Pentagon’s Former UFO Chief Speaks Out on UAPs & Government Secrets | Sean Kirkpatrick
Transcript
Brian Keating:
Is the government hiding evidence of extraterrestrial craft? Were aliens present during a Department of Defense technology test? Does Tom DeLonge have alien artifacts? And where did he get them from?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
We’re doing peer reviews, and we’re getting people out and involved across multiple communities to try to to get this evidence on the table so people can look at it and understand what the conclusions are.
Brian Keating:
Today on Into the Impossible, we have the first director of the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office or ARO at the US Department of Defense. Sean is a physicist and ex intelligence officer. His work has brought him into the public eye, especially given the increased government transparency and interest in UAP and UFO related topics. Sean quit his position as director of the ARO due to constant threats and harassment. However, even after he quit, the criticism and harassment only worsened. He actually had more harassment from US citizens than the Chinese and Russian adversaries that he used to work against.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
The way you combat conspiracy theories and the associated misunderstandings that fuel them is fact and science and truth.
Brian Keating:
So after 18 months on the job, Sean called it quits last December and Aro published its first part of a report that he and others had worked on. Today we discuss the world of ufology, the study of UFOs, the scientific secrets they may reveal, the personal and professional motivations for so many people that are interested in this topic. Today, we’ll discuss the evidence for extraterrestrial technology, UFO threats, Skinwalker Ranch, and skepticism in science and ufology in general. Let’s go into the impossible. So, Sean, we normally on this podcast do a deep dive into the cover and the and the subtitle of a book, and we ask what’s the artwork for. You don’t have a book yet, although I’m sure people are reaching out to you, with many offers. Maybe I’ll introduce you to my agent. But I wanna instead, go over an article that you wrote as, the so called US government’s UFO Hunter.
Brian Keating:
And that was the title of the article. And the quote I wanna get your reaction to is this one, that you write, the conspiracist story goes something like this. The UFO has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UFOs from as early as the 19 sixties and probably earlier. The gray cover up failed to produce any salient results and consequently the work was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors. Apparently, the CIA stopped the supposed transfer back to the US government. All of this is without substantiating evidence but alas belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume at which it’s transmitted. Sean, what do you say to those people that say that’s exactly how conspiracies work and we’re in the midst of many, many conspiracies? How do you react to the criticisms of, well, that’s just normal and and that’s how conspiracies go?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Then why are we fooling around with conspiracies? This is not the dark ages. This is, you know, back in the land of reason and science and thought. And the way you combat conspiracy theories and and the associated misunderstandings that fuel them is fact and science and truth. So if you’ve got evidence for a conspiracy, then then that helps to investigate what the underlying truth is. There has been none that has been substantiated for this. And everything that has been brought to our attention and everything that was brought to my attention when I was in that position as the director, we investigated and discovered that it did not come from where they thought it came from. Most everything was explainable through other documentation, other programs, other people that had talked to other people.
Brian Keating:
You’ve, of course, done a lot of research as part of ARO, but also you’re a physicist, and I thought it would be very interesting to describe, some of the interest that, as I’ve made the case for, why physicists should be interested. How did you get involved in in this project? It it doesn’t seem to be a likely segue from somebody who was a, laser and materials physicist in the University of Georgia. What how did you get interested in this? Why should a physicist have any anything to say about this, this subject matter?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Well, so understand that as a as a career government official, as an intelligence officer, most of my last assignments, I was told to go do, not necessarily applied for. This being one of them. I did not apply for this job. So why did they ask me to do it? And the answer actually goes to, I think, where you’re trying to hit, especially for for the students that are gonna be paying attention to this. The difference between scientific investigation and intelligence tradecraft is actually very thin. There’s there’s a lot of overlap between them. And in fact, we have a field in the intelligence community called scientific and technical intelligence. And it is exactly what it sounds like.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s trying to understand what what an adversary, what another country, what anybody else is investigating through their science and technology programs. And you do that by studying them, studying what they are putting out in the in the publication, studying what actions they’re doing, trying to discern what are they actually researching? Why are they doing? This is not very different from that. You have an unknown observation or phenomena, and you’re trying to understand what is that. And is it a threat? And do I really need to be worried about it? Or is it something else? And is there another underlying problem that we need to see? So the reason I was asked to take this particular thing is because there’s not that many, PhD physicists in the intelligence community doing analytic work, who has stood up programs, stood up new offices and new organizations. So I had experience doing that. I had experience doing research. I had experience doing intelligence work and trade craft and collection. So in the intelligence community, I would also be known as a collector, an s and t developer.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
So I would develop sensors or develop experiments to go out into the world and measure what other people are doing, whether that’s through remote sensing or overhead or what. Bring all that together, Try to understand what’s happening.
Brian Keating:
And you have a background in assessing data, applying likelihood frameworks, etcetera. I’ve heard rumors or perhaps are just, you know, claims that may not be true that when the planet Venus is, above the horizon for some period of the day, which it’s not always, that UFO or UAP sightings go up by some very large statistically significant, amount. Is that true, Sean?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
I don’t know that I have that statistic anyway. Now we did do some work. I think as you know, Mark, I some work with the, University of Utah and my colleagues out there on some correlation. Right? So trying to understand some of the underlying environmental factors that affect reporting, reporting statistics, reporting dynamics. And we put that out in a paper. There’s a second paper that’s coming out that does the neck kinda round of that. But in that paper, we looked at things from, you know, sky view, cloud cover, light pollution, trees. Right? So just some of the basics.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Not we’re not trying to draw any massive conclusions out of that, but to set a baseline of understanding. Okay? So to go back to your question about why should physicists be be interested in this? But they should be interested in this because it is, you know, a conspiracy laden problem that needs, truth and needs, basic scientific method applied to it. And let me give you, the same kind of, metaphor I’ve given, before. Do you know how much money just the US alone has spent on looking for life out in the universe?
