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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.

  • p. 49 …We need to pull up engineers 2 out of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and allow them the…
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1 which I am supporting, is really looking at the unclassified
2 data sources that might be used to augment our classified
3 data sources to understand if there is a signature there we
4 can pull on. So very similar to the radars but civil
5 capability.
6 For example, we have a lot of climate science
7 satellites, for example, that look at Earth. Lots of them.
8 How many of those is the data valuable in seeing these
9 kinds of objects? The challenge in that is those platforms
10 do not necessarily have the resolution you need.
11 If you remember the slide I put up there with the
12 trends, the size of the objects we are looking for are
13 typically reported to be one to four meters.
14 Well, the resolution of many of the climate science
15 civil satellites is much larger than that, which means you
16 would have a hard time picking out something that is smaller
17 than a pixel on the imagery on the data.
18 That is not to say all of it is not useful and there
19 are ways of pulling through that data and going through.
20 That is what NASA is focused on right now is what is -- what
21 are some other data sources that could be used.
22 In addition, things like open source and crowd sourcing
23 of data -- we are exploring public-private partnerships,
24 ma'am, as you know -- we have talked about it in the past --
25 to look at is there a way to smartly crowd source additional
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.