2024-03-20 - NSSA - “SpaceTime with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick” - Sean Kirkpatrick / Chris Williams

Chris Williams (00:00:15):

Good afternoon and welcome to the latest edition of the National Security Space Association's Spacetime interview series. My name is Chris Williams and I have the honor and privilege of serving as the Chair of the Mormon Center for Space Studies, the association's independent think tank. I'll moderate today's interview. The association is devoted to enhancing collaboration and partnership between industry and government to strengthen the US National Security Space Enterprise. With nearly 100 member companies, NSSA conducts a wide variety of programming and activities ranging from large conferences as well as smaller classified and unclassified events to promote dialogue on key topics of interest to the national security space community. We also conduct these spacetime interviews with leading US national security officials and we publish scholarly papers on a broad range of topics. Indeed, we'll release a major paper on Dynamic Space Operations next week, so be on the lookout for that.

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You can find out more by visiting the association's website@www.nssaspace.org. Today we are honored to have with us Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Department of Defense's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. Dr. Kirkpatrick directed the standup of that office and let its growth and maturation. Prior to AARO, Dr. Kirkpatrick served in key positions at the Naval Research Lab, air Force Research Lab, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He served as the Defense Intelligence Officer for Scientific and Technical Intelligence, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at US Strategic Command and the Deputy Director of Intelligence and DNI representative at US Space Command. He also served on the National Security Council staff. Dr. Kirkpatrick is the recipient of several scientific military and intelligence awards. Sean, thanks for your service and thanks for being with us today.

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A quick word about our format. Dr. Kirkpatrick will provide some brief opening remarks about the recently released AARO report on the historical record of US government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP volume one following his remarks. I'll ask questions about that report. Members of our audience are encouraged to submit questions by clicking the q and a button at the bottom of the screen. I can't promise I'll get through all of your questions, but we'll at least get through some of them. We've allotted a total of one hour for today's interview, so let's get to it. Without further ado, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the floor is yours.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:02:55):

Thank you, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here with my National Security Space colleagues, especially as I bring closure to one of the last deliverables of my final government assignment. As you know, A was given two missions, operational and historical. The operational mission is the most important as it deals with the safety and security of our operators, our national security spaces, and our nation. The operational mission aims to minimize the risk of intelligence and technical surprise. The historical mission and the topic of the recent report is focused on investigating allegations of a government conspiracy to hide reverse engineering programs of extraterrestrial technology. That mission was also to review all previous investigations, activities and studies that the US government has conducted on this topic. Going back to 1945, while the final report is not due until to Congress until June of this year, we had decided to break up the report into two volumes in order to get the bulk of the information out to Congress in volume one and to accelerate transparency and data sharing to the appropriate members.

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This report has both a classified and an unclassified version. The classified version, along with evidence at the highest classification levels, has been provided to the appropriately cleared Congressional oversight committees and leadership. This includes the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and House and Senate leadership. Note that it does not include any other house or Senate committees or members not in that group. As I've said since day one, my team and I would follow that evidence where it leads wherever it leads, and that I would be open and objective to the hypothesis as long as the data supports it. Unfortunately, we live in a world of double standards where the reverse is not necessarily true and people don't want to accept what evidence suggests. When it is counter to belief, this report's not going to change any of those people's mind, and you can tell them apart by how loudly they cry out and how personal the attacks become because that's usually the fallback position when there's no evidence. To the contrary, I'd like to point out that there are many people who came forward privately to discuss their observations and concerns, who provided invaluable testimony and who provided valuable historical information at the risk of personal condemnation and continue to remain anonymous. Those people have our thanks and gratitude. As a reminder, I can only talk to what I did up to retiring. We're not going to speak about the operational mission today, so we'll focus on really this historical report. And so with that, let's dig into your questions.

Chris Williams (00:05:55):

Thank you. Thanks very much, Sean. We'll now turn to q and a and again for our audience, please feel free to submit questions using the q and a button at the bottom of the screen. I see a handful have come in already. Let me start with a fundamental question, Dr. Kirkpatrick. To the best of your knowledge, has the US government ever been in possession of extraterrestrial technology or non-human beings?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:06:19):

No, and we have found no evidence to support those allegations.

