“Friday, Dec. 1, is Dr. Kirkpatrick’s last day in the office,” Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough told DefenseScoop on Thursday.

A longtime physicist with expertise in defense and intelligence, Kirkpatrick’s been serving as the first-ever chief of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) since it was first launched in July 2022.

Earlier this month, the department revealed Kirkpatrick’s plans to retire from government service before the end of this year. 

Among many notable positions during his 27-year federal tenure, Kirkpatrick previously served as chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center and as deputy director of intelligence for both U.S. Strategic Command and separately U.S. Space Command.

“Dr. Kirkpatrick assembled a very talented and dedicated team of federal government, military, and contract employees. AARO will continue to skillfully execute its mission throughout the leadership transition,” Gough said.

In his 18 months leading AARO, Kirkpatrick steered the establishment of a formal process and associated mechanisms for Pentagon and intelligence community officials to respond to and make sense of unidentified anomalous phenomena (or UAP, the contemporary term for UFOs that accounts for objects that can also operate in space or underwater). His team, which now includes more than 40 DOD personnel, is investigating a growing caseload of more than 800 military-aligned UAP reports.

Kirkpatrick has also been upfront about facing public harassment, whistleblower complaints and congressional calls for transparency during his term as AARO’s inaugural lead. 

In a recent interview with Politico, he said his choice to exit the nascent office was based not on those or other controversies — but that he’s reached his personal, professional goals for AARO and was ready to move on. One task he did want to complete in his final weeks though, he said, was the compilation of the first volume of official interviews with UAP observers for the congressionally mandated Historical Review Report.

The department is planning to release that initial volume soon, DefenseScoop confirmed.

AARO’s new Deputy Director Tim Phillips (who is on assignment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) will serve as acting director and lead the office as the Pentagon recruits Kirkpatrick’s permanent replacement.

According to Gough, Phillips’ early priorities leading this office will include: interviewing current and former federal government employees who have reported firsthand knowledge of UAP incidents or programs to AARO; integrating all available intelligence community and federal government sensor data to assist the evaluation of open UAP cases; and completing the hiring of personnel for all of AARO’s fiscal 2024 authorized billets.

“The selection process for a new director for AARO is ongoing. We do not have an estimate on when the selection and announcement of the new AARO Director will be made,” Gough told DefenseScoop.

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This new mechanism is separate from an existing reporting channel via which currently serving military personnel should continue to provide information about the latest, contemporary encounters they have on the job with UAP (the modern term for UFOs), according to AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick.

Both long-anticipated options are now accessible on the Defense Department’s recently launched AARO.mil website.

“I want to spend just a moment trying to explain that very carefully: This [new] reporting mechanism that is on the website is for people who think they have firsthand knowledge of clandestine programs that the government has been hiding,” Kirkpatrick told DefenseScoop during his first-ever, on-the-record media briefing at the Pentagon. The tool can also be used to report past UAP sightings or associated detections on sensors, dating back to 1945.

Those reports will support the making of AARO’s in-the-works Historical Record Report that’s due to Congress by June 2024, among other resources the office is producing. 

“Operational reporting is different. That is [for] a pilot flying around and he sees something in his airspace and he needs to record it. That goes through operational channels” laid out in the GENADMIN Joint Staff J3 “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting and Material Disposition” guidance published by AARO in May, Kirkpatrick explained.

“We understand that members of the public are also interested in reporting UAP sightings to AARO. We are exploring methods for how the public can do so in the forthcoming third phase of this secure reporting mechanism, but I don’t have anything to announce about that today,” he also confirmed.

Spotlighting this latest reporting option specifically for past and present government, military and defense contracting officials, the AARO chief invited people who qualify and are interested, to submit a form online to establish an initial point of contact with his office. 

Members of his still-growing team — which he’s been leading since AARO’s creation in 2022 — plan to catalog and review all submissions and follow up with individuals, as needed, moving forward.

“What I think is going to be a little bit of possibly a frustration is — especially if I get thousands of inputs — is we’re not going to be responding to everybody,” he said.

His team plans to release a “new user guide” on the next update to its official AARO.mil website addressing that angle, and more broadly how the process is meant to unfold.

“The website is a living thing. It’s going to evolve as we do more and more here. We’ve got a package of a lot of new material that we’ve got ready for release. We’ve uncovered some things that we are having declassified — not just operational videos, but historical documents that we’ve had been classified that we’re about to release — [in the] coming days and weeks. And we’ve got some educational material that will help inform the public. So, you should expect to see things evolve on this platform,” Kirkpatrick told reporters. 

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Obtained by DefenseScoop before it was released Wednesday evening, the 15-page document (the newest in a series of reviews required by lawmakers in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act) confirms that AARO has received a total of 801 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena as of April 30. This public, unclassified version does not say how many of those have been resolved.

