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.
19 Dr. KIRKPATRICK. One of the key tenets that we are trying to do in our science plan is understand what those signatures are. We get all the raw, for example, radar data prior to the scrubbing and filtering to allow it to enter into our weapon systems and our detec- tion systems. We are now taking all that data and cross correlating it to what pilots are saying they are seeing or other observations from other operators. What that allows us to do is then see if there are any signatures in that data that I can pull out, generate what we will call auto- matic target recognition algorithms that allow us to then use that signature associated with a observed UAP whatever that UAP may be. We will then make those recommendations of what those changes should be back to the Department. The Deputy Secretary asked me last October to make those recommendations, what changes do we need to make to radars, to platforms, to detection systems and algorithms, to pull on those algorithms and make those changes. That is going to take some time. That is where the research and development comes in. It is not instantaneous. I will not say a lot of the things that fall outside of the ranges of those filters have been identified by people in the loop and you cannot have people in the loop all the time. It is just not cost effective. Part of our budget is working through what does that look like and then making those recommendations back to the big program offices for them to put into—changes in acquisition. Senator GILLIBRAND. My last question is about the academic community. Can you give us an update on how you collaborate with the academic community and how the independent study being done by NASA complements AARO’s work? Dr. KIRKPATRICK. Sure. Two questions, so I will try to make it quick. In 1979, Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I would go one step further and I would say extraordinary claims require not only extraordinary evidence but extraordinary science and so how do you do that? You do that with the scientific method. As AARO is developing and implementing its science plan, it has to do so grounded in a solid foundation of scientific theory across the entire range of hypotheses that have been presented for what UAP are. That range spans adversary breakthrough technology, on one hand, known objects and phenomena in the middle, all the way to the extreme theories of extraterrestrials. All of that has physics-based signatures associated with it, whether it is theoretical from the academic community known from things like hypersonic weapons or adversary breakthrough tech- nologies, as we have talked about before, or the known objects that we have to go measure. The idea is across that entire range, you have to come up with peer-reviewed scientific basis for all of it. The academic community plays a very big role on one end of the spectrum, the intelligence community on the other end of the spectrum, and then measure- ment in the middle.
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.