By Tim Binnall
The director of the Pentagon's UFO research group provided an update on their work at a briefing for the Senate Committee on Armed Services and indicated that they have yet to find any evidence that the phenomenon is extraterrestrial in nature. During Wednesday morning's meeting (which can be seen in full above), Sean Kirkpatrick, who heads the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), acknowledged the challenge of trying to solve the riddle of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), musing that "we cannot answer decades of questions about UAP all at once, but we must begin somewhere." To that end, he noted that they are currently examining over 650 reports that the group has received over the last few years.
Kirpatrick went on to stress that, to date, "only a very small percentage" of the hundreds of UAP reports "display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous." Conversely, he said that "the majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics" suggesting that they are "balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources." As for the proverbial alien in the room, Kirkpatrick was rather categorical on the topic, declaring that "I should also state, 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."
During his testimony, Kirkpatrick offered something of a demonstration of AARO's work by way of two declassified UAP reports that the group has received. Seen below, the first incident featured a silver orb that was filmed flying somewhere in the Middle East by an MQ9 Reaper drone. Categorizing it as "unresolved," Kirkpatrick noted the footage is all of the information about the object that the group possesses and, as such, "it is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video." The second report concerned what began as a UAP similarly filmed by a Reaper drone in South Asia, but ultimately wound up being identified as an airliner.
Kirkpatrick also shared an enlightening graph which details some of the overarching trends that have emerged from the hundreds of cases examined by AARO. Among the insights were that a whopping 52% of the reports involved spherical, orb-like objects, that they largely appeared to be white, silver, or translucent, and the odd UFOs measure approximately one to four meters in diameter. Additionally, the 'average' UAP report detected no thermal exhaust from the objects which are most often reported at an altitude of 10,000 to 30,000 feet and can range from being stationary to flying at around Mach 2.
While the lack of an alien revelation may disappoint UFO enthusiasts, one question concerning the topic that was answered at the hearing was what would happen if AARO stumbled upon something from out of this world. "If the significant scientific data were ever attained that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin," Kirkpatrick said, "we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. government leadership of its findings." One would be wise to note that the AARO director did not say that the group would immediately share this information with the public.