The report covers the time period between Aug. 31, 2022 and April 30, 2023 and marks an uptick of 291 reports since the previous iteration and announcement last year that verified 650 cases. Officials noted that 274 of those new 291 UAP cases “occurred during this period” — while another 17 “occurred during previous reporting periods from 2019-2022, but had not been conveyed in previous submissions.”

Notably, of the latest 291 accounts, “290 occurred within the air domain and one in the maritime domain,” the report states. None of those newly covered submissions referred to transmedium objects (which can speedily travel from above the Earth’s atmosphere to areas underwater and are why the term “UFO” evolved to “UAP”) or detections in the space domain. 

“Airborne UAP continue to dominate UAP reporting,” officials also note in the report.

They also reveal that AARO is now accessing UAP incident reports from the Federal Aviation Administration to consider in its studies. The officials broadly committed to further deepening AARO’s relationship with U.S. military and civilian agencies’ air domain-focused components in the next year.

“Collaboration with Space Force, U.S. Space Command, NRO, and NASA is well underway. Integration of the maritime domain is another area where AARO will seek to make significant progress in the coming year. AARO will work with the U.S. Navy and [ODNI’s National Intelligence Manager for Military Integration] to ensure timely and quality reporting via existing reporting mechanisms, and begin conducting research on sensor calibration relevant to the maritime domain,” per the report. 

The office’s other primary priority moving forward in the near term will encompass mitigating reporting bias and bolstering reporting quality on UAP. 

Currently, gaps in domain awareness are a “direct result of insufficient data secured by radar, electro- optical (EO)/infrared (IR) sensors; the presence of sensor artifacts, such as RI flare; and optical effects, such as parallax, that can cause observational misperceptions,” officials wrote.

AARO plans to strengthen targeted collection within the intelligence community and help better inform other agencies about what data and information to collect from observers, according to the report. 

The team has also produced a new “multilayered” science-and-technology plan that incorporates how other federal mechanisms can support the overarching mission to detect, track and characterize UAP.

On par with the last version of the report, AARO officials in this one again state that, to date, no UAP encounters “have been confirmed to have directly contributed to adverse health-related effects to the observers.” 

They do blatantly clarify for seemingly the first time, however, that no UAP report has been positively attributed to foreign activities. Still, “these cases continue to be investigated,” they wrote.

Despite whistleblower claims, AARO’s chief Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick has repeatedly emphasized that the Defense Department has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity. The latest report does not expressly include a statement with that sentiment — though AARO at this point has still obtained nothing that officials believe suggests otherwise, DefenseScoop confirmed.

“We’ve stated that we’ve found no evidence many times in the past. Also, searching for evidence of extraterrestrial activity is not the mission of AARO nor the purpose of the annual report on UAP,” a Pentagon spokesperson told DefenseScoop late Wednesday.

“We anticipate that the secure reporting mechanism on the AARO website will be live soon,” the official also said.

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Hicks now holds regular meetings with AARO’s inaugural director, Sean Kirkpatrick — who she’s also repositioned to report directly to her.

The Pentagon’s second-in-charge took action late last month, partly to help speed up AARO’s development and launch of a congressionally mandated public website where the organization will be expected to disclose its unclassified work and findings and offer a secure mechanism via which users can submit their own reports of possible UAP observances.

In separate discussions over the last week, Hicks and Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon briefed DefenseScoop on new details regarding the deputy secretary’s near-term vision for AARO — and the latest status of the new website and reporting mechanism ahead of an official announcement from the Defense Department expected on Thursday.

“I believe that transparency is a critical component of AARO’s work, and I am committed to sharing AARO’s discoveries with Congress and the public, consistent with our responsibility to protect critical national defense and intelligence capabilities,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.

Behind the scenes

Mysterious, seemingly unexplainable flying objects have long perplexed humans all over the world. For decades, they have been referred to as UFOs. But recently, the U.S. government began using the “UAP” moniker to account for what appear to be craft that can travel underwater or transition between space and Earth’s atmosphere, or other domains.

The latest surge of interest and pressure from the American public and Congress started really mounting in the last five or so years, in response to multiple verified videos showing U.S. military pilots’ interactions with baffling objects, often around key national security installations.

Hicks formally established AARO via an official memorandum last year, after lawmakers mandated its creation in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The UAP mission is not easy, and AARO’s mission, to minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of UAP objects of national security issues, is being orchestrated by a small, but growing team,” Hicks explained.

“AARO is not yet at full operational capability, and I look forward to AARO achieving that in fiscal year 2024,” she also told DefenseScoop. 

To meet its directions from Congress — and led by it’s inaugural director Sean Kirkpatrick — AARO officials must disseminate a series of reviews about the organization’s expanding portfolio of UAP investigations and sightings that Defense Department and intelligence community personnel catalog. Kirkpatrick testified at a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing in April that, at that time, AARO was diving deep into more than 650 cases of reported incidents.

Not long after that event, in July, the House Oversight Committee held a separate hearing on UAP transparency, which was notably well-attended, where three former U.S. defense officials each testified under oath that they believe UAP pose “an existential threat to national security.” During the hearing, all witnesses suggested, and one blatantly stated, that AARO has not met its responsibility to seriously engage with potential observers and that DOD needed better reporting and response mechanisms. 

