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.
10 Meanwhile, for the few cases in all domains that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, AARO exists to help the DOD, IC, and interagency re- solve those anomalous cases. In doing so, AARO is approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytic rigor. This includes physically testing and employing modeling and simulation to validate our analyses and underlying theo- ries, then peer reviewing the results within the U.S. Government, industry partners, and with appropriately cleared academic institutions before reaching any conclu- sions. I should also State clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or ob- jects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial ori- gin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appro- priately inform the U.S. Government’s leadership of its findings. For those few cases that have been leaked to the public previously, and subsequently commented on by the U.S. Government, I encourage those who hold alternative theories or views to submit your research to credible peer-reviewed scientific journals. AARO is working to do the same. That is how science works, not by blog or social media. We know that there is tremendous public interest in UAP and a desire for an- swers from AARO. By its very nature, the UAP challenge has for decades lent itself to mystery, sensationalism, and even conspiracy. For that reason, AARO remains committed to transparency, accountability, and to sharing as much with the Amer- ican public as we can, consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods and U.S. and Allied capabilities. However, AARO’s work will take time if we are committed to doing it right. It means adhering to the scientific method and the highest standards of research integrity. It means being methodical and scrupulous. It means withholding judgment in favor of evidence. It means following the data where it leads, wherever it leads. It means establishing scientific, peer re- viewed theoretical underpinnings of observed data. AARO is committed to those standards. I am proud of AARO’s progress over the last 9 months. Much remains to be done, but the hard work is under way. Thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to your questions. Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you so much, Dr. Kirkpatrick. Can you just give us some raw numbers of how many UAPs you have analyzed? How many have been resolved, and sort of in what buckets and then how many are still left to be resolved? Just an update from your January public report where it was 366 or some- thing and about 150 were balloons and about two dozen were drones. Just give us an update if you have one. Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Sure. As of this week we are tracking over— a total of 650 cases. Now, the report in January basically said about half of the ones at that time, about 150, were balloon—were likely balloon like or something like that. That does not mean they are resolved. Senator GILLIBRAND. Oh, I see. Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Okay. Let me walk everyone through what our analytic process looks like. We have, essentially, a five-step process. We get our cases in with all the data. We create a case for that event. My team does a preliminary scrub of all of those cases as they come in to sort out, do we have any information that says this is in one of those likely categories—it is likely a balloon—a bird, it is likely some other ob- ject, or we do not know. Then, we prioritize those based off of where they are. Are they attached to a national security area? Does it show some anomalous phenomenology that is of interest? If it is just a spherical thing that is floating around with the wind and it has no payload on it, that is going to be less important than something that has a pay-
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.