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.
18 push to increase size and funding. We want to make sure that you are able to meet your goals. What I also need to ensure is that we are not duplicating or rep- licating existing functions and creating redundancy within DOD and the interagency. What steps are you taking right now to make sure that your par- ticular office and function is unique to any of the other agencies that might be involved in these types of cases? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Yes, that is a great question. I would like to lay down—here is my mission and my goal and my vision here. The vision at some point in the future, you should not need an AARO. If I am successful in what I am doing, we should be able to nor- malize everything that we are doing into existing processes, func- tions, agencies, and organizations and make that part of their mis- sion and their role. Right now, the niche that we form is really going after the un- knowns. I think you articulated it early on, this is a hunt mission for what might somebody be doing in our backyard that we do not know about. Well, that is what we are doing, but at some point we should be able to normalize that. That is why it is so important the work we are doing with Joint Staff to normalize that into DOD policy and guidance. We are bringing in all of our interagency partners. So NASA is providing a liaison for us. I have FBI liaison. I have OSI liaison. I have service liaisons. Half of my staff come from the IC. Half of my staff come from other scientific and technical backgrounds. I have DOE. What we are trying to do is ensure, again, as I make UAP into SEP they get handed off to the people that that is their mission to go do, so that we are not duplicating that. I am not going to go chase the Chinese high-altitude balloon, for example. That is not my job. It is not an unknown and it is not anomalous anymore. Now it goes over to them. Senator ERNST. Very good. Thank you, Madam Chair. Senator GILLIBRAND. Thank you. I want to just followup on the filters for surveillance. Outside ob- servers have speculated that DOD sets filters on certain sensors to eliminate objects that are moving really fast or slow, because what we are looking for militarily are conventional aircraft and missiles. UAP that does not fit into these programs would thereby be weed- ed out and never noticed. This speculation was proven to be true during the UAP incidents over North America where DOD publicly acknowledged that we were able to start seeing these UAPs only when we opened up these filters. Obviously, our military operators cannot be overloaded with ob- jects that are not conventional aircraft or missiles. Can you none- theless make sure that the raw data is being captured and subse- quently processed so that your office knows what is really out there, and is that going to cost money? Will you expect to pay for that money out of AARO’s budget?
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.