During both Kirkpatrick’s and the whistleblowers’ hearings, a visible point of contention that came up was associated with AARO’s seemingly delayed delivery of the fiscal 2023 NDAA-mandated website and UAP reporting mechanism.

The legislation set a June deadline for the online portal to be supplied by the office.

Kirkpatrick told lawmakers at the review hearing in April that his team “submitted the first version of that before Christmas,” but he was still waiting on input from superiors at the time. 

At the transparency hearing on July 26, witnesses urged lawmakers to hold AARO accountable and ensure it was on track to implement the required reporting mechanism for UAP observers to access information and share their personal accounts to inform DOD.

DefenseScoop viewed a timeline in an unofficial memo that allegedly records all the major steps AARO previously pursued aligned with the website development up until July 31 — the same date that Hicks convened stakeholders to discuss AARO’s website and formally directed DOD to provide that office with any administrative and technical support needed to build and launch the online portal successfully.

Hicks was not provided with the website materials until late-July, which is when she got involved and took personal oversight over the project, DefenseScoop confirmed.

According to the timeline, last fall AARO began planning to generate and launch a public-facing website and reporting mechanism at the recommendation of its Senior Technical Advisory Group — and in anticipation of the fiscal 2023 NDAA requirement.

That November, the office submitted a package to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and requested formal approval to begin developing a website and the “Phase Two” secure reporting mechanism. The timeline notes that the “Phase One” reporting mechanism is the email address that individuals who have spoken to members of Congress currently use to report information to AARO.

Phase Three, which has not yet been approved, is the NDAA-mandated mechanism for AARO to receive reports from the public.

Between November 2022 and April 2023, that submitted package moved back and forth between the I&S front office and AARO at least every other week. At Moultrie’s request, AARO regularly responded to questions, made edits and re-coordinated the memo. And Kirkpatrick also had several in-person meetings with the undersecretary.

In May — not long after Kirkpatrick testified about the product being under review — Moultrie approved AARO’s staff package, authorizing the office to provide members of Congress with an email address that individuals can use to contact AARO and to coordinate a package authorizing launch of the website and the Phase Two reporting mechanism. 

A decision on the Phase Three mechanism was deferred until a later date.

Following Moultrie’s approval, AARO worked with its IT contractor to refine a prototype website, according to timeline.

That month, the Joint Staff also separately published a “GENADMIN” message on  “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting and Material Disposition” that offers guidance to the military services and commands about reporting UAP worldwide, using a standard reporting template. The template is a result of work AARO has pursued with military leaders to improve and standardize reporting procedures across the force, since its inception.

Two months ago, on June 27, Kirkpatrick’s team delivered an overview of the prototype website to the DOD’s deputy general counsel for intelligence, and others. During that briefing, the intel lawyers identified several privacy and records management requirements that AARO needed to address before releasing the secure reporting mechanism portion.

AARO then reached out to department stakeholders to address those issues raised — but the timeline suggests staff faced challenges receiving definitive guidance on what privacy and records management actions were required to launch the website.

So, on July 31, Hicks convened them all to discuss AARO’s website, and ultimately accelerate its creation.

“She has the ability — and used it — to bring together all the top actors in the department. I think what she found was that this was being worked at a working level, but it didn’t have the right level of senior leader attention until she really kind of drove it home to say, ‘Hey, you people around the table are going to make this thing happen,’” Pahon, the Pentagon spokesperson, told DefenseScoop.

When asked why she went all-in on prioritizing AARO as an element under her purview, particularly now, Hicks told DefenseScoop: “The department takes UAP seriously because UAP are a potential national security threat. They also pose safety risks, and potentially endanger our personnel, our equipment and bases, and the security of our operations. DOD is focusing through AARO to better understand UAP, and improve our capabilities to detect, collect, analyze and eventually resolve UAP to prevent strategic surprise and protect our forces, our operations, and our nation.” 

The new UAP website

On Thursday, the Pentagon is expected to announce that AARO is set to launch its informational website that compiles details around its ongoing operations and efforts to make sense of UAP reports.

This site will host readily accessible, regularly updated information for the public about AARO’s activities. And Kirkpatrick’s growing team will post information, photos, videos and other media of UAP cases as they are declassified and approved for public release.

Other content will include reporting trends and a “frequently asked questions” section, as well as links to official reports, transcripts, press releases and other resources that AARO thinks the public may find useful. 

“In the near future, the authorized reporting mechanism consistent with section 1673 of the fiscal 2023 NDAA will reside on the website, as well. AARO’s intent is for this website to be a one-stop shop on AARO and UAP, and we look forward to continuing to refine the website to provide the most transparency possible regarding AARO’s work and findings,” Pahon told DefenseScoop.

He confirmed that AARO has established a multi-phased approach to developing the authorized secure reporting mechanism. 