Brian Keating:
It’s in the 1,000,000, less than 1,000,000,000 perhaps.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Oh, it’s 1,000,000,000.
Brian Keating:
Billions. Okay.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
NASA’s one of NASA’s primary missions is the hunt for extraterrestrial life out in the universe. Right? Whether it’s probes on Mars you know, there was an article I was just reading this morning about, a finding from Perseverance. Right? They’re very excited about what that research might leak. Probes out in the universe, probes out in solar system, we we send spacecraft to other planets. People don’t normally think of it that way, but we are sending spacecraft to other planets. Right? Lights, probes, and
Brian Keating:
what That’s right.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
As long as we’re having that conversation in the context of scientific research with NASA out in the universe. You’re out in the solar system. It’s a very scientifically based, data based rational argument and discussion. Right? As that conversation gets closer and closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, maybe a little bit closer than that, right, it starts to to morph. That conversation starts to morph into science fiction. And then somewhere when you get in, you know, across the ionosphere of Earth, it becomes conspiracy theory. To go back to why shouldn’t physicists care, well, you need to elevate this conversation, the level of this conversation out of the conspiracy theory and into fact. So base it with some baseline maths, some baseline pattern of life’s baseline scientific method, and show some data.
Brian Keating:
Hey there. I hope you’re enjoying this out of this world episode of Into the Impossible, and I’m wanting you to do just one small favor to show that you’re enjoying, and it’s free. Just subscribe wherever you’re listening to or watching this podcast or video episode. It really helps out a lot. Leave a review for extra credit. I know it’s the summer, but you gotta get that extra credit homework. So leave a review, rating, thumbs up, comment, whatever you like. Do you like this episode? Do you want an opposing view on as we’ve had on in the past? Let me know in the comments below.
Brian Keating:
And when you see people claiming, and I I asked some of my audience to, you know, contribute questions for today, and there’s so much vitriol and hostility, and a lot of themes that come up is, well, this guy’s salary is paid by the taxpayers, which is not true anymore. Correct, Sean? You’re no longer working for air. So, so that’s not true. Well, let’s let’s grant it. We have a right to this data. And I say, I could show you the Hubble Deep Field, and that’s data. Do you have a right to it? You know, I I guess you could say you have a right to it. Could you do anything with it as an amateur? You know? And and I I think, of course, the answer is no.
Brian Keating:
You can make certain images, but to do actual real science other than, you know, kind of just just playing around and making pretty wallpaper and screensavers for your desktop, there’s very little that an average person could do. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, you know, be have access to. But what right does the public have to data? Isn’t there some, you know, is there some balance that you try to strike between all these reports that you claim, you know, flooded your office, but also transparency to the to the taxpayer? How do you balance those 2 competing constraints?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
The American public do does not have, right to any classified data. And we have we are awash in classified data. We have a we have how many wars going on right now. And every time we take an overhead satellite image from one of our intelligence satellites, that’s classified data. You have no right to that. That is used for national security reasons, purposes, and missions. And a taxpayer pays a subset of the public, military, civilian, and contractors for the purposes of national security and to protect this nation. Now you either pay them and you trust them to go do their job, or you don’t trust them to go do their job and you should stop paying them and let somebody invade and take over this nation.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
I mean, you know, pick your poison. When it comes to this particular data, the government is trying very, very hard to declassify stuff and push it out so that people can see, so there can be transparency. That was the whole purpose of standing up Arrow, and that’s all I spent most of my time trying to do. And it doesn’t go fast. What people don’t understand is contrary to what you see in the public media, you can’t just snap your fingers and say something is declassified. Nobody has that authority. It has to go through an interagency process for 1. 2, the owner of that data has their own declassification procedures, so everybody is different.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
And why is this a problem? Well, if I get as the director, if I got data that came from the air force, I have to go through air force procedures to get it declassified. And what does that mean? That means they have to make sure that there’s there’s no mission specific operational data. There’s no capability data that can be compromised. It’s not that there’s a balloon in it. It’s because the I’ll I’ll come back to why things are classified. But but that’s the air force. Right? The army has a different process and a different procedure. The navy has a different process and a different procedure.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
The intelligence community has different processes and procedures and different rules. And so you have to go to each one of them separate depending on who gave you the data, if there’s data to be had. So there’s a there’s a process and it takes time. And that’s what people don’t understand is that each one of these things takes time. That’s why it’s still slow. Some of the things that you’re seeing getting published on Arrow’s website now, we had started 18 months ago while I was still there to get it classified and out. Now why are things classified? That’s another good question that people should probably understand. Especially if you’re a graduate student, you wanna go into technology development for, you know, the department or the IC.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
These are the things you’re gonna have to understand. You can build the best sensor on the face of the planet, like, the the newest camera that’s that’s 16 megapixel, and it can take a picture, from, you know, 2,000 miles away and get, you know, pristine data. Okay. Great. And I’m gonna put that on an aircraft, and I’m gonna slide. Well, because you’ve developed that for a air force platform, for example, they’re gonna classify the capability of that sensor because nobody else has it. We don’t want anybody else to have it. And they we don’t want anybody to know that we can do this.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
So they classify it. Now the aircraft goes out, flies around, takes a picture of a bird. Guess what? That picture is classified. It’s not classified because the bird is special. It’s classified because if I gave that picture in all of the raw data to an optical physicist or an optical scientist, they could reverse engineer the capability of that camera. And now you’ve lost this the the technological edge. Right? Everybody hears about this in the news about how we’re losing our technological edge to China. Well, this is why the reasons why.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
You lose that data, people figure it out. So you have to do things to the image to declassify it. So what does that mean? That means you scrub the metadata down and out to get rid of that. You you probably compress the image. And once you do all that, you kinda lose the ability to reverse engineer the original capabilities of the sensor. And so the image at that point can be downgraded, declassified to, you know, unclassed. Here’s a bird. It’s a great picture of a bird.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s close-up. Okay. That’s sort of the whole classification problem in a nutshell. Now to make matters even worse, you’ve heard a lot of discussion in the in the media about, the department and the IC recognizing that we’ve overclassified a lot of things, and we need to we need to fix that. We’ve been struggling with that for for decades. K. Well, they’re they’re getting around to figuring out how to do that, but here’s what that means. Why do we say we’ve overclassified things? We’ve made it difficult because alright.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
You’re an optical physicist. You go and you work for Raytheon or Lockheed or somebody. You build a nice sensor camera system, you know, state of the art, government funded. It’s gonna be classified. If it goes to the air force, the air force will classify it with one compartment. And then it goes to the navy, it’ll be the a different compartment. Not even the same compartment. It’ll be the same camera, but it’ll be classified with different compartments, different protections.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
And so you can’t just take one, you know, and declassify it without consulting the others because they have to figure out, is there any compromise to each other’s programs? So that is the problem that the government’s trying to get a hold of and fix. Right? So we don’t need 2 compartments for the same sensor on
Brian Keating:
different platforms. We need, you know, maybe you need 1 car, and
Sean Kirkpatrick:
you don’t need platforms. We need, you know, maybe you need 1 compartment, maybe you don’t need a compartment. That’s the review that’s going on right now.
