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.

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1 recommendations, what changes do we need to make to radars,
2 to platforms, to detection systems and algorithms, to pull
3 on those algorithms and make those changes. That is going
4 to take some time.
5 That is where the research and development comes in.
6 It is not -- it is not instantaneous. Right now, a lot of
7 the -- I will not say a lot of the things that fall outside
8 of the ranges of those filters have been identified by
9 people in the loop and you cannot have people in the loop
10 all the time. It is just not cost effective.
11 So part of our budget is working through what does that
12 look like and then making those recommendations back to the
13 big program offices for them to put into -- changes in
14 acquisition.
15 Senator Gillibrand: My last question is about the
16 academic community. Can you give us an update on sort of
17 how you collaborate with the academic community and whether
18 -- how the independent study being done by NASA complements
19 AARO's work?
20 Mr. Kirkpatrick: Sure.
21 Two questions so I will try to make it quick. In 1979
22 Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary
23 evidence. I would go one step further and I would say
24 extraordinary claims require not only extraordinary evidence
25 but extraordinary science and so how do you do that?
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.