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.
11 load on it, which will be less important than something that is ma- neuvering. There is sort of a hierarchy of just binning the priorities because we cannot do all of them at once. Once we do that and we prioritize them, we take that package of data in that case, and I have set up two teams. Think of this as a red team, blue team, or competi- tive analysis. I have an intelligence community team made up of intelligence analysts and I have an science and technology (S&T) team made up of scientists and engineers and the people that actually build a lot of these sensors, or physicists, because if you are a physicist, you can do anything—but they are not associated with the intel community. They are not intel officers. They look at this through the lens of the sensor of what the data says. We give that package to both teams. The intelligence community is going to look at it through the lens of the intelligence record and what they assess and their intel tradecraft, which they have very specific rules and regulations on how they do that. The scientific community, technical community, is going to look at it through the lens of what is the data telling me, what is the sensor doing, what would I expect a sensor response to be, and back that out. Those two groups give us their answers. We then adjudicate. If they agree, then I am more likely to close that case if they agree on what it is. If they disagree, we will have an adjudication. We will bring them together. We will take a look at the differences. We will adjudicate why do you say one thing and you say another. We will then come to a case—a recommendation. That will get written up by my team. That then goes to a senior technical advi- sory group, which is outside of all of those people made up of senior technical folks and intel analysts and operators from retired, out of the community, and they essentially peer review what that case recommendation is. They write their recommendations. That comes back to me. I re- view it, we make a determination, and I will sign off one way or the other and then that will go out as the case determination. Once we have an approved web portal to hang the unclassified stuff, we would downgrade and declassify things and put it out there. In the meantime, we are putting a lot of these on our classified web portal where we can then collaborate with the rest of the com- munity so they can see what is going on. In a nutshell, that is the process. Because of that, that takes time. Of those over 650, we have prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value. Now we have to go through those and go, how much do I have actual data for, because if all I have is an operator report that says ‘‘I saw X, Y, or Z, my assess- ment is A, B, or C,’’ that is not really sufficient. That is a good place to start, but I have to have data. I have to have radar data. I have to have EO data. I have to have thermal data. I have to have overhead data, and we need to look at all that. Now, from a big picture perspective, that is all still very valuable data and we are looking at applying a lot of things—new tools, ana-
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.