Chris Williams (00:06:25):

And let's dive into some of the key points of the A historical report that was recently delivered to Congress, as you mentioned and published on the Department of Defense website. The report states and I quote, AARO, found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic sponsored research or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of A UAP represented extraterrestrial technology. All investigative efforts at all levels of classification concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the results of misidentification. Can you elaborate on that key finding?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:07:07):

Sure. So this really points to all of the studies that were done. Going back to the earliest, earliest days in the forties, there were dozens of these kinds of studies and reports on single events or entire series of events such as Blue Book. Most all of those turned out to be exactly what is stated there. They're all ordinary objects or phenomena or the result of misidentification, but none of them turned up any evidence at any classification level that anything to support that any UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.

Chris Williams (00:07:58):

The historical report also states, and I quote Aero found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology aero determined based on all information provided to date that claims involving specific people known locations, technological tests and documents allegedly involved in or related to the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology are inaccurate. How did aero reach that conclusion? And in that regard, can you discuss relevant issues associated with that finding such as UAP, non-disclosure agreements, the involvement of a particular CIA official, an alleged intelligence community document claims that a military officer touched an off world craft, an extraterrestrial spacecraft sample, and other relevant matters that were laid out in the unclassified report?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:09:00):

Sure, that's quite a lot, but yes, we can, let me try to elaborate on some of that. So the finding is as the finding states right, there was no evidence to support that story. So the storyline, which I think I highlighted bit in my Scientific American article, but is also laid out in the report itself, speaks to a number of activities where there was alleged reverse engineering by the government. Government was unable to make progress, abandoned the program to industry kept on it and their own internal investment and trying to figure out how to make it work. And then there was some effort made to bring that material back into government oversight. And the allegation is that CIA stood in and said no pointing to actually very specific individuals and that associated with all of this, there was claims of a very high ranking military officer who actually touched one of these and that there was an extraterrestrial sample of material that was provided back to that one of these companies to see if they could reverse engineer or fabricate.

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What is fascinating about all of that is when you actually peel that back and you go talk to those people like the CIA officials, the military intelligence, sorry, the military officers, all of them put on the record and signed their name to it, that none of that was true. It was all either fabricated or misunderstood, like the allegation that this particular military officer may have touched an off world craft. He was actually working on the F1 17 and it was in transit and it was a piece of that that he was speaking to at the time. The extraterrestrial spacecraft sample actually has no chain of custody. It was alleged to have come from a crash in, I think it was the sixties, maybe fifties, and was passed down, was bought, was then handed back over to a company to see if they could reverse engineer that.

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That piece of material had turned out to be likely a piece of aircraft material or missile casing from the Air Force. It had nothing to do with extraterrestrial, in fact didn't match anything from extraterrestrial UAP. Non-Disclosure agreements are alleged to have been conducted either separately or under the Atomic Energy Act or under the Air Force. And then really surrounding the NDAs are a lot of allegations about threats of retaliation by death if they gave away this information. What's interesting about the NDA discussion first, there are no UAP specific NDAs with the exception of there was a fake U program that we called out in the report that was used as training and a hoax. And so by the letter of the definition that was A-U-A-P-N-D-A, but it wasn't a real U-A-P-N-D-A and the NDAs writ large. What a lot of people fail to account for is prior to about 2000, I believe 13 NDAs were not standard.

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They were all done per organization per service, but they all had title 18 language in them. Title 18 is the language that is called out for consequences of disclosing classified information to anybody, but especially to foreign governments. And in title 18, it does actually say if you give away classified information to a foreign government, you can be punished with a range of punishments up to and including death. That language got sometimes pulled out and put into an NDA upfront, and sometimes it's just called out as Title 18 language. After 2017, all NDAs became standardized into two forms and that specific language is no longer visible when you look at it, but if you dig into the title, that's an implied consequence. The point of that is contextually, if you're a young officer and this is your first exposure to a lot of things in the classified world and somebody puts one of these NDAs in front of you and it calls out punishment by death, that's going to stick with you. And if you're on one of these unfortunate people that may have victim to one of the fake UAP NDAs, that's going to stick with you. So these are all pieces of a story that contribute to the larger narrative, none of which is true when you dig into it. It has different aspects that are colored by different people's perceptions and interpretations of a number of events.

