There may be no aliens or extraterrestrial life to worry about, but there are at least 650 possible cases of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), according to the head of the Pentagon’s office that monitors and reports on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP).
“Of those over 650, we’ve prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value,” Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on April 19. “And now we have to go through those and go ‘How much of those do I have actual data for?'”
Kirkpatrick noted that “the majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrated mundane characteristics of balloons, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources.”
In a slideshow presentation to the committee during his opening testimony, Kirkpatrick pointed out that AARO has sighted 72.2 percent of UAPs in the 15,000 to 30,000-foot range, “where a lot of our aircraft are.”
Kirkpatrick played a video of a UAP in the Middle East last year that, by his office’s analysis, did not look like a threat. This case is still under investigation. Kirkpatrick did not say where in the Middle East the UAP, which appeared to be a round silvery object, was seen. He said it will be “virtually impossible to fully identify” what the object was, based only on the video.
Kirkpatrick showed another slide and played another clip of a high-speed UAP in South Asia this year, zooming past an MQ-9 Reaper, which is an unmanned aerial vehicle. A close-up view shows the UAP appearing to move by propellers. This case was resolved and is pending peer review. According to the slide, “the object is commercial aircraft transiting known flight paths” per morphology and traffic-control data analyses.
Additionally, said Kirkpatrick, there is a possible aerial threat from China and Russia.
“Of the cases that are showing some sort of advanced technical signature … I am concerned about what that nexus is,” he said.
At least there is no need yet to worry about a real-life version of ET.
“I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” said Kirkpatrick.
The public hearing was the third Congress has ever held about UFOs, with the most recent one taking place in 2022, or more than 50 years since the first hearing in 1969.
