17 all of those reports and look for commonalities.
18 How many of them are being described as round spherical
19 objects that are maneuvering? How many of them are not
20 maneuvering? How many of them seem to have a plume to it or
21 note? That is also going to be very valuable to give us
22 more of a global picture and a trends analysis of what are
23 we seeing and help us get to the determination.
24 So to go back to your question, ma'am, we have -- this
25 next quarterly report will be coming out here pretty soon.
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.