Chris Williams (00:15:27):

The historical report also states, and I quote AARO assesses that all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist, are misidentified as authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation or resolved to an unwarranted and disestablished program. Can you elaborate on that? And I've got a couple of follow on questions with respect to that particular quote from the report.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:16:04):

Yeah, to some extent. So there were a large number of programs that people named. They would come in in a protected environment as the authorized disclosure authority AARO could receive all of this information. They would tell us what they thought, they knew they would name a program at that point after they finished their interview. That information that we hold, we have to, one, we have to protect it as if it is real until we can find it in the DOD ic, DOE, NASA universe of special access programs. So we have to protect it as if it is a special access program. When you go and do the research on a number of these named programs, many of them turn out to be don't exist at all. And when we say don't exist, we mean not across DOD ic, DOE, the National Archives, the Service Archives, the Combatant Command Archives, the Intelligence Community Archives. There's nothing there for anybody out of any records. Some of them are real programs, but they're real highly sensitive national security programs not related to extraterrestrials that we then have to protect and report. And that's what we've reported up to Congressional leadership. Here's the list of programs that are being talked about that are not extraterrestrial that you need to be concerned about because that is a risk to programs. These are real.

Chris Williams (00:18:06):

Thank you. And as part of the discussion in the historical report, there's reference to a prospective special access program or PSAP called Kona Blue. Can you talk about how that figures in the historical assessment and broader set of issues in this case?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:18:27):

So it's well-known and well-documented out in the world of the story of how Senator Reed, Harry Reed wanted to set up a special access program with the Department of Defense to protect alleged information that the then AIP OSAP program was supposedly uncovering and to provide a compartment under which the alleged spacecraft could be returned to government oversight. So the big concern here from Reed and from Congress was if this program existed, there was no congressional oversight. So he sent a letter to the Secretary of Defense and said, Hey, we want to set up this special access program. Secretary of Defense said no, and then had a review of the program with DIA and under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and said, yet, not only are we not going to do that, but we're going to stand this program down because this has nothing to do with aliens and extraterrestrials. This was supposed to be something else.

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Senator Reed did not necessarily stop at that point. In fact, did not like that answer. And so reached out to his colleague, Senator Rita Lieberman, who had a connection in the Department of Homeland Security to try to get the Department of Homeland Security to stand up this program. And a prospective special access program is a proposal. It's a proposal package that is put together by a group of people to stand up a special access program. That package then has to go through coordination and it goes through general counsel and it goes up through the SCO director, the special access program office director, and to get approval. And Kona Blue was that program they had convinced Reed and Lieberman had convinced the DHS to put together that program or that proposal. That proposal was written by some of the same group of people that came out of the previous program after it was shut down.

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And so that entire package we found in the DHS archives, researched it a year ago and then worked over the last year prior to my retirement to get it declassified and to get it out. I actually sent a congressional notification to the Hill last summer when we found it and then had briefed it to them to the hill several times since then. It is now out in the report, and that package is in its final review for public release. It has been declassified and is almost ready to go. So that is where that program came from. And it contributes to this story. Why? Because we had several interviewees come in who named Kona Blue as the program that is housing the reverse engineering and the non-human intelligence bodies of these craft. And that is absolutely not the case. In fact, the program that was proposed was proposed to set up six centers research centers. One was consciousness, one was technology, one was propulsion. I don't remember what the other two or three were, and they were all going to be run by the existing contractor. So I think that will be in the program plan when that comes out and everybody will have that. But that's where that came from and why it contributes to this story, because then come forward in time to now, and interviewees are naming Kona Blue as one of those programs, and it's not

Chris Williams (00:23:18):

The historical report. States AARO assesses that some portion of sightings since the 1940s have represented misidentification of never before, seen experimental and operational space, rocket and air systems including stealth technologies and the proliferation of drone platforms. Can you talk a little further about this, including the historical, in essence, this particular finding suggests that what many people may have seen is certain US programs that either they confused with an extraterrestrial or some other activity. Is that what was intended by this finding or how would you characterize that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:24:08):

