2023-05-01 - Matt Ford interviews Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
Matt Ford:
Please welcome from the great state of New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Senator, how are you?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
I'm fine. Thank you for having me.
Matt Ford:
Thanks for being here. And we know your schedule is tight, so we're going to jump right into the subject of hand. So Senator, there have been reports of objects in our skies and undersea from our military pilots and other service members that they couldn't explain. Now, these objects are referred to as unidentified, anomalous and undersea phenomenon or UAP. So Senator, what was your turning point when you decided that we as a nation, that we have to take these reports seriously and look into them?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
Well, it was a combination of things. The thing that really got me highly concerned was when service members had come forward with digital evidence, whether it was video or radar or different sensory data that they were retaliated against or disregarded or somehow diminished or demeaned in their roles. And I thought as chair personnel at the time, at the personnel subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, I was not going to tolerate our service members being in any way disparaged because they were doing their jobs to report these sightings. And so once I heard about that, I started getting much more detailed in my review of what is the scope of these unidentified aerial phenomenon? What is the military's role? Are they reviewing them? Do they actually analyze them? Do they identify them? And unfortunately, I found out the answer was largely no, and they weren't actually doing the work, which is why me and a few other senators on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committee decided to create a specialized office two years ago within the Department of Defense that we're supposed to review all sightings and to make sure that whistleblowers can come forward to make sure that no one can be retaliated against and that people are obligated to report.
Because we wanted to make it clear that the military could not disparage or retaliate against people who were just giving evidence of things they've seen, which is absolutely essential from a domain awareness, national security perspective. So we are now just pushing the military and the intelligence community to fund this office and to do the work
Matt Ford:
And we're going to talk about the whistleblowers a little bit more in depth here in a bit, but one thing I wanted to touch on, so these military servicemen and women that have testified observing UAP operating in a way that exceed our current understanding of physics, and a lot of these cases, they go all the way back to World War II and beyond. So with that in mind, would this preclude adversarial operations such as those from China and Russia from the equation?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
No, and in fact, for a lot of people, that's what it's all about. What the goal of the office is to do is review all data related to unidentified aerial phenomenon, present, past, and as reported. We also now have the goal of increasing our collection, so actually increasing the sensors and the radar capabilities and the ability to glean information and data from airspace that previously we really didn't monitor. We do very little monitoring of airspace outside of commercial airspace, and we have requirements for commercial airspace. You have to have emitters, you have to have lights, but many of these sightings can be in the areas that we don't monitor very effectively. And so the new ambition for this office is to make recommendations about additional sensors, what we need developed. And also it's important from just plain old national security. If you've got China developing hypersonic missiles, you need the ability to detect those as well as a Chinese spy balloon or Chinese drones or Iranian drones or any other adversaries military capability or spying capability that's being utilized over our military bases, over our missile sites, over our assets. It's vital that we have that domain awareness and that we can ultimately have superiority, air superiority in places of conflict.
Matt Ford:
Now going back to Arrow, so when you mandated that the Pentagon established this office that eventually became AARO, what was the reaction from the Pentagon? Did they attempt to interfere or take control of the narrative? How did they react to this legislation that you passed or that passed?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
So I'm not sure. I mean, we know what was publicly available and when we were recommending this office, they quickly set up their own office, which was a bit odd, but I don't know why that might've been in the works. Who knows. But our goal was to really create something transparent and accountable to the American public that has a public facing aspect, that has public reports, and that destigmatizes the sightings of aerial phenomenon. It is imperative that we destigmatize this because we need facts and we cannot allow things like spy balloons to just coast over the United States taking photos and getting data from our missile sites and our bases. It's unacceptable. And in many respects, we were asleep at the switch because we weren't looking for this stuff because from the military's perspective, it didn't exhibit hostile behavior. It wasn't attacking, it wasn't shooting, it wasn't chasing and it wasn't evading.
All of those types of behavior are things they would have cared about and would have really tried to not only understand but defend against. But because the behavior of a lot of this aerial phenomenon that we've captured is by chance, the fact that some device goes under an existing craft that's recording data and information is really how we're catching these. It's when our pilots fly by something and say, what is that? What is that object? What is that aircraft? What is that doing? And why is it moving in that way? And that's hard to understand. Our devices and sensors on our aircraft aren't caliber to capture this information and easily reposit it to a scientific group to review it. So we're going to try to change our sensors on aircraft to do that. So we could actually capture the data, review the data, and be able to assess it one way or the other, known unknown.
And if known, what is it? We've been able to assess? Let's see. Our January report, we assessed 366 pieces of data from sightings. Since the last 20 years, we've had a huge influx in reporting, and now we're up to 700, I think is what they said in the hearing, 700 or 6 50, 650 unknown aerial phenomenon. And so of the six 50, we know that in the first batch, the 360 6, they designated about 150 were orbs or balloon like objects. About two dozen were drones, A handful were debris or birds, but 171 in the first tranche, were unknown still. And so in this larger tranche of another 300 or so, we'll assess what they are. And this office in review isn't ideal for UFO enthusiasts in that they aren't necessarily getting to the bottom of past sightings. Is it real? Is it true? Did that happen? Because all they can do is review data that they have access to.
And all you have is a video clip, or all you have is a photo. You don't have any additional data to weigh that against to assess what actually is it. So a lot of the goal of this office is to get much more data. So we have the tools we need to assess what is it in real time as opposed to having to go back historically. So we may never know of the, let's say the top 10 sightings historically that enthusiasts are certain are a flying saucer or whatever it is. You may never actually be able to assess that and say yes or no because you have no additional data. And so what's so important about AARO is it's not only gathering the data that the Air Force and the Navy and other armed services detection has, which is high quality data, and then comparing that with publicly available data.
