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.
14 and 2021, 11 near misses occurred involving UAPs that required pilot action and followup reports. As a result, in 2019, the Navy established a protocol for pilots to report on their dangerous encounters. Could you speak to any ongoing efforts within DOD to ensure the safety of our aviators with a potential UAP encounter, what is your relationship with NORTHCOM, NORAD, SPACECOM when it comes to this imme- diate real-time response and how—they are there right there in the moment, right? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Absolutely. That is a great question. Let me start with my relationship with the commands are very good. I just came back from sitting down with General VanHerck and all the all the J staff out at NORTHCOM a couple weeks ago, talking through exactly what we need to do to help them get their arms around this. We are also working very closely with the Joint Staff, and the Joint Staff has just been very outstanding in helping work through policy and guidance issues to the forces and to the services. I would like to just make sure that we message back to all of the operators the importance of their reporting and the fact that you are about to get a bunch of new requirements that we are issuing through the Joint Staff on all of the data that we are going to need you to save and report back to us. It is invaluable and we are working to try to take the most ad- vantage of that to learn what it is that we are trying to mitigate. To get directly to your question, the first thing that we are doing is normalizing our reporting. We are standardizing our reporting and the requirements associated with that. Guidance from the Joint Staff, I think, goes out maybe this week, maybe next week, that we have been working with them for some months that does exactly what I just said. It gives them timelines. It gives them requirements. It gives them ‘‘here is all the data you have to have, and you have got to retain it.’’ The next thing that comes after that is a plan ord that will go out to the commands for mitigation and response. So there is a cou- ple of things that we have to do. One, I need to work with the commands and with the IC and out- side of our DOD and IC partners to extend our collection posture targeted at some of these key areas that you saw on that heat map that have a lot of activity so that we can turn on extra collection when an operator sees something. Part of this is generating as a response function in what we call a tactic technique and procedure for an operator when he sees something, calls back to the operations floor. They can turn on ad- ditional collection. What does that collection look like? How do I bring all that together so I can get more data on what is that thing? Senator ROSEN. Can I ask really quickly—— Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Sure. Senator ROSEN.—do you have the authorities you need to extend your collection posture between agencies or branches of the mili- tary? That seems to me to maybe be a sticking point. I know my time is just about up.
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.