Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the transcript of an April 19, 2023 hearing of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick testified on the office's mission, budget, data collection and review of the historical record. He said AARO had found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity or off-world technology. He also presented trend data and two declassified MQ-9 videos, and one of them was resolved as a commuter aircraft.
8 In reality, if you want to play the first slide we will show you what that looks like in real time, or first video. So we are looking at that. There it goes. Why do you not play it again and then pause it halfway through? Right there. All right. You might be able to see that trail there behind it. That is actu- ally not a real trail. That is a sensor artifact. Each one of those lit- tle blobs is actually a representation of the object as it is moving through, and later in the video as the camera slews that trail actu- ally follows the direction of the camera, not the direction of the ob- ject. We pulled these apart frame by frame. We were able to dem- onstrate that that is essentially a readout overlap of the image. It is a shadow image. It is not real. Further, if you later follow this all the way to end it starts to resolve itself into that blob that is in that picture in the top right and if you squint it looks like an aircraft because it actually turns out to be an aircraft. Go ahead and put that on. So you will see the tail sort of pop out there and so what you are looking at is—this is in the infrared—this is the heat signature off of the engines of a commuter aircraft that happened to be flying in the vicinity of where those two MQ–9s were at. Why am I showing you this? The first one that I showed you, we do not have resolved yet. That is an unresolved case we are still studying. This one we can resolve. But this is the kind of data that we have to work with and the type of analysis that we have to do, which can be quite extensive when you have to pull these apart frame by frame. Further, we are now matching all of this with the models of all of those imaging sensors so that I can say—I can recreate this. I can actually show how the sensor is going to respond. All of these sensors do not necessarily respond the way you think they do, espe- cially out in the world and in the field. I believe that is all I have and I will open it up for your ques- tions. [The prepared statement of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick follows:] PREPARED STATEMENT BY DR. SEAN KIRKPATRICK Thank you, Chairwoman Gillibrand, Ranking Member Ernst, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee and Congress. It is a privilege to be here today to testify on the Department of Defense’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. First, I want to thank Congress for its extensive and continued partnership as the Department works to better understand and respond to UAP in an effort to mini- mize technical an intelligence surprise. Unidentified objects in any domain pose po- tential risks to safety and security, particularly for military personnel and capabili- ties. Congress and DOD agree that UAP cannot remain unexamined or unaddressed. We are grateful for sustained congressional engagement on this issue, which paved the way for DOD’s establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Of- fice in July of last year. Though AARO is still a young office, the spotlight on UAP in recent months underscores the importance of its work and the need for UAP to be taken seriously as a matter of national security. All leadership that I’ve had the pleasure of working with, whether DOD, IC, DOE, Civil, Scientific or Industrial, view Congress as a critical partner in this endeavor. AARO has accomplished much in the 9 months since it was established. The AARO team of more than three dozen experts is organized around four functional areas: operations, scientific research, integrated analysis, and strategic communica- tions. In the 9-months since AARO’s establishment, we have taken important steps
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 26 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.