Brian Keating:
Scientific advances are often frightening as well as exciting. An example of this is Elon Musk’s new Neuralink, a brain computer interface designed to assist paralyzed patients in controlling technology with their thoughts. While this technology holds immense promise for restoring movement and communication, ethical concerns linger around safety, privacy, and the potential long term effects. Despite the controversy, Neuralink is planning upcoming trials in more and more patients, aiming for high single digits by the end of the year. If successful, this could mark a significant step towards revolutionizing human computer interaction. I love staying up to date on news, especially related to science, technology, and artificial intelligence, And with the rapid speed of today’s news cycle, it’s crucial to stay informed and trust where you’re getting your information. I’m excited I found this story about Neuralink on Ground News. Ground News is a website and app that I use every day.
Brian Keating:
It gathers articles from around 50,000 news sources all over the world in an unbiased way that can help you read between the lines of the standard mainstream media bias. It helps you break free of algorithms and echo chambers, and filter bubbles. You can check them out at ground. News slash doctorbryant. Let me show you why I love Ground News. Right away in the Neuralink story, you can see that 47 news outlets have reported on the story. Of these 47 outlets, 35% of them lean to the left politically, 35% come from the center, and only 31% lean right. You can see the reliability of the outlets covering the story.
Brian Keating:
This is unique. It also shows who owns the outlets reporting on the story. The majority, 32%, are from independent news outlets. Ground news also makes it easy to compare headlines to see how bias might influence the framing and shape our understanding of the issues. I found it hugely fascinating that the Left tends to focus on the detailed technical issues and improvements, highlighting the long term goals, while the Center emphasizes Musk’s intentions to give people superpowers. Surprisingly, the right leaning media coverage underscores assurances made that the implant doesn’t harm the brain and focuses more on the technology’s potential benefits. You can’t get this type of news analysis anywhere else. The news isn’t going to report on itself, but ground news does.
Brian Keating:
One of my favorite features is to look at their blind spot feed, which allows you to see stories that are underreported by either side of the political spectrum. The blind spot feed has been incredibly helpful in seeing what each side focuses on and what they ignore. With Ground News, you get a deeper understanding of the complexity and nuance of different issues by seeing it from all different sides and identify media narratives. I love ground news so much. I deleted the default news app on my iPhone, Apple news and installed Ground News and their widget instead. And I can tell you Ground News is the perfect gift for family and friends, especially in 2024, it’s gonna be a blow out, wildly polarized electoral season and aftermath. To get this, go to ground news/drbryant, doctorbryant, to stay fully informed on breaking news and see through media bias. You’ll become a smarter news consumer and subscribe to my link for 40% off unlimited access with their Vantage plan.
Brian Keating:
The same plan I use. By subscribing, they’re directly supporting an independent platform for news and supporting the show as well. I’ve had, you know, 2 former CIA, agents on the podcast before, and they’ve both both spoken about the problem of over classification. And we saw that, you know, even impact the presidential race in the past past few years. But back going back to the article, you wrote that, you know, many of the, you know, sightings and allegations that from the public claim to be UAPs are derived really from the misrepresentation or inadvertent disclosure of legitimate US programs that might not be related to UFOs at all. So without revealing any sensitive details, now I wanna pivot from observations and and classification of of data once it’s been observed. But what about the other way? Can you share an example of a real government project that might have been mistaken for something extraterrestrial?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Sure. There’s a there’s a bunch of historical ones that have already been declassified. Right? So the then what is it that one of the original stealth planes, f 117. State of the art stealth fighter being developed out and tested out in Area 51, and everybody saw it, thought it was an alien spacecraft. Right? In fact, that is that is one of the key programs that gave rise to the whole conspiracy back starting back then. That was the platform everybody was pointing to saying this is a alien technology. You know, it’s understandable if that is the first time anybody ever sees that sort of shape. Nobody, would believe it could even fly.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
And so how do you you know, to see something like that, 1, it it doesn’t look like an aircraft. 2, you don’t think if it is an aircraft, it cannot fly, and then you see it fly. People get, all kinds of notions in their hit. Well, why would you think it’s any different today? So just because you all out in the world, the entire, you know, human race has now seen the the newest stealth bomber. Okay. Well, but you’ve only seen it from how many different aspect angles? They don’t take pictures all around. There’s a reason for that because it looks weird. There are things that are classified that you don’t wanna see or share.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
And and so it’s not unreasonable to to think, hey. There’s a new technology that we’re testing, a new design, and we don’t recognize what it looks like. So that must be that must be the the technology. Right? And I’ve had people talk to me about, well, you know, there’s a lot of people that think stealth technology was born of of extraterrestrial technology. No. It hasn’t been because we actually have the entire record of how stealth technology was developed, who developed it, where it came from, why it came from there, how did we build it out, how did we advance it over the years. It’s a rich history. Most of it’s still classified, but it’s a rich history of technology development, advanced technology development.