Things like what did the FAA record on that date, time and space? Did anyone have any weather balloons in the area? Did anyone have any other detection devices to see if they got any photographs or any video evidence? All of that is so much more scientific and capable of assessing. And so if you saw the hearing, Dr. Kirkpatrick gave us two examples, and they both looked bizarre, but one, he was able to cross-reference enough data and information from public information like FAA, and they could actually identify ultimately that it was a puddle jumper. It was a slower flying aircraft that because of the lens and the camera that was able to get the digital images, it was too blurred and too undefined to know what it was. But with cross data, they identified it was an aircraft. The second one they showed us was just an orb that came right in a camera's view that traveled seemingly very fast over some kind of military site, and they don't know what it is.
And so they might not get any more data to clarify, is it a drone? Is it a balloon, is it a aircraft, is it unknown? And so that's the hard part, but also the good part. So we won't necessarily know all the past secrets, but my intention is to make sure we know all the future secrets before they become secret. Because the whole point is to do the scientific analysis to identify what it is, because if it is Russian or Chinese or Iranian, we must know and we need to know what technology they've developed and whether they're investing in drone technology or balloon technology or spy technology that we've never seen nor heard of.
Matt Ford:
Got it. Yeah. And I think that's fantastic that we're finally taking this seriously. Let's jump back, if you don't mind for a second to the whistleblower. So as many people may not be aware, you spearheaded, I think it was like 33 pages of legislation on UAP in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. And I think one of the most important provisions that is in there that you guys put in there, was this provision that protects whistleblowers against reprisals and retaliation. Now, sources have claimed to us that they still fear retaliation. Do these claims surprise you at all?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
No. And our office is here to assure them they cannot be retaliated against by law. And if they still fear retaliation, they should reach out to my office because we can make sure that they get interviewed by Dr. Kirkpatrick. We can make sure that they can submit any of their data or information in a confidential way. We can do everything possible to make sure that they can be heard and protected at the same time. You may not know this about my history, but we've been working on military sexual violence for a long time, and we were able to help a lot of service members who wanted to tell their story, but were still afraid of retaliation. And we were able to make sure they got lawyers that they had a confidential way of reporting, and we made sure that they were able to do with their testimony what they wanted to, whether it was ever public or not public, based on their needs.
So we are here to help and we're here to make it easier. We are going to have a public facing website soon. A draft has already been submitted to the higher ups to approve. So as soon as that's approved, and I asked all the higher ups when I get approved this, and clearly there's a bottleneck somewhere, but I'm going to get to the bottom of it. And so eventually there'll be a place where anyone can upload data, information, video photographs, and can also see the stuff that's been declassified, which is important so that people can see this is how we took this video, and this is how we know where it was, and this is the publicly available information we laid on top of it. And that's why we know what it is that's important. So people can know it may look like something on first blush, but with scientific rigor, it's not that. Or it may look like something and we still don't know what it is. So the truth is we will get to whatever facts we can, but there'll still be things unknown.
Matt Ford:
Some of the feedback that we've received in particular from whistleblowers that have worked on alleged legacy UAP programs, but they're hesitant to come forward is what they've shared, is that there's no published legal protection mechanisms. Give them the legal assurance that they are indeed going to be covered. So they can reach out to your office and you can download or make it clear exactly what protections are in place.
Kirsten Gillibrand:
Yep, they can definitely do that. And we have an email that is confidential, just casework@gillibrand.senate.gov, and if they just put UAP in the ray line, it'll get to our military staff who will then follow up and make sure that they are given confidential support and advice on what their next steps could be and where the protections lie.
Matt Ford:
Excellent. Okay, great. So if you have time, we just have another couple of really quick questions. So what would you say to the unelected gatekeepers in government who do not want to level with the American public about UAP?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
My concern is that's not their job. This type of work should be public. We should have transparency and accountability. There's going to be some stuff that we find that we won't want to share publicly. For example, if we assess that the Chinese have this one kind of drone technology that's a huge national security risk, the Department of Defense may decide something like that needs to stay on the secret level so they can not only prepare against it, but they probably don't want China to know that we know what they're doing. So something like that, I could imagine we would try to stay non-public, but anything that's not related to national security, we should definitely be declassifying.
Matt Ford:
I completely agree with that. So finally, should there be legal amnesty for past or present government employees or contractors who have been involved in keeping this from Congress and the American public sort of as an incentive for these people to come forward?
Kirsten Gillibrand:
That's what the whistleblower language in the 23 NDAA is supposed to protect. But if that language isn't sufficient, these people just have to tell us what part's not sufficient and what they would need in the defense whistleblower protection to cover them. We're happy to amend the bill this year. I mean, the goal is to give a hundred percent amnesty and whistleblower protection in this space of unidentified aerial phenomenon. And there may be explanations about what programs people were working on. They might've thought it was about something, but it really wasn't, and they were never told what it was about. So there can be those kinds of misunderstandings, but the truth is, we have the ability to take classified information. We have the ability to talk in classified settings, so then they're not breaking their classification NDAs. We have the ability to do that. And so we will write the whistleblower protection to make sure it covers compartmentalized programs, special access programs, and intelligence oriented or top secret programs. We can make sure that there's a setting, a SCIF or a top secret setting where they can give their testimony. We will not allow them to be harmed.
Matt Ford:
Fantastic.
Kirsten Gillibrand:
And we will do whatever is consistent with whatever agreements they made.
Matt Ford:
Excellent. Okay. Well, this is great news and Senator Gillibrand, I mean, we really appreciate you coming on our show to talk about this really important topic, and we know our audience really appreciate your leadership on this. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, ladies and gentlemen,
Kirsten Gillibrand:
Thank you everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to talk on your show.
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