By Justin Snead
ESTRAGON: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! …I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Concerns about AARO’s efficacy for UFO disclosure are understandable considering the government’s long history of efforts to downplay and dismiss the topic. AARO’s closest historical parallel, Project Blue Book, began as a sincere effort to unravel the UFO mystery only to become the key tool in those efforts. Even before Blue Book, in 1949, the Air Force released case summaries of some of the UFO sightings that had been collected during its initial investigation of the phenomenon. Even though several of those cases had led some in the military and the Pentagon to conclude the culprit was extraterrestrial spacecraft, the Air Force analysis was a farce. It concluded that most of the sightings had prosaic causes, even if the facts of the case did not support the given explanation. The truly inexplicable cases were simply ignored. Donald Keyhoe was one of the few journalists to get his hands on this tranche of reports. In 1950, he reported that it was like “reading confidential suggestions for diverting attention and explaining away the sightings.” He wondered if the Air Force’s real purpose “was to investigate something serious, at the same time covering it up, step by step.”
Anyone who has studied a little of this history–or even just watched a few seasons of The X-Files–knows how this always plays out. The public comes tantalizingly close to real answers about UFOs, only for them to be yanked away. We are all long sufferers of the Lucy-and-the-football syndrome. Is AARO’s director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, just another in a long line of Lucys? Will he dangle the truth as a prelude to announcing that UFOs were only in our heads the whole time? There is a strong case to be made that this time is different.
Let’s try to imagine the worst-case scenario. In late November 2021, as pressure to investigate UFOs was building from Congress, the DoD announced the opening of the office that would become AARO. Sean Kirkpatrick was named director eight months later, in July 2022. Suppose that Kirkpatrick and his DoD handlers decided from the beginning to use AARO as a means to bottle up or somehow dismiss evidence of the existence of UFOs. AARO’s critics are not saying this explicitly, but their criticisms are dripping with innuendo that strongly imply it. For this to be the case, what would have to be true?
For starters, it would require a tacit agreement to lie to Congress, to cook the books so that the information Congress demanded all came out one way, facts be damned. This would be legally, professionally, and politically perilous. If AARO were caught in the act of even one misdirection, the entire operation could be exposed. When Blue Book was dismissing UFO sightings in the 1950s and 60s, it was acting neither under a Congressional mandate nor under the glare of Congressional oversight. If the DoD and Intelligence Community were to lie to Congress about UFOs today, it would put their entire leadership structure at risk.
The notion that AARO intends to cover up the truth about UFOs also faces a logic problem. It would be odd for the DoD to put this much effort into looking for something they did not want to find.
AARO was formed by, and until August 2023 was still managed under, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Intelligence and Security, a Pentagon office about which Lue Elizondo has said “didn’t give a damn about this topic to begin with until they were forced to.” He resigned from this office for this very reason. When OUSD(I&S) first announced its UFO office, the conventional wisdom was that it was trying to preempt mandates from Congress about how the office should operate. It would elide Congressional oversight, and as Elizondo said at the time, attempt to “control the narrative” about UFO revelations. This plan–if it was the plan–was short lived, and the Congressional mandates came anyway. AARO, under Kirkpatrick, is complying with those mandates: a rigorous analysis of incoming sightings reports; building better data collection tools, including permanent sensors in UFO hotspots; developing novel scientific theories; regular reporting to Congress, including what will certainly be a barn-burner historical report; networking with governmental and civilian organizations, including NASA and the FAA; designing a (not yet launched) public reporting tool; and interviewing witnesses Congress sends his way.
If the intention is to maintain the coverup, then taking any one of these steps would be incredibly risky. Allowing AARO to function as designed is the equivalent of setting Pandora’s Box on a table in a crowded room and letting everyone fiddle with the latch, knowing full well that one of them might pop it open. OUSD(I&S) and the wider circle of DOD and IC leadership are by all appearances OK with this outcome. They have resolved, grudgingly or not, to letting AARO seek the revelations that are implied by Congressional mandates.