Brian Keating:
Another thing is, is that, you know, the the question of the data collection methodology. Are there some, you know, filters? Are there some, you know, kind of overlays or biases as we’d say in the trade? Because, you know, I’ve noticed a lot of the people that I’ve had on my podcast, people like Ryan Graves and and others like David Fravor or Aminon, but I’ve I’ve talked to his wing woman, and and Dietrich. And, you know, the question is, well, of course, you’re gonna see strange things around military bases. And in the Science Reports article, you overlay and and, you know, a large number of so called hot spots are in the Western United States where we have most of our, you know, secret bases are not around are not secretive bases, but actual bases are not in, you know, downtown Manhattan. They’re in the great expanse of the, Southwest and the, and the Northwest. So can you comment on, you know, kind of some of the overlay biases that people aren’t aware of and that, you know, can probably dismiss a large number of sightings, due to legitimate, though classified government programs.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
In the very first annual report that, we put out after I stood up Arrow, we put that heat map together for this very reason. We have a global heat map. It’s on the website. Everybody can look at it. And we we actually wrote too. This is this is clearly collection bias in the reporting community because the reports are coming from military pilots, military operators, navy and air force predominantly. And why is that? Well, because we’re flying around testing stuff. Couple of things that people don’t probably recognize.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Right? So one, a test range is huge. It’s like several 100 square kilometers. I mean, it’s huge. And so there will be tests multiple tests can occur on a test range simultaneously by different owners, different different organizations. And not everybody knows what everybody else is doing on a test range. That’s reason that’s called a test the the the very few people that understand the entire scope of everything that’s happening are like the the range test director or the commander who has to know everything that’s happening in their in your the OR, their area of responsibility. That’s sort of saying what? There are there are times where, you know, you’ve got group a is doing one test, and group b is doing another test, and group a might inadvertently see group b. And they’re gonna see it because it’s only during test times that sensors are turned on, which is another collection bias.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Now I have a collection bias of I’m only getting reporting out of those areas where we’re doing sensitive testing, not only from the US’s side, but now I’ve now think of it from the adversary side. I’ve got my test range where I’m gonna be testing all of my advanced technology. So if I’m an adversary, I wanna know what’s going on in your test range. Well, I’m gonna try to get into it. How am I gonna do that? Well, I can float a balloon in there. I can fly a drone in there. I can do all kinds of stuff. And we have to try to sort out, hey.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Is that a threat, and do I need to shoot it down? Or is that just a piece of trash that’s flying through the air? Or is that you know? So we have that problem. And then the underlying sort of, secondary, collection bias there is sensors because we don’t run those sensors on those ranges 247. It costs a lot of money. You have to have contractors run it, you have to have support, you have to have electricity. So we only usually turn those things on, and and that’s all of our sensors. When we’re running a test, we need to have sensors on for test. So the the other thing that we were trying to get fixed was you need a pattern of life. Right? Scientifically speaking, I need a baseline.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
I need a pattern of life of everything that happens in that airspace 247 for, I don’t know, 2, 3, 4, 5 months at a time. Just turn everything on and collect all that data and monitor everything. Well, we can’t afford to core, you know, turn everything on and collect all of that, all that up energy of all the things that are happening and all. So what we have to do is is design purpose built, or bring out already built, purpose built, monitors, whether they’re radars or telescopes or whatnot that are that are slave to it and watch. Collect all that data and then analyze. Okay. So here’s what happens when there’s no tests happening. How many objects come through the airspace? Here’s what happens when a test happens.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Does the number of objects go up? Because if it goes up while we’re doing a test, that’s an indication that somebody is trying to do something. If it doesn’t go up, then there’s probably just your normal stuff that’s going through all the time.
Brian Keating:
Hey there. I can’t get you any of the possible extraterrestrial technology that Sean and his team at ARO evaluated, but I can get you something that’s out of this world and that’s a meteorite. It’s a meteorite that was fell to earth at great velocity made of exotic materials that you will get if I pick you as one of the monthly winners that I select when you join my Monday Magic mailing list where I send out all sorts of cool information about research in science, technology, engineering and math, including a very deep dive into this very episode that you’re enjoying today. So I hope you’ll do me that favor and subscribe to the Monday Magic mailing list. And if you have a dotedu email address like many of you do, you’re guaranteed to win one of these suckers if you live in the United States. So for those of you blessed to be a student or a professor or trapped in a lab somewhere, Go to briankking.com/edu and you’re guaranteed to win if you live in the US. Now back to the episode. And what about things that aren’t in our air space? Does you know, for example, one of my listeners, Ashton, Forbes, is asking, some an event like, Malaysian Airline, 370 flight mysteriously disappeared, was tracked on many different sensors.
