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…
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1 normalize that into DOD policy and guidance.
2 We are bringing in all of our interagency partners. So
3 NASA is providing a liaison for us. I have FBI liaison. I
4 have OSI liaison. I have service liaisons. Half of my
5 staff come from the IC. Half of my staff come from other
6 scientific and technical backgrounds. I have DOE.
7 And so what we are trying to do is ensure, again, as I
8 make UAP into SEP they get handed off to the people that
9 that is their mission to go do so that we are not
10 duplicating that.
11 I am not going to go chase the Chinese high-altitude
12 balloon, for example. That is not my job. It is not an
13 unknown and it is not anomalous anymore. Now it goes over
14 to them.
15 Senator Ernst: Very good. Thank you, Madam Chair.
16 Senator Gillibrand: Thank you.
17 I want to just follow up on the filters for
18 surveillance. Outside observers have speculated that DOD
19 sets filters on certain sensors to eliminate objects that
20 are moving really fast or slow because what we are looking
21 for militarily are conventional aircraft and missiles. UAP
22 that does not fit into these programs would thereby be
23 weeded out and never noticed.
24 This speculation was proven to be true during the UAP
25 incidents over North America where DOD publicly acknowledged
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.