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.
17 When do you expect that you will establish a public-facing dis- coverable and access portal for people to use to contact your office as the law requires? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. I would like to, first, say thank you all very much for referring the witnesses that you have thus far to us. I ap- preciate that. We have brought in nearly 2 dozen so far. It has been very helpful. I would ask that you continue to do that until we have an ap- proved plan. We have a multi-phased approach for doing that that we have been socializing and have submitted for approval some- time. Once that happens, then we should be able to push all that out and get this a little more automated. Senator GILLIBRAND. Great. Dr. KIRKPATRICK. What I would ask, though, is as you all con- tinue to refer to us and refer witnesses to us I would appreciate if you do that. Please try to prioritize the ones that you want to do because we do have a small research staff dealing with that. Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you. Do you have any plans for pub- lic engagement that you want to share now that you think it is im- portant that the public knows what the plan is? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. We have a number of public engagement rec- ommendations, according to our strategic plan. All of those have been submitted for approval. They have to be approved by OUSD(I&S). We are waiting for approval to go do that. Senator GILLIBRAND. Okay. I will follow up on that. My last question is about the integration of department’s UAP operations, research, analysis, and strategic communications. Dur- ing the recent UAP incidents over North America it did not appear that you were allowed to play that role. Do you agree that the public perception is generally that you and your office did not appear to play a major role in the Department’s response to the detection of objects over North America? What can you tell us that is going on behind the scenes from your perspective, and in the after action assessment process, is there awareness that there is a need to operate differently in the future and a commitment to doing so? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. When the objects were first detected, I got called by Joint Staff leadership to come in late one night to review events as they were unfolding and to give them an assessment based on what we knew at that time. I did that. I worked with the director of Joint Staff, the J2 and the J3 that night and over the couple of following days on what are the types of things that we are tracking from an unidentified object perspective, what data bases do we use those sorts of things for known objects, known tracking. Beyond that, the response I would have to refer you back to the White House for the decision on how they did the response. We did not play a role in what you would respond other than that initial advice on what we are seeing and how we are seeing it. Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you. Senator Ernst? Senator ERNST. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Kirkpatrick, I know that your office has gotten a lot of atten- tion recently and, of course, any new agency there tends to be a
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.