Brian Keating:
Is this something that ARO would be involved with? Or he he claims that, you know, this this could be of interest because it might involve, you know, some sort of advanced technology, nonhuman intelligence.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
That wouldn’t be something that Aero would be involved in. That’s all FAA. It’s a known it’s a known aircraft. It’s not the 1st aircraft that’s gone missing from radars.
Brian Keating:
Can you talk about the broader trends over the last 20, 30, 40 years? The Zeitgeist is abuzz since, you know, 2017 when, you know, past guest, Tom DeLonge, you know, kind of got a lot of attention in the, you know, New York Times front page, sightings, and and so forth, strange anomalous things that he’s, also involved with on a personal level through his own, you know, for and not for profit endeavors. But but talk about the temporal trends. I mean, have you just seen this, like, overwhelming flood as well as you’re seeing with classification and that problem already discussed, but with reporting and and just people’s attention being, you know, fixated so much on the subject.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
So at the first blush, has reporting numbers gone up? Yes. Have they gone up exponentially? No. And why have they gone up? So the underlying reasons why reporting and remember, we’re talking about, you know, military intelligence, civilian, you know, not not the general public reporting, but the right. So that reporting in the department and in the IC has increased because we wrote orders. My team and I wrote orders with the joint staff to all of the services and all of the combat support agencies. And so for those of you not tracking combat support agencies or some of the intel, agencies that support combat commands and say, you must report if you see something. Here’s everything you have to report. We put that out.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s been more than a year now, and and I reported that. I think the Pentagon made an announcement about it because we were we were answering one of the problems that had been identified that there was no standardized reporting. Well, we’ve fixed most of that. We said, here’s here are the orders you must report. And you will save data, and you will transmit it to Arrow for analysis. And once that started getting out, because it takes time to propagate those orders out across all of the forces and the training areas and whatnot, then reporting has gone up. Right. And then we started working with the FAA.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
So one of the other things one of the last things I was doing was working with the FAA on integrating FAA pilot reporting. Now there’s a huge difference between a commercial pilot and a military pilot, and what they report, and how they provide the data. Because a commercial airline does not have onboard radar that it’s gonna use to collect against that. It doesn’t have sensors. It doesn’t have data recording of the kind that a fighter jet will house. Right? As it has health and safety recording, that’s about it. You have limited value of what you can get from the civilian reporting, in the commercial airlines, FAA airlines, but they are working really hard to standardize. You know, you need to tell us exactly what was your lat long at the time you you what was your GPS coordinates at the time you saw? Where do you think it was? What was it doing? As much information as you could provide.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Now you go into, Arrow’s reports, and they’ll tell you how many FAA, reports or civilian reports have been received. I think by the time I left, it was less than a couple of 100 across the globe. So and many of them, believe it or not, turn into Starlink launches, satellite reentries. Those are some of the biggest things that get reported all the time.
Brian Keating:
I’ve interviewed these pilots. I actually did an interview live with Rheingraves and my good friend Ariel Kleinerman, who are both f 18 pilots. They served together in the US Navy. One reaction I get is, you know, how dare you, Keating? How how dare you criticize these military flyboys and girls, and you don’t have the guts to to strap on to an f 18. And, you know, I fly around a little Cessna around Southern California. But, but how dare you on the one hand, and the other hand, you know, they have this implicit trust of the military when it comes to sightings of UFOs, but but on everything else, including you, and we’ll get to my friend David Spergel and NASA and their involvement, they have utter disdain, contempt, and and and real suspicion. How do you what do you what are the forces at work here that would allow somebody to have such cognitive biases? On one hand, support the government, you know, when there’s pilots that, you know, ascribe to my pet theory that there are alien technology, flying around our skies, and then the ultimate distrust of folks that are civil servants or maybe even in the military that, you know, give their whole careers to this effort. How do you balance those? How do you square those 2?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
You know, that’s one of the things that is the most disappointing about this entire endeavor is, you know, my team is made up was made up of military and civilian intelligence officers, who have dedicated their lines and careers to serving the national interest. National security have served overseas. I’ve been overseas, and yet the civilians often get shunted aside as and not ascribed the same level of respect. And I’ll tell you as intelligence officers, most intelligence officers, when they serve overseas, they’re serving in war zones right alongside the uniform military. They are supporting the military by doing intelligence. They are they are collecting. I mean, collection against an adversary means going behind enemy lines where uniform military can’t go. And yet, somehow, that is not as as good in the eyes of of some of the public.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
And when it comes to things like this very divisive, topic area, When you have a group of people like like my team was, who are, you know, outstanding top notch people who are trying to answer what congress told them to go do and trying to do their job and per present an objective evidence based analysis, and they get harassed and shot down about that, that’s just not acceptable. Right? So I would turn that argument, that statement back around to the American people that have said that and go, how dare you? Why don’t you get off your couch and come help do some actual military or intelligence work, and let’s see how well you do.
Brian Keating:
Yeah. Having this, you know, kind of instant access, instant gratification, you know, 247, you know, kind of overwhelm. It just seems, you know, almost like a losing proposition. I think you said once you get more kind of attacks from, US citizens than you do from people in, in Russia or China, which are adversaries.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s ridiculous. Brian. I was I was deputy director of intelligence at US Strategic Command, right, supporting throwing nuclear weapons around. And I was deputy director of intelligence at US Space Command, you know, overseeing all of our space or and it’s 2 of our key key capabilities of the, you know, the United States national security apparatus, space and nuclear weapons. And I had less trouble from Russia and China trying to figure out what I was doing than I have from the American public who’s pissed off because I didn’t tell them that they were aliens.
