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.
12 lytic tools, like natural language processing. I can go across all of those reports and look for commonalities. How many of them are being described as round spherical objects that are maneuvering? How many of them are not maneuvering? How many of them seem to have a plume to it or note? That is also going to be very valuable to give us more of a global picture and a trends analysis of what are we seeing and help us get to the de- termination. To go back to your question, ma’am, this next quarterly report will be coming out here pretty soon. Our next annual report you all have given us—moved it up to June, July—we are going to be having that done about that timeframe and we will be combining a whole number of reports into that one. I think we are currently sitting at around—if I remember cor- rectly, we are around 20 to 30-ish are about halfway through that analytic process. A handful of them have made it all the way out to the other side, gone through peer review. We have got case clo- sure reports done and signed. We are going to get faster as we get more people on board and we get more of the community tools to automate some of the anal- ysis that has to be done. Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick. Senator Ernst? Senator ERNST. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Kirkpatrick, the Office of the Director of National Intel- ligence (ODNI) annual threat assessment states that China’s space activities are designed to erode United States influence across mili- tary, technological, economic, and diplomatic spheres. Likewise, Russia will remain a key space competitor. In the course of your work, have you become aware of any Chinese or Russian technical advancements to surveil or attack United States interests? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. That is a great question. Part of what we have to do as we go through these, especially the ones that show signa- tures of advanced technical capabilities, is determine if there is a foreign nexus. That is really hard if what we observe does not have a Chinese or Russian flag on the side of it. Now, I think it is prudent to say of the cases that are showing some sort of advanced technical signature of which we are talking single percentages of the entire population of cases we have. I am concerned about what that nexus is and I have indicators that some are related to foreign capabilities. We have to investigate that with our IC partners, and as we get evidence to support that, that gets then handed off to the appro- priate IC agency to investigate. Again, it becomes an SEP at that point. Senator ERNST. Yes, somebody else’s problem. Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Right. Senator ERNST. Very good. Thank you. Yes. Is it possible that the Chinese or Russian advanced technologies could be causing some of these anomalous behaviors? You said there seems to be some indicators. For us today, could you describe a potential threat that might exist out there if they are of foreign nexus?
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.