The scientist at the Department of Defense (DOD) who was until recently tasked with investigating UFO sightings has said he found no evidence of alien life on Earth, despite claims of a government conspiracy to “reverse-engineer” crashed spacecraft.
Speaking on the In the Room podcast with Peter Bergen on Tuesday, Sean Kirkpatrick, who until the start of December was the inaugural director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said: “The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens and I could have rolled them out, but there’s none.”
The rare interview comes after Kirkpatrick stood down from leading the federal Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) investigations unit, which was established by an act of Congress in 2022.
AARO—which is tasked with investigating potential UFO sightings through data and witness interviews—has received renewed attention after former members of the military testified to the House Oversight Committee that the government was secretly in possession of alien technology.
Department of Defense
Three former military witnesses were invited to give testimony last July. During the hearing, they said the government had been aware of non-human activity since the 1930s, while David Grusch, a United States Air Force veteran who had previously worked on investigating UFOs, made claims that the federal government was in possession of alien UFOs and the bodies of “dead pilots.”
On the podcast, Kirkpatrick suggested many of the people his department had interviewed had offered a similar story to the one Grusch had outlined in his testimony—but that it went further.
“The story goes something like this,” Kirkpatrick summarized. “The U.S. government has been hiding as many as 12 UFOs—possibly going back to the mid-60s, and maybe even the 40s if you include Roswell—and the U.S. government’s been trying to reverse-engineer these to no avail.
“And as a consequence, they abandoned the effort to industry, who wanted to continue to look at this.”
However, he went on to say that he had been told that some people in government had wanted to return the supposed pieces of alien craft to the DOD around the turn of the century.
“There was a push to bring that material back into government oversight because, the allegation goes, Congress had no knowledge of this and this was all a hidden program,” Kirkpatrick said. But he added: “There is no evidence of aliens and there’s no evidence of the government conspiracy.”
DOD spokesperson Sue Gough previously told Newsweek that it had “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
Many supposed UFO sightings are thought to be witnessed by pilots, who see strange objects while in the sky.
Kirkpatrick estimated that nine in 10 of the cases of pilots seeing UAPs that were referred to AARO turned out to be caused by parallax—a phenomenon wherein an object appears to change position because of a change in the observer’s point of view.
“Most of the time when we can’t give an explanation, it is because there is a lack of data,” he said, noting the widely publicized case of U.S. Navy pilots witnessing a tic-tac-shaped object off the coast of California. Kirkpatrick said there were multiple possible explanations, but a lack of data from the incident had prevented AARO from discerning the truth.
He added, however, that between 2 percent and 5 percent of the reports AARO investigated had sufficient data, but remained “truly anomalous.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.