Brian Keating:
So pivoting now to, to, you know, this this question of the the the popular narrative that surrounds and and this is such a rich environment, you know, for for characters, for almost caricatures of people. I mean, you’ve got billionaires, you’ve got rock stars, you’ve got egghead scientists, you have Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan, you know, rigorous professors due to full studio scientists, David Spergel, again, I mentioned him, my colleague here at UCSD, Shelley Wright, who was actually looking for aliens. And you see that there’s no greater person, no greater personality than a physicist like yourself, like me, who would be more interested, I should say. There’s there’s no one to be more interested than a physicist. Right? If this were true. And I think, you know, if I had to suspect, you were possibly animated by your, you know, interest hope perhaps that we could shortcut 3 centuries of physics if these things were real, perhaps, but you didn’t let that get in the way of where the data took you. But talk about these other characters, this, you know, Robert you mentioned Robert Bigelow in your Scientific, American article. I mentioned Tom DeLonge.
Brian Keating:
These are people who have claimed on my podcast that they have evidence of alien technology, that has, you know, crashed. They have it. And then when I ask them, well, can you give me the chain of custody, Tom? You know, where no no. We we lost provenance to it, you know, here, but but but everything else well, if you lose one shred of the causal chain, it doesn’t hold together. So why are people like the Bigelows, you know, and the late Harry Reid and and other people? We often hear about that. The government is spending money on this. How dare again, they love to, you know, they love to question, you know, people that that oppose their senators, except if their senator is on an opposing political party during election season. So talk about that.
Brian Keating:
The characters like Bigelow and others, what are they doing positive and negative for the search for truth?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
You know, nothing would make me happier than to uncover the evidence to to say, hey. Here, I found them. Here they are. Let me roll them out for you. But that didn’t happen. Right? The evidence does not support that. None of the evidence. And it’s important to note it’s evidence.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Right? Just because somebody said, you know, something and they heard it from somebody else or they saw something. Humans are fallible. Right? They are fallible. They are subject to optical illusion. They’re subject to to their own interpretations of sensors, their own sensory perception. Right? But it’s data that is that is the coin at the realm, especially in something like this. The people that you may you’ve named, right, I I can’t think of anything that they’ve done that I would say is positive in the search of answer to this question. And and why do I say that? This piece of material was claimed to be from a a crashed UAP.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Right? No provenance as you pointed out. They they think it came from the Roswell, and nobody can say for sure because they lost chain of custody. They don’t know where it came from. It got bought and and sold, and now there’s this belief. Okay. So you take It gets pointed to as the evidence. This is the evidence. Therefore, we must believe.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Okay. Well, well, once we get a hold of said evidence to actually go measure it, investigate it using science. Science does not support said thing. It’s not even it it’s it’s not even extraterrestrial. It’s terrestrial. It’s we know pretty much what it is, and and we know probably what it came from. But we can’t say for a 100% that it was definitely a missile casing. I could say it’s probably a material that was used in the aerospace industry back in that time.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
But the isotopic ratios do not support anything other than earth based. So unless you wanna debate whether isotopic ratios are definitive in that answer along with all the other spectrum that was taken, You can’t really debate it anymore. So why do they do it? I get asked this question a lot. I got asked it in congress. I got asked it behind closed doors, on camera, off camera all the time. Why do people do it? And my job was not to determine intent. Let’s be clear. My job was not to determine intent.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
My job was determine truth and then let other people figure that out. People do things for a variety of reasons. There’s fame, fortune, there’s power. Their drive for power is you would be surprised how much that one comes up in this. You think it’d just be money and pay, but the ability of people to say, I I helped ghost write the legislation that forced the Pentagon to go do this. Right? I’ve had 3 people tell me that. That is that I mean, they and they like to say it a lot. It’s like, okay.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Well, that’s great. But you know what? We all and if you’re in the government long enough, you pretty much all end up helping write legislation at some point. And then, and then there’s there’s just there’s there’s misperception, the misinterpretation of things that are real that you just don’t understand, then then you’re you’re down to it’s it’s belief. And and once you get into its belief and not evidentiary based fact, now you’re almost into a religious discussion. Right? Because you can’t combat belief. And I’ve I’ve told people this before. Right? I can put out all of the hard evidence in science that will, you know, unequivocally say, this is not that. Just like this piece of material that the report came out, you know, whatever, last week or couple weeks ago.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Finally, that was another thing that we finished last fall, and it took this long to get, you know, released. But you could put all that out and people are still gonna believe. And they’re gonna believe because they want to believe. And and in today’s, you know, and I I’ve actually I’ve heard this from a couple of people. I mean, I get emails all the time. And I’ve had a number of people concerningly because, you know, it actually makes me worried about where these people are headed. But I’ve had people say, look. The state of the world today is such that I’m scared.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
This is horrible. We’re all gonna die. This is all bad. And, you know, aliens are going to save us. It’s not necessarily that they believe aliens are gonna save us. They want to believe somebody is going to save us.
Brian Keating:
Right. That’s eschatological in a lot of cases. And I think that’s part of the human impulse and the human urge. And I think that there’s no reason to suspect that they would save us. I mean, I I would say, know, if you wanna find life, just go, you know, a couple miles off campus here, and there’s, there’s a ocean full of life with trillions of viruses per cubic centimeter, and yet we still dump a lot of trash into the ocean. So the question is, you know, what will change the day after we really discover aliens? And I wanna take you back to some of these, you know, very evocative. I mean, we we used to do a really good job of naming these investigative programs, and I I wanna read to you some of my favorite ones as we we only have about 10 minutes left. You’re generous with your time.
