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.
13 Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Sure. In order to do this research appropriately we have to also be cognizant of what is the state-of-the-art in de- velopment across the S&T community. What are the Defense Advanced Research Project Agencies (DARPAs) of the world doing? What is the horizon scanning of emerging tech- nologies appropriate to this subcommittee? What is happening out there, and if somebody could accelerate that capability, how would that manifest itself and what would it look like, and do those signatures match what we are seeing? There are emerging capabilities out there that in many instances Russia and China—well, China in particular, are on par or ahead of us in some areas. Previously, I used to be the Defense Department’s intelligence of- ficer for science and technical intelligence. Our job was to look for ‘‘what does all that look like?’’ And then my last several years, of course, in Space Command doing space. The adversary is not waiting. They are advancing and they are advancing quickly. If I were to put on some of my old hats, I would tell you they are less risk averse at technical advancement than we are. They are just willing to try things and see if it works. Are there capabilities that could be employed against us in both and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and a weapons fashion? Absolutely. Do I have evidence that they are doing it in these cases? No, but I have concerning indicators. Senator ERNST. Thank you. I appreciate that, and that is why it is so important that you are working with the intelligence commu- nity as well because you have the science, the data background, but you also need to know from various sources what adversaries may be working on, correct? Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair. Senator GILLIBRAND. Senator Rosen? Senator ROSEN. Well, thank you, Chair Gillibrand, Ranking Member Ernst. This is a really important hearing. I would like to thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick, for your service to the country, and, as a former systems analyst myself, I really appre- ciate your flowchart, the description of the process, and particularly the trends analysis, going forward, how that is going to help us and you talked about language, the large LLMs—the large language models of artificial intelligence. That is really going to help us in the hunt forward, predictive analysis, I think, to some of your point what we worry about. I want to focus on Nevada because I want to talk about the im- pact of UAPs on aviation safety. When it comes to unidentified aer- ial phenomenal, one of my first concerns is really about the safety of Nevada’s military aviator. We have airmen stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, naval avi- ators flying at Naval Air Station Fallon, and servicemembers from across the world training at the Nevada test and training range. I know you know all this. Unfortunately, the existence of advanced UAPs in the U.S. air- space and over U.S. military installations is not a new phe- nomenon. The Navy has officially acknowledged that between 2004
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.