That secure resource is projected to be launched in late October of this year. AARO will initially only be accepting reports from current or former U.S. government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of federal programs or activities dating back to 1945.   

“The process for submitting these reports, via the AARO website, is going through a significant security review to ensure that we protect both the privacy of the participants and the security of the site. AARO and the Department recognize that members of the general public also desire to make UAP reports, and this capability will be established in the next phase of the website development in the coming months,” Pahon noted.

The office will engage closely with and through the department’s Chief Information Office and the Defense Media Activity to ensure the upkeep of this portal.

“While no one can guarantee that a website cannot be hacked, AARO has been working with experts across DOD to ensure that this website meets the highest government security standards. For example, AARO rigorously tested the site for vulnerabilities, and will be hosting it on the .mil domain,” Pahon also said. 

Broadly, department officials “acknowledge that there have been some delays to launch the website” and reporting hub, he added. But he emphasized that the holdups “resulted from our work to ensure that [they comply with DOD] standards for security and the public release of information, and to verify that the website meets the statutory, regulatory, and technical standards for official government websites.”

Despite the challenges and bureaucratic hurdles so far, Hicks told DefenseScoop that she and other DOD leaders are “confident in the process that AARO is putting into place to receive reports and protect the information it is provided, as well as the DOD CIO’s efforts to ensure the integrity of the website.” 

“Key to these efforts is AARO’s work with the military services and organizations across DOD, including the DOD CIO, to ensure that our most sensitive work is secure and continues to provide the department with the technological edge we require to deter conflict and ensure success,” the deputy secretary said.

In her view, AARO has taken “significant steps” this year to build a pathway towards establishing transparency and trust “with the American public, members of Congress, and our own DOD and Intelligence Community employees” on UAP — and the website’s unveiling is the latest demonstration of that.

“AARO is also working to standardize and destigmatize reporting on UAP and to thoroughly analyze reports of both current and historical events. We still have a long way to go, but I have charged AARO to aggressively pursue efforts to make its findings as widely available as possible to the Congress and, whenever possible, the public,” Hicks added.

In response to questions regarding how concerned she is that some of these reported UAP encounters could be advanced platforms owned by a U.S. adversary like China or Russia, Hicks said that DOD “is always concerned about the potential threats of new advanced technology being used by our adversaries.”

“That’s why the Department takes UAP seriously. We need to understand these UAP that exhibit behaviors not readily understood by our sensors or observers to ensure they are not a threat to our homeland,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.

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Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, and former Air Force intelligence officer and federal civilian David Grusch each testified under oath July 26 about recent military-aligned “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) encounters that they said demonstrate an “existential threat to national security.”

Grusch — who said he recently made an official whistleblower filing via the Intelligence Community Inspector General — shared the most sensational allegations with lawmakers, including accusations that the U.S. government had secretly recovered UAP-type craft and “non-human biologics” from crash sites, that senior defense and IC leaders have retaliated against him and others who came forward, and that the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is not seriously engaging with him on such matters.

In official and unofficial statements shared online and via email late last week, Defense Department personnel pushed back on a number of those and other assertions the witnesses made at the hearing.

AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick issued a fiery statement spotlighting “his own personal observations and opinions” — but “not necessarily official DOD and IG positions” — on social media Thursday. The Pentagon authenticated his post Friday. 

In it, Kirkpatrick wrote that he “cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of” the Defense Department and the intelligence community who have been “working diligently, tirelessly, and often in the face of harassment and animosity, to fulfill their Congressionally-mandated mission.”  

Allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims. Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick wrote — pointing at Grusch without directly stating his name. 

He also said AARO has yet to see credible proof regarding allegations of any reverse-engineering programs for non-human technology, and that some information reportedly obtained by Congress has not been shared with his office. 

Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough declined to weigh in on Kirkpatrick’s statement in an email to DefenseScoop late Friday evening. 

“The department is aware of Dr. Kirkpatrick’s post, which are his personal opinions expressed in his capacity as a private citizen and we won’t comment directly on the contents of the post. We do want to reinforce the department’s unwavering commitment to openness and accountability to the American people and Congress,” she wrote.

Still, Gough’s official Pentagon responses also echoed some of the notions articulated by the AARO director.

“The department has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information to AARO. Any unsubstantiated claims that individuals have been harmed or killed in the process of providing information to AARO will serve to discourage individuals with relevant information from coming forward to aid in AARO’s efforts,” she wrote.  

“To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,” she reiterated.

Gough did not respond to follow-up questions from DefenseScoop Monday regarding new or existing channels for service members to flag UAP incidents, and whether or not there’s been an uptick in new reports to AARO — or intensified harassment — since the hearing. 

According to Graves, the former F-18 pilot who testified last week, DOD’s responses reflect “a perfect example of why witnesses are reluctant to come forward.”

“The Pentagon Press Office statement following the hearing was misleading. The disconnect between pilot witness testimony under oath at the Congressional hearing and the Pentagon Press Office’s dismissal is a perfect example of why witnesses are reluctant to come forward. It makes zero sense that our military would undermine its own servicemen and women when they are reporting serious flight risks,” he told DefenseScoop on Monday. 