Yes, and there's more to it than it's just the things that people saw you have to take into account. And here I have to really tip my hat to some of my researchers who did a really excellent job on kind of pulling the context together here. Keep in mind in the forties the United States was just coming out of World War ii, everybody's raw, there's still sensitive feelings about being caught by surprise, Pearl Harbor, all the things that had gone into that era. The other thing that happened was there were some new technologies that were used during that time that hadn't been used in that way in a serious significant fashion sense. Rockets, aircraft, other aerospace types of activities, balloons even. So people are sensitive to contextually being caught by surprise. There's really new technologies that are breaking into everyday life that they're just starting to wrap their heads around.

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And as you start to see these things pop up everywhere, people get nervous, they start reporting them, they start trying to figure out what they are, they don't know. Now, there is a human condition that I don't, I'm not a psychologist, so I would have to defer to somebody who's better versed than I am. But there is a human condition of if you see something you don't understand and in the lack of an explanation, you are going to fill that void with a belief. What is that belief and where does it come from? And this is been true and it's based off of everybody's personal experiences, but they want to have an explanation to address the fear of not understanding what that thing is. And I think you're seeing a lot of that as well. And so what we're seeing from a out of that finding is the response to new technologies.

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And now here we are fast forward today and we have a whole bunch of new technologies that people are trying to wrap their around long distance drones, drones that are starting to use new aerospace principles, ai, all the things that are starting to space travel. We're seeing more space launches and more types of space launches that people don't necessarily understand. Do you know how many starlink satellites and deployments got reported as UAP? I mean dozens of them because people, they see a string of lights in the sky and they don't know what that is and you correlate that back to a starlink deployment. We're seeing, I think the same phenomena I think we're seeing as a contributing factor, not the soul factor, but a contributing factor.

Chris Williams (00:27:33):

Thank you, Sean. You wrote in Scientific American that quote, AARO's interest. That is all domain phenomena. Sea, air and space remains an ongoing concern to our national security enterprise, particularly when the phenomena are observed near our nation's sensitive military and critical infrastructure facilities. Observations by experienced military personnel as well as data from highly capable sensors are being reviewed by AARO accordingly to weed out explainable observations and expose truly difficult to explain phenomenology using the most rigorous scientific analysis available. This is the real job you said to minimize the risk of intelligence and technical surprise as you mentioned before. Can you talk a little bit about, based on your professional experience, to what extent are America's adversaries involved in UAP related activities? And is our lack of knowledge on this topic of result of adversary denial and deception, or is it limited in effective sensors that we don't have enough sensors in the right place at the right time with the right collecting the right phenomenologies combination thereof? What do you think about that? I mean, on the one hand, the report categorically says, and you have said that there's no evidence of off world technology or off world beings at the same time, there are plenty of unexplained activities. So how do you think about that problem and what has aero done in this particular area?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:29:11):

Yeah, that's a good question. And this is where the sweet spot of why AARO is important. Unknown means initially when observed people or sensors can't make sense of what is being observed. That doesn't mean it's unknowable, it means it's unknown at that time with sufficient data, even the most difficult of the unknown cases can be pulled apart and analyzed and understood. It is the hunt for the things that may represent a technological leap or it may be not a technological leap, but something that somebody is doing to the United States that we weren't tracking before, like, oh, I don't know, a Chinese high altitude balloon, right? You have to analyze and investigate and pull that data apart. It's not a question of do we not have enough sensors or ineffective sensors? Absolutely not. We have more sensor coverage than you can possibly imagine. Is it a factor of adversary, denial and deception?

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Well, they try and they're good at some of the things that they try and they're not so good at other things that they try and it's a spy versus spy world and game. And we get on with that. This is a domain awareness problem, plain and simple. It doesn't matter if you're talking about UAP where you're talking about a stealth aircraft. This is a domain awareness problem. And what that means is we have a lot of data from a lot of different sensors. Whether or not we have data for a particular event is a different question, but in general, we have lots of data across lots of sensors and we need to train the sensors and the data exploitation tools to look for some of the signatures that they aren't currently looking for. And what do I mean by that? Our air domain awareness sensors are trained and operators are trained to look for missiles, aircraft, fast moving, big drone, even large drones, not small drones.