Brian Keating:
But but, Project Saucer, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Twinkle, Grudge, Bear, and then, of course, the famous blue book. Which one of these is closest in spirit to what you did, or which one would you say gave the most, you know, Bayesian credulity to the search either for ordinary prosaic explanations or perhaps led the way to probe new mystery?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
I really liked not the original blue book, but there was a blue book follow on report. It’s out at at Nara. But it’s basically the air force coming in some years later and saying and I’m summarizing. We’re, you know, we’re getting beat up about blue book and that we didn’t do a job. So we’re gonna convene another group of people to review what blue book did and do an assessment of that. Did they do their job? Did they follow procedure? Did they give, you know, evidence? Did they turn over everything? And and that report, you know, came out and said, yeah. Well, they they they did, and and we validated, you know, most of what they what they had turned over. Here’s everything we found.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
We think they did an exceptional job. And I think that, you know, if you look at it through the view of scientific method, right, that’s pure reviewing of a paper, and it got validated. So I think that was the closest to what we were trying to get to, what we stood up arrow of. We’re putting all this together. We’re doing the investigation, and we’re doing peer reviews, and we’re getting people out and involved across multiple communities to try to to get this evidence on the table so people can look at it and and understand what the conclusions are.
Brian Keating:
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Brian Keating:
So in Era’s, first report on the historical record of US government involvement with UAP, I have a list of 9 or 10 different really shocking headline grabbing, attention grabbing, incidents ranging from a CIA officer who allegedly mishandled or managed the UAP experimentation to a claim that a military officer touched an off world craft. Yeah. To the yeah. To the question of experimentation on extraterrestrial spacecraft samples that we discussed that earlier. And then, a named company allegedly experimenting on alien technology. Which of these, you know, took the longest to resolve in, eventually coming to the conclusion as you state very clearly, you know, in the end that there is no evidence in any of the findings in in volume 1, at least. I mean, hope could spring eternal for the future, but to date, a Aero has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off world technology or the
Sean Kirkpatrick:
existence of a classified program that had not
Brian Keating:
properly reported to congress. Which of those gave you program that had not properly reported to congress? Which of those gave you the most, you know, kinda caused you to stew the most over it?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Each of them took different some different amounts of time to dig into. Clearly, I got to resolution on all of them to write the report so I could retire. The I think the thing that took sort of the longest to unwind was the, you know, the alleged company that had the material and was was experimenting on it. That’s actually linked to this piece of material that the report came out about recently on what it was because that piece of material, somebody had asked a company to look at it, and they came back with the there’s it’s this type of alloy. We don’t think that’s a single layer we can reproduce. We can’t do anything with that. That’s fed the conspiracy. That’s fed the story line, right, of hey.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
If somebody called a company and and got them because they knew a guy. Right? So it’s like it’s like if I had called you up and said, hey, Brian. Would you mind taking a look at this piece of material for me and tell me what you think? And I think it’s this, and it’s gonna be and it’s gonna be based off of this paper. And I’m gonna give you this paper. It says, hey, this is a this is a thing. And if you apply this field, it’s gonna do this. When you pull the thread on all of that, it all comes down to, again, that same kind of group of people we identified in the paper They had their fingers in all of this, and it all is it’s self consistent within the story. But once you start pulling the threads on the facts, it doesn’t hold together.
Brian Keating:
So just a couple of questions from the audience before I ask my final question and wrap up. Thank you so much for your time. So this is from Nick Pope. You probably heard of him. He wonders, what consultation process, if any, do you follow when receiving interview requests? And aside from the obvious prohibition on divulging classified information, does the DOD or anyone else give you guidance on points to stress or points to avoid?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
So nobody gives me guidance. This question’s come up a couple of times. So did the White House put pressure on me? DOD put pressure on me. Nobody did. I was told to go do a job and a mission, and that’s what we did. And I don’t I did not run those questions by anybody. We came up with those questions on on interviewing in order to get to what does the person want to say and how do they wanna say it. And then we would have them put it on paper, and then they would review it.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
They would make any changes they want, and they would sign their statement for the record. All of those are on file on the record. Right? So things like this, this alleged military officer who put his hands on that. Well, that time he got tracked down, he put on record, no. That’s not what I was touching. Yeah. These are kinds of things that we need to people need to understand. So so the interview process was a 2 person process.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s an interview process. It’s standard in in, both the IC and law enforcement. And And if anybody came in and had something that they wanted to share that was crossing a a legal boundary, like they were claiming they were being threatened or somebody was coming after them, we can refer them direct to, law enforcement, and law enforcement would pick up the criminal aspects of that. We would focus on the factual investigation.
Brian Keating:
Renata, some, one of my listeners, I don’t know who she is. She asked, well, what would what would happen if you did discover that something did turn out to be extraterrestrial or nonhuman intelligence? What would be the next steps? I mean, presumably, there’d be some process that were you in, in possession of a process or procedure to enact? Should it turn out to be the case that some of these were, you know, verifiable
Sean Kirkpatrick:
in some sense? So I got asked about that by both DOD and IC leadership at the highest levels. You know, if you find something, what are we supposed to do? And we debated it. And the answer is, if if we found evidence of extraterrestrial life, a gold star extra credit to any student who knows whose mission that is. Because it’s not the departments and it’s not the ICs. It’s NASA’s. Right? So we brought NASA in as a partner early on as you everybody knows. I had a NASA liaison in my office. And if we had ever come up with actual evidence of extraterrestrial life over to NASA, Good luck with that.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
It’s your job. Right? That’s their job. That’s their mission. That’s what’s in their budget to go do. Now if said life turned out to be hostile, well, then there’d be an interagency process that would probably rise up to president. And I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t know. There’s an interagency process that handles every major decision like that that comes up, conflict wars, whatnot, finance, this would not be any different.