Based on his own experiences with military-connected UAP, Graves formed and now runs the witness program Americans for Safe Aerospace to provide an entity for the public to safely and securely report observations or encounters. He testified at the hearing that his team estimates roughly only 5% of UAP sightings are currently reported to AARO.

“I hope Congress will hold DOD accountable and push for more support for witnesses and whistleblowers. For example, the [Pentagon] Press Office says AARO welcomes witness accounts — but AARO has not even implemented a public reporting mechanism as required by last year’s [National Defense Authorization Act]. How are witnesses even supposed to get in contact?” Graves told DefenseScoop.

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At a House Oversight and Government Accountability subcommittee hearing on UAP transparency — which was highly-anticipated and well-attended — retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, and former intelligence officer David Grusch each testified under oath that they believe such seemingly inexplicable phenomena pose “an existential threat to national security,” and can likely collect reconnaissance information about the U.S. and test for vulnerabilities in the nation’s technology infrastructure. 

The three witnesses shared new details about their own and other military officials’ reported UAP experiences throughout the event.

Fravor — former commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron Forty-One, known as the Black Aces — shared how after his team in 2004 captured footage of a UAP that appeared to be shaped like a “Tic Tac” during a routine training mission with the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier off the California coast, there was no immediate investigation of the incident.

“None of my crew were ever questioned, tapes were never taken, and after a couple of days, it turned into a great story to tell friends,” Fravor said.

The Navy eventually authenticated a 90-second video that was captured in 2017.

“What is not seen is the radar tape that showed the jamming of the APG-73 radar in the aircraft, but we do see on the targeting pod video that the object does not emit any infrared plume from a normal propulsion system that we would expect,” Fravor noted.

“I would like to say that the Tic Tac Object that we engaged in November 2004 was far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10-plus years,” he also said.

Graves, a former F-18 pilot with more than a decade of Navy service including two deployments in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve, testified that he witnessed advanced UAP on multiple sensor systems firsthand.

In 2014, he said, “UAP sightings became an open secret among our aircrew. They were a common occurrence, seen by most of my colleagues on radar and occasionally up close.” 

That year, “a pivotal incident occurred during an air combat training mission” in an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach, he noted in his opening testimony.

“All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, were forced to take evasive action. They terminated the mission immediately and returned to base. Our squadron submitted a safety report, but there was no official acknowledgment of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings,” Graves explained. 

Based on those and other experiences, Graves founded and now runs the UAP witness program Americans for Safe Aerospace to provide observers with a “haven” to share their experiences without fears of professional retribution. 

On the sidelines after the hearing, Graves told DefenseScoop that he hopes his testimony will inspire the “many” active duty military pilots he knows who have encountered UAPs on the job to come forward and speak up about their experiences. 

“I think that Congress needs to hold the Department of Defense accountable — not only to increase reporting but also to share that data,” he said.

The biggest bombshells during the hearing were dropped by David Grusch, who served as an intelligence officer for 14 years — first in the U.S. Air Force at the rank of major and most recently, from 2021 to 2023, at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at the GS-15 civilian level. 

Grusch served as an agency co-lead for unidentified anomalous phenomena and trans-medium object analysis — and also reported directly to the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force (UAPTF) that recently evolved into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

“I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons. I made the decision, based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple inspectors general, and in effect become a whistleblower. As you know, I have suffered retaliation for my decision,” Grusch testified. 

Both he and Graves also hinted at “upsetting” retaliation tactics they and others they know allegedly faced from senior government leaders for coming forward with UAP information. 

Though he said most of what he knows can only be discussed in a classified environment, Grusch also spoke briefly of “non-human biologics” or “bodies” found with some of the recovered UAP craft.

In response to those claims, lawmakers pointed out how Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the inaugural director of the Pentagon’s AARO, testified at a hearing in April that, at that point, his team’s research had “found no credible evidence thus far of extra-terrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”

Grusch said he met once this year with Kirkpatrick — and hoped to brief him further on the topic moving forward — but that the AARO director never followed up. 

“AARO’s congressionally-mandated historical review of U.S. government UAP programs is ongoing. We are not going to comment on any details of the review, including interviews. AARO is committed to following the data and its investigation wherever it leads,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough told DefenseScoop in an emailed response to questions regarding Grusch’s request.

She added: “AARO has established a safe and secure process for individuals to come forward with information to aid AARO in its congressionally-mandated historical review. AARO welcomes the opportunity to speak with any former or current government employee or contractor who believes they have information relevant to the historical review.”

AARO is set to supply Congress with its next UAP investigation report and briefing sometime this summer. Beyond that, lawmakers suggested further testimony, and relevant legislation, is already in the works.