How can we be sure of that? Because we know (and the DoD knows) that UFOs are present all around the world, that they have been here a long time, and don’t seem to be going away. AARO presentations have described the UFO presence as “potentially ubiquitous.” Kirkpatrick himself informed the NASA UAP study group that inexplicable metallic spheres capable of traveling Mach 2 are seen all over the world. Kirkpatrick has said that between two and five percent of the cases in his data set are truly anomalous. That means he’s got about 40 UAP that exhibit inexplicable, physics-defying characteristics, with perhaps two to five genuine anomalies showing up every month. So it is only a matter of time before AARO captures incontrovertible evidence of the phenomenon.
It strains credulity to accept that Kirkpatrick would allow all of that evidence to flow to him, be as public about it as he has been, only to turn around and bury it under lies.
Much of the frustration with AARO stems from the belief that sensors and scientific analysis are a colossal waste of time when all Kirkpatrick need do is gather some Special Access Program whistleblowers in a conference room, record their testimony, and announce the U.S. government is in possession of non-human technology. Christopher Mellon has championed the use of whistleblowers for disclosure. In June, he wrote in Politico that in “one stroke [AARO] could resolve one of the greatest government conspiracy theories and most profound scientific questions of all time.” Mellon will go down in history as a national hero, and his impatience to end the reign of UFO secrecy is understandable, but he could easily be wrong that a whistleblower bankshot would bring about disclosure.
Kirkpatrick has acknowledged–and Congress has repeatedly reminded him–that collecting whistleblower testimony is part of his job. But to be useful that testimony has to contain data he can feed into AARO’s rigorous analytic process. It’s clear by now that Kirkpatrick sees himself not as an investigator of people and events, but as a researcher of a phenomenon (he uses the word often). On whistleblowers, he told ABC News in July, “I believe that they believe what they are telling me. And my job–it’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of what can I go research.”
When Kirkpatrick says that he still lacks “sufficient scientific-quality data” of non-human technology, it’s frustrating to those of us who suspect that evidence exists somewhere in classified records. But there is another way to interpret these statements. Kirkpatrick believes that he needs fresh, uncompromised data that he can vouch for scientifically. As he told the NASA panel, without this framework firmly in place, “we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution…This includes physical testing and employing modeling and simulation to validate our analyses and the underlying theories, and then peer reviewing those results before reaching any conclusions.”
This level of scientific analysis is the only thing that can clinch the case, and Kirkpatrick is laying the groundwork for that to be airtight. This is why he keeps lecturing the public about “why we have to do the things we have to do.” He reiterated this at the NASA meeting: “The greatest thing that could happen to me is I could come out and say, ‘Hey, I know where all these things are. Here you go.’ Alright, but I don’t, right. And it’s gonna take us time to research all that.”
Once AARO does capture verifiable evidence of a UFO in real time, Kirkpatrick knows that no one will take his word for it, or even take the video and sensor data at face value. He is going to reap a whirlwind of very difficult questions from our skeptical intelligentsia and political leadership. Most of his public statements reveal that he is fixated on this phase of disclosure and that AARO is preparing for it. Pulling UFO parts out of a box now, even if he could, would not prepare him to answer those questions, and may in fact harm the ultimate goals of disclosure.
AARO’s critics seem to imagine there was a secret agreement between Kirkpatrick and UFO gatekeepers to continue the coverup. But there is just as much evidence that the opposite occurred. If the current DoD and IC leadership decided to let the truth come out, whatever it may be, they would want it to unfold in an orderly and methodical process. They would need a project leader who would ground the process in rock solid evidence. They would need to go slow enough to account for the scientific method, and all manner of political, bureaucratic, and societal considerations. In short, they would need Kirkpatrick to be doing exactly what he is doing. Did this agreement to disclose actually happen? If UFOs are real and ubiquitous, that is a more plausible explanation for what AARO is doing than the accusations of a coverup.
We don’t know. We are waiting for AARO.