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They're meant to look for those things to prevent somebody from launching missiles into the United States. They are not trained to exploit the data to look for a quad copter. And so understanding what does a quad copter look like in those kinds of sensor systems is part of the design space that we laid out starting when we stood up era, right, is you got to go calibrate all of that stuff and then you've got to go figure out what tools you need to exploit it. So it's a long way of answering your question of my experience is there is a number of factors that go into this. Adversaries are trying to spy on us just as we're trying to spy on them. Does that mean that UAP any given UAP could be an adversary? It could be. It's a question of is it? And then you have the burden of proof. You have to identify what it is you're looking at and you have to identify signatures that relate to a particular country. So you have attribution and then you have intent, and those are the things that you have to go investigate if you're going to make that case.

Chris Williams (00:33:16):

Should aero DOD and the IC focus their limited collection and analytic resources primarily on UAP phenomena above or near sensitive US military bases and training ranges, and why or why not? I mean, one of the questions is, is there a correlation of sightings that tend to be around certain locations and are those locations where there are concentrations, military test ranges, for example, where high tech new capabilities are being tested or fielded and the like. So what's your general sense of how we should allocate and apportion? What are admittedly limited collection capabilities?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:34:06):

So there's actually three pieces to that question, right?

Chris Williams (00:34:10):

I never ask a single question. It's always

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:34:15):

Your question leaves a lot of things we have to discuss. One, if you look at the heat map that's on the AARO website, you'll see that, and I've said this in testimony and I've said this in the public, you'll see that those are collection biased spots. That means for those of you not tracking what that is, that is where we have all of our sensors, that is where we have all of our pilots. They are the ones and the sensors are the ones that are alerting us of activity. We don't have a whole lot of collection outside of that. So you can't draw the conclusion that there are higher probabilities of UAP around those institution or those installations and training ranges because you don't know what normal looks like. You don't have a pattern of life, you don't have a baseline across areas outside of those installations and ranges.

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And so again, aero laid that out to go do. That was one of the things that we were working on before I retired because once you have that map, then you can tell is there a spike in activity when there's a sensitive test going on? If there is, then you can draw the conclusion that there's a correlation. If there's not, then you can draw the conclusion that you have a safety and a hazard problem because you have a bunch of stuff in your space that's just floating through all the time and you'd be surprised what's in your air.

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So then you get to the apportionment of collection. The first and foremost thing you should probably all recognize as national security professionals is turning the intelligence communities collection apparatus onto the backyard of the United States. That's generally frowned upon. There is a lot of oversight that has to be put in place. There is a lot of protections that have to be put in place to protect American citizens and institutions against inadvertent collection. For somebody to say, Hey, I keep seeing something out in our backyard in the middle of Kansas, let's put all the collection onto the middle of Kansas. That is generally not going to be received well. So you have to plan carefully. Now even training ranges, I think a lot of people probably don't recognize the training ranges are also a large extent of them are over private properties. So flying training exercises for F 20 twos, F 30 fives, a lot of that occurs over other people's properties.

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So while it is controlled airspace, the ground is somebody else's ownership. So you can't just collect on that ad hoc. That being said, we did prioritize again prior to my retirement, I prioritized a set of ranges that had high reporting. Now that high reporting is because those groups are sensitive to the reporting requirements, we're already doing their reporting properly and so we prioritize, Hey, can we get some additional collection in those areas and do a baseline pattern of life so that we can figure out what's going on there. So it's not a simple question, Chris, I don't think you can just say, should we focus on those? You have to start somewhere. So let's start with where we know we are getting reporting, which is right now national security areas, whether it's nuclear critical infrastructure or military bases, both of which have sensors out there to find out if people are flying drones in the area or there's aircraft in the area. So bootstrap your way up and then lay out a larger plant.

Chris Williams (00:39:05):

Can you talk about some of the historical cases involving on orbit anomalous phenomena? To what extent has aero focused on space related UAP and what actions can or should be taken to improve collection and analysis in those areas