“I’m shocked, actually, by just the amount of information that came out [of this], because of all the roadblocks that were put up against us. So I think what’s going to happen now is the floodgates [are open]. Other people are going to say, ‘I’ve got some information I’d like to come swear in.’ And that’s what we’re going to start doing: We’re going to start talking to people, and we’re going to start naming names,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told DefenseScoop in a press gaggle immediately after the hearing. 

“This is just the first of many [hearings],” Burchett said in the press gaggle.

Throughout and after the hearing, he and other lawmakers also repeatedly emphasized that UAP transparency is an inherently bipartisan issue. 

“I confess that I’m very much a newcomer to this whole field, so I’m just reading up on it now. But I certainly would support as much transparency and disclosure as possible — and we have to treat it through the lens of reason and science,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told DefenseScoop after the hearing.

“There was a lot of credibility to the witnesses, and what they were saying did not seem outlandish to me. That doesn’t mean that everything was necessarily true that we’ve heard. We’ve got to maintain a skeptical mind. But we should be able to arrive at factual conclusions without fear,” Raskin said.

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The proposed legislative language included in the annual authorization bill comes just after reports from a former Pentagon official-turned-whistleblower emerged, alleging that the U.S. had or has what could be spacecraft of non-human origin in its UAP research arsenal. So far, lawmakers have not responded to those claims, which also have not been proven with official records or evidence to date. 

But in the latest version of the IAA introduced in the Senate last week, lawmakers incorporated a mandate for any person currently or formerly under contract with the federal government that “has in their possession material or information provided by or derived from the” government relating to UAP — “that formerly or currently is protected by any form of special access or restricted access” — to notify Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), within 60 days of the bill’s enactment.

No later than 180 days after the IAA’s passage, the officials would also need to make “all such material and information” and “a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic [UAP] material” available to AARO for “assessment, analysis, and inspection.”

Restricted and special access programs involve sensitive information at classified or higher security levels. 

Further, the text of Sec. 1104 of this version of the IAA states that “no amount authorized to be appropriated or appropriated by this act or any other act may be obligated or expended, directly or indirectly, in part or in whole, for, on, in relation to, or in support of activities involving [UAP] protected under any form of special access or restricted access limitations” that have not been “formally, officially, explicitly, and specifically described, explained, and justified” to the AARO director, and congressional leadership.

The legislation notes that it applies to “any activities relating to the following”:

1. Recruiting, employing, training, equipping, and operations of, and providing security for, government or contractor personnel with a primary, secondary, or contingency mission of capturing, recovering, and securing unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or pieces and components of such craft.
2. Analyzing such craft or pieces or components thereof, including for the purpose of determining properties, material composition, method of manufacture, origin, characteristics, usage and application, performance, operational modalities, or reverse engineering of such craft or component technology.
3. Managing and providing security for protecting activities and information relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena from disclosure or compromise.
4. Actions relating to reverse engineering or replicating unidentified anomalous phenomena technology or performance based on analysis of materials or sensor and observational information associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena.
5. The development of propulsion technology, or aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology, systems, or subsystems, that is based on or derived from or inspired by inspection, analysis, or reverse engineering of recovered unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or materials.
6. Any aerospace craft that uses propulsion technology other than chemical propellants, solar power, or electric ion thrust.

In recent years, intelligence and defense authorization bills have been used as mechanisms to pass UAP-related legislation. According to an executive summary released last week, the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal 2024 requests additional funding for AARO.

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Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the inaugural head of the Pentagon’s newly launched All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), hosted a first-ever informal forum at the Pentagon last month where representatives from the international Five Eyes alliance discussed how to better collaborate with the data they collect on UAPs.

“We’ve entered into discussions with our partners on data-sharing. How do they do reporting? What kind of analysis can they help us with? What kind of calibration can they help us with? What can we help them with? We’re establishing all of that right now — and they’re going to end up sending their information and data to us to feed into the process that we’ve laid out for how we’re going to do all this,” Kirkpatrick recently said during NASA’s highly anticipated UAP Independent Study Team meeting. 

Beyond those comments, however, the Five Eyes allies — the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — are largely being tight-lipped about their nascent attempts at collaboration on the UAP topic in the aftermath of their initial engagement. 

In multiple requests this week, DefenseScoop asked government officials from each of the nations to provide more details about the discussion and results of the meeting, why those contents are all classified amidst vows for more federal transparency, and next steps for the alliance on UAP cooperation. 

Spokespersons from the U.S. and U.K. did not reply with answers before publication, though a Pentagon official acknowledged receipt of the questions.

A New Zealand Defence Force “representative based in Washington D.C. attended the briefing” that Kirkpatrick hosted, a spokesperson from the nation’s government said. Beyond that, they only added: “For more information you will need to contact the U.S. authorities.”

Of the alliance members, Canada provided the longest response to inquiries regarding the Five Eyes forum. The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) accounted for the primary representation of that nation, a spokesperson said. 

