A senior Pentagon official has lashed out at this week’s congressional hearing on unidentified flying objects, calling the claims “insulting” to employees investigating the sightings and accusing a key witness of failing to cooperate with the official Pentagon investigation. US government.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, posted on his personal LinkedIn page and shared on social media Friday, criticizes much of the testimony of a retired Air Force intelligence officer who encouraged believers in extraterrestrial life. , grabbing headlines in the international press.
Retired Air Force Major David Grusch testified Wednesday that the United States has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse engineer “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs). ), the official government term for UFOs.
Some of what the United States has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologicals” that he said he had not seen but learned about from “individuals with direct knowledge of the program.”
Kirkpatrick, a career intelligence officer, was appointed a year ago to head the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), whose goal was to centralize UAP investigations. In recent years, the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have come under pressure from Congress to better investigate reports of aircraft flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.
Kirkpatrick wrote the letter Thursday and the Defense Department confirmed Friday that he had sent it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick has declined to comment on the letter, writing: “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing go by without sharing how insulting it was to the officials in the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail. “They are truth seekers, just like me,” Kirkpatrick continued. “But they certainly wouldn’t get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee. The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about unidentified flying objects, Gough said. The Pentagon has also not uncovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that programs related to the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or currently exist,” she added.
According to Kirkpatrick, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.” In December, he had told the press that the Pentagon was investigating “hundreds” of new reports following a push for pilots and others to come forward with any sightings.
In his letter, Kirkpatrick wrote that allegations of “retaliation, including physical assaults and insinuations of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is an essential member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action on should anyone file such complaints”.
“However, contrary to claims made at the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak to AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged retaliation and refused to answer when asked by a congressman if anyone had been killed to hide information about UFOs.
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