Brian Keating:
How do you react to claims, you know, made by people, that we’re not gonna mention by name, but but seem to indicate, you know, these things violate the laws of physics? You know, the question has come up many times, why isn’t Ed Witten involved in this? Why aren’t the top, you know, theoretical and experimental physicists in the world involved with this program? So people describe things like, craft that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. There’s an upcoming book by an author I hope to have on. He’s tentatively his team has agreed to have him on, perhaps after the book comes out. Claims, you know, these kind of negative energy curvature, all sorts of things that do violate the laws of physics as we understand them. How do you as a physicist react to those claims that you don’t have enough physicists on it? We need the top, you know, string theorist or, you know, whoever working on it. I I claim those would be irrelevant because you’d really want a met a metallurgist on board. But how do you react to those claims that you don’t have the right people or the government doesn’t have the right people on the job?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Well, first of all, nobody knows what people we have. Do the only people they’ve seen are me and handful of others. So we had access to all of the scientists across the entire inter agency. And you don’t need theoretical physicists because nobody has produced any evidence of anything that violates the laws of physics, not a single shred. Right? So there’s a lot of people that say it violates the laws of physics. Well, based on what? What data do you have? You have none. Nobody has produced a single thing. Not a radar, track, not video with raw data.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Right. None of this compressed data that comes off the Internet. So any any compressed video that you get off the Internet is not analyzable for anything that’s subs that’s defendable. Because image compression does all kinds of interesting artifacts to your video. And a lot of people don’t know that. You end up missing frames, so things look like it’s moving differently than it is. You’re missing the bit depth. You don’t know what the none of the reflectography reflectography or the, spectral analysis.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
None of that matters on a compressed image. You just can’t do it. And I’ve got a great example of this that it was put in for declassification well before I left. And I think it’s it’s almost done, and it’s gonna be released. And it’ll it’ll go through a really great example of a thing that we really thought was maybe this was it. Maybe this was the evidence we needed. And it turned out now it was image compression that made it look like it was doing something it wasn’t. And once you got we had to go get the raw data.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
We’ve actually finally tracked down some of the raw data. Didn’t do anything that they thought it did.
Brian Keating:
Yeah. I pointed out when I spoke of the Joe Rogan experience. I told Joe, you know, in 1945, a guy named Luis Alvaro has made a type of spoofing technology that made the Germans think that, allied bombers were receding when, in fact, they were coming closer and he used the inverse 4th law power. And that if you were a German, you know, physicist, look. You say, all these things defy the laws of they’re moving faster than the speed of light. So, yeah, you have to be very careful, and I’m excited to hear about that. Last question for me. I know you gotta run.
Brian Keating:
It’s I’m depressed, hearing what you’ve gone through and and even reading some of the questions from people that that follow me, and, it it’s it’s it seems, it seems hopeless. It seems pointless. And and I wonder, you know, when you think about the future of of ARO and and so forth, you know, hopefully, this won’t be the end. But given everything you’ve been through and and the and the, you know, harsh treatment and and really thankless job, I mean, where do you see the future going in this field when, you know, there’s been, as you say, a whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication, secondhand and thirdhand retellings in our end lies. So looking ahead, what do you see as the most important steps for the next, ARO directors in the scientific physical physicist study of UAPs in general?
Sean Kirkpatrick:
This is a larger problem than just ARO. What you’re describing is and and as as I pointed out in my op ed, it’s a it’s a systemic loss of intellectual capacity, critical thinking skills, rational thought, and even common sense. And the and the general populace has lost respect or even understanding of scientific method, science, and how do you go about discerning truth from fiction? And it is getting worse, and it pervades every aspect of our society. I am depressed because I don’t see that improving. The only way that’s gonna improve is through education, information and whatnot. And we are we are hamstringing ourselves in in educating and then providing information and then validating truth. And instead, we are we are getting our gospel from social media or the Internet or the 247 news cycle, and how many clicks can I get instead of actually stopping and asking yourself? Does this actually make sense? And if so, where’s the evidence, right? So all these people, right? Great. You you wanna believe what you wanna believe, believe it.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Stop wasting taxpayer time and energy to chase it for the purposes of getting some of that taxpayer dollars, you know, put into your pocket, which is a whole other story. But but people need to start questioning, where’s the data? Where’s the evidence? Where, where right? I’ve seen everything these people have said they had, and there was nothing there. There was nothing some of these people gave me, you know, information after information after information after information. We went and investigate everything and not a single thing for Doctor. Treacher. So why? That goes back to your question, why? So I’m depressed because I don’t think the future looks too good from a, cognitive perspective across the the populace is unless people start relearning critical thinking.
Brian Keating:
Yeah. And to leave, us off on a depressing note, I’m afraid that is the truth, and I’ve heard that from many different sources, including those in the NASA panel. So, you know, I believe there’s big some big conspiracy, you know, about technology. I always say I don’t I don’t believe in gravity, Sean. I have evidence for gravity, and I think that’s what we have to hold people to. And if you wanna be a citizen scientist, we love it. I had on one of the best citizen scientists in the world, Chris Lintott, you know, has brought citizen science to millions of people through Galaxy Zoo. Nobody, you know, nobody’s clamoring and saying that that’s closed off to the general public.
Brian Keating:
But if you want actual, alien, materials, I do have some here, Sean. When I come and visit you on the East Coast in the near future, I will bring you some alien technology. No. It’s not technology. It’s just a meteorite, but I I give it out to my, doteducustomers for free when they go to my website, briankkingdot com. And I will bring you one too, my friend. Alright.
Sean Kirkpatrick:
Thank you so much.
Brian Keating:
This has been a blast, and thanks to Avi Love for connecting us. Have a great day, Sean. Hey there. If you made it all the way to the end of this episode, you’d love this alternative deep dive with Kirchai Mungal, Tom DeLonge, and Jim Semivan. Click here for that episode. And click here for a list of all my episodes on aliens and extraterrestrial technology. See you next week on Into the Impossible.