“Our nations’ militaries routinely exchange information on a number of subjects as part of our long-standing cooperation as partners in defence. While the details of the meeting remain classified it can be characterized as the sharing of information on the subject of UAP and no further details can be shared at this time. This sharing of information is an example of the ongoing important relationship between our militaries,” that official told DefenseScoop.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Australia did not confirm whether a representative from their nation attended the UAP meeting — and their response took a different direction entirely. 

“The [Australian] Department of Defence does not have a protocol for reporting or recording of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) or Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO),” the official told DefenseScoop in an email.

None of the spokespersons commented on new reports surfacing from a former Pentagon official-turned-whistleblower alleging that the U.S. has what could be a spacecraft of non-human origin in its UAP research arsenal.

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Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first-ever chief, revealed the moves during NASA’s highly anticipated, inaugural UAP Independent Study Team meeting on Wednesday.

“One of the first things that we’re doing” is assessing all existing sensors and associated data its privy to — from the Department of Defense, intelligence community, commercial sector, NASA and elsewhere — against typical UAP target objects, Kirkpatrick explained. 

“Given what we’ve got so far, that is going to be an important first step to understanding which sensors are going to be relevant. From there we are augmenting with dedicated sensors that we’ve purpose-built and designed to detect, track and characterize those particular objects. We will keep putting those out in very select areas for surveillance purposes,” he added.

His team is working to better calibrate existing U.S. and allies’ platforms to better spot and monitor unidentified anomalous phenomena. Just days ago, Kirkpatrick met with members of the “Five Eyes” alliance — made up of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — to establish processes for UAP data-sharing and asset calibration that can better inform investigations. 

AARO is also working with universities to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to its data holdings and target searches. Among other activities, Kirkpatrick said his office is conducting a new “pattern of life analysis.”

“This is essentially baselining what is normal. I have all these hotspot areas — but we only have hotspot areas because that’s when the reports come in from the operators that are operating at that time. They don’t operate all the time. So to have a 24/7 collection monitoring campaign in some of these areas for three months at a time is going to be necessary in order to measure out what is normal. Then I’ll know what is not normal when we have additional things that come through those spaces — and that includes space and maritime,” Kirkpatrick said

Broadly, NASA’s study explores how data captured by government, commercial and other sources can be studied to shed light on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Officials at the public meeting confirmed plans to officially publish their overarching work in late July.

The Pentagon’s ARRO is separately working to better characterize, understand, attribute and help the department respond to UAP — specifically with priority given to reports by government personnel in or near areas of national security importance. It has a number of future deliverables mandated by Congress in the next several years. 

“While NASA is evaluating unclassified data sources for its study, AARO’s dataset includes classified material with a focus on national security areas. However, all of this data — collectively — is critical to understanding the nature and origin of UAP,” Kirkpatrick said in his presentation on Wednesday. 

Beyond “unique capabilities, world class scientists, and a wealth of academic and research linkages,” he noted, the space agency “also has access to Earth-sensing satellites, radiological sensors, tools for gravitational wave and geomagnetic detection, and means of analyzing crowd-sourced data that may assist AARO and NASA in their UAP efforts.”

AARO was mandated by the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act and established that same year. Pressure from the public and Congress for explanations of imagery demonstrating U.S. military pilots’ interactions with baffling objects detected across multiple domains, ultimately led to its establishment.

In October 2022, NASA unveiled a team of 16 outside experts studying “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or as known natural phenomena.”

As AARO’s director, Kirkpatrick serves as a non-voting participant of the NASA independent study team. He’s been providing input and guidance since the study kicked off last year.

“The NASA team is using only unclassified data for its UAP study and is not drawing on classified data. However, AARO has been sharing classified data and information with the cleared members of the study panel. Though NASA and AARO are taking on different aspects of the UAP problem set, those efforts are very much complementary,” Pentagon Spokesperson Sue Gough told DefenseScoop on Wednesday.

During a press briefing after the public meeting on Wednesday, Dan Evans — assistant deputy associate administrator for research in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate — told DefenseScoop that his agency sees “true benefit to this team working solely on unclassified data, because when you restrict yourself to those types of data, you can collaborate freely with academia, with industry and with international partners.”

Evans further confirmed to DefenseScoop that Mark McInerney — who he described as a “tremendous expert on large-scale curation of data and an employee of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who really runs the show when it comes to our Earth observing assets” — is the NASA official recently tapped to embed with AARO.

“Individuals such as [McInerney] can translate into both domains between unclassified and classified data,” Evans said. 

Back in April, Kirkpatrick testified to Congress about AARO’s work and progress made from its inception up to that point. On Wednesday during the NASA-led briefing, he shed light on how his team’s research continues to evolve.

“At the time of my open hearing, we were at 650 cases-ish. We are now at over 800. We are putting together our annual report, which will be due Aug. 1 to the Hill, and there will be an unclassified version as there always has been. We will have those updated numbers at that time,” Kirkpatrick explained. 

The “jump” in new reports stems from AARO recently integrating data from the Federal Aviation Administration into its arsenal.

“We’re going to try to do a little more fidelity on some of the analytics we report out, but the numbers I would say that we see are possibly really anomalous or less than single-digit percentages of that total database,” Kirkpatrick told the NASA experts.

AARO is generating a “robust scientific plan” about its efforts for Congress, which he said McInerney will fundamentally help inform. 

Kirkpatrick also supplied eight recommendations that the Defense Department would like to see the space agency incorporate into its own UAP-resolving pursuits (see chart below). 

.

He suggested NASA take the lead on the government’s crowd-sourced metadata evaluations, lead a comprehensive review of archive UAP data, examine the use of large-scale scientific instruments for such discoveries — and more. 

Notably, during the meeting and follow-on press briefing, DOD and NASA officials also reflected on the online trolling and hostile public responses they are steadily receiving for participating in the government’s UFO projects.

“The stigma has improved significantly over the years since the Navy first took this on, some years ago. It is not gone — and in fact, I would argue the stigma exists inside the leadership of all of our buildings, wherever that is. My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment, especially coming out of my last [congressional] hearing because people don’t understand the scientific method and why we have to do the things we have to do,” Kirkpatrick said. “Where can NASA help? I made that recommendation that NASA should lead the scientific discourse. We need to elevate this conversation. We need to have this conversation in an open environment like this where we aren’t going to get harassed.”

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In a letter penned to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Intelligence Director Avril Haines last week, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote they are “concerned not to have seen more tangible evidence” that government officials are efficiently implementing guidance on the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that was established via the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

That office is charged with scrutinizing federal UAP reports, including UFOs.

The letter, shared with DefenseScoop on Monday, comes less than two weeks after AARO’s inaugural Director Sean Kirkpatrick testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing about the office’s activities in its first nine months of existence. There, he hinted at certain bureaucratic hitches his team has been confronting, which the lawmakers now spotlight in their latest correspondence to the DOD and intelligence community bosses.

“To date, we are cautiously optimistic about the limited progress being made by AARO, and we support the considerable efforts of the AARO Director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, to meet Congressional intent,” Warner and Rubio, who lead the intel committee, wrote — after calling out examples of “slow implementation” of some NDAA requirements, so far. 

AARO marks the latest iteration of Pentagon and intelligence community efforts to study and solve reports involving military personnel and government sensors detecting perplexing items across domains that can’t immediately be explained or identified. It has evolved from the now-defunct UAP Task Force and earlier, more secretive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP — among other government UFO-analyzing teams that predated it. 

But since the new office was established, DOD has scrambled on separate occasions to shoot down several mysterious objects in North American airspace that it still hasn’t explained publicly.

“I just came back from sitting down with [top military officials at U.S. Northern Command] a couple of weeks ago — talking through exactly what we need to do to help them get their arms around this,” Kirkpatrick told lawmakers at the hearing in late April.

During his testimony, he pointed to a number of new resources his AARO team is also generating to advance its UAP investigations based on Congress’ inclusions in the 2023 NDAA. However, in response to a few senators’ follow-up questions, Kirkpatrick also hinted at potential administrative elements delaying the public release or closed delivery of what’s being developed. 

Warner and Rubio pointedly asked Austin and Haines about the status of some of those initiatives in their letter.

The fiscal 2023 law “directed AARO to stand up a secure public-facing website, or communication mechanism, to outline the secure process for witnesses to come forward with relevant information. To date, we have seen no efforts to communicate the existence of the secure process to the public. We request that you provide us an update on the plan to publicize the secure process for witnesses to come forward,” the senators wrote.

Kirkpatrick had confirmed at the hearing that his team “submitted the first version of that before Christmas” and was still waiting on feedback from superiors at the time. 

Warner and Rubio also said they “have not seen evidence of an AARO strategic communications strategy,” and therefore seek to understand why the office is not using social media to better engage the public — as it was directed.

“AARO established a Twitter presence in July 2022, but has yet to post anything further, despite attracting over 31,000 followers. This highlights the lack of communication and transparency with the public,” they wrote.

Going forward, the senators asked that Congress also “be regularly informed about the content of the interviews” AARO conducts with possible UAP witnesses. 

Further, Warner and Rubio also requested that lawmakers receive updates on expectations related to AARO’s personnel and reporting structure, which also were left up in the air when Kirkpatrick testified.

“The FY23 NDAA requires the director of AARO to report directly to the Principal Deputy Director National Intelligence (PDDNI) and the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Despite assurances that there is a proposed plan to implement this change in reporting in circulation, we have yet to see any final guidance issued. We request that you provide us an update on the proposed plan including the timeline for issuance of the final guidance,” they wrote.

The DNI office also has not met the law’s mandate to appoint a deputy director of AARO to serve from the intelligence community, according to the senators, who want answers on that. 

A Pentagon spokesperson on Monday confirmed the Defense Department’s receipt of this inquiry. 

“As with all congressional correspondence, we will respond directly to the authors of the letter,” the spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

Meanwhile on Monday, still-unconfirmed reports surfaced of another new and perplexing balloon flying over the U.S.

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