As a formal field of academic study, ufology is in its infancy. When Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, a physicist with expertise in materials and lasers, was appointed to head the Pentagon’s UFO investigative arm in 2022, AARO (All-domain Anomalous Resolution Office), I believed the field finally was leaving the cradle. With his leadership, the nation would see the application of a methodological approach to UFOs, UAP and all manner of related phenomena. We also would learn what was discovered.
Instead, I was saddened to read in Dr. Kirkpatrick’s January 19, 2024 Scientific American article, “What I Learned as the Government’s UFO Hunter,” that as head of AARO he had found no evidence indicating alien technology in the mountain of UAP reports in the government’s possession. Rather than discussing UAP, he bemoaned the lack of data and proceeded to use the bulk of his opinion piece to bash a straw man made from pro-UFO “conspiracists” who dared waste his and the government’s time. Dr. Kirkpatrick wrote:
As director of the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), charged by Congress in 2022 to help bring science-based clarity and resolution to the long-standing mystery surrounding credible observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), also known as UFOs, I experienced this erosion up close and personal. And it was one factor in my decision to step down from my position last December. After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.
The conspiracists’ story goes something like this: The U.S. has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UAP/UFOs from as early as the 1960s and perhaps earlier. This great cover-up and conspiracy failed to produce any salient results, and consequently the effort was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors to continue the work. Sometime later, the story continues, those private sector contractors wanted to bring the whole program back under U.S. government (USG) auspices. Apparently, the CIA stopped this supposed transfer back to the USG. All of this is without substantiating evidence, but, alas, belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume in which it is transmitted and the number of times it is repeated, not the actual facts.
So, wow! Was I wrong. Rather than continuing the work to investigate UAP and show the public how government-funded science works in a field of interest to the public and Congress, Dr. Kirkpatrick said there’s nothing worth investigating. He resigned from the office and expressed his disgust for whistleblowers, especially those who support the extraterrestrial hypothesis and report a government cover-up regarding evidence of UAP/UFO reality.
In March 2024, Dr. Kirkpatrick wrote a follow-up Scientific American article in which he reiterated the need for scientific study of UAP. However, he recently stated and was quoted in Scientific American and other media, including an appearance on a National Geographic television report on UFOs, to debunk the Congressional testimony of US Navy aviators who reported seeing UAP up-close while on flight duty. The event files include UAP recorded on their gun cameras, as well as documented by radar and other sensors aboard their aircraft and the support ships in the fleet.
I can understand the need for secrecy when it comes to advanced technology with unimaginable military and financial potential. On the other hand, this is the United States of America. Here, We the People have the ultimate right-to-know.
Thus reading the piece gave me a sense of déjà vu. The idea that UFO secrecy supersedes democracy is exactly how then-U.S. Rep. Gerald Ford felt when Dr. J. Allen Hynek posited, “swamp gas” when pressed to explain a flap of sightings across Michigan in 1966. Ford said he felt insulted by Dr. Hynek’s “flippant” explanation that might account for a number UFO reports, but could not account for what his constituents had reported experiencing.
To placate the public and its elected representatives, the U.S. Air Force and/or Washington’s alphabet soup agencies elected to ask academia to investigate and, it was hoped, kill the subject from public discussion. Thus arose the Condon Committee — the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, conducted by the University of Colorado under contract with the U.S. Air Force. And like Dr. Kirkpatrick’s report on his tenure at AARO, the Colorado UFO study seemed pre-determined to conclude in its 1969 report that there was nothing worth investigating scientifically in the phenomena. Click here for the Condon Report in PDF format.
We’ve learned since then the opposite: There really is much more to the UAP story than saying, “There’s nothing new to learn.” Among the data and evidence to analyze and discuss is the question: “Why are members of the military and intelligence community so adamantly against its discussion and disclosure?”
The late Dr. James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona, an expert in meteorology and atmospheric physics, wrote that the Condon Report was designed to debunk the subject of UFOs. Click here for Dr. MacDonald’s rebuttal in PDF format.
The image at the top of the post is an official photograph from AARO, released when the organization inaugurated its public web site. Laid over an image of the Pentagon, the patch reflects its all-domain identification mission. Its symbols include a starry area for space, woosh-y clouds for the planet’s atmosphere, and a dark bottom to represent earth’s oceanic depths.
The first phrase in the motto, “Universitas mutao est” translates roughly as “The Universe is Change.” The second motto, “Vita nostra est quod cogitationes nostras facere est” comes out, more or less, to: “Our life is what our thoughts make it to be.”
You know, that is so Zen! So, dear readers: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Perhaps it’s the thought that our ideas are the most real things of all.