WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is investigating around 650 cases involving unidentified aircraft, but the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, has said that there is no evidence of alien activity.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kirkpatrick said approximately half of the reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena” have been prioritized for further review and to examine if enough data is available to resolve the cases, adding that many cases may remain unresolved due to a lack of hard data. He estimated 20 to 30 cases are halfway through his office’s analytical process with “a handful” of cases that have been peer-reviewed and closed.
“I will not close a case that I cannot defend the conclusions of,” Kirkpatrick said.
During his testimony, Kirkpatrick showed videos of two recently declassified cases of unidentified objects observed by U.S. military drones to demonstrate AARO’s analytic process. The first video, showing an apparently spherical object observed in the Middle East in 2022, remains unresolved for lack of data. A second sighting from South Asia this year was resolved pending a peer review after AARO’s analysis determined the object to be a commercial aircraft.
In recent years, concerns have risen in Washington over unknown objects entering US airspace, leading to the establishment of Kirkpatrick’s office in July last year to analyze sightings.
However, Kirkpatrick clarified that there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy known physics. He stated that only a small percentage of reports display anomalous characteristics, and the majority can be explained as mundane sources.
Kirkpatrick co-authored a draft paper with Harvard professor Avi Loeb last month presenting a theory that recent objects defying physics could be probes from an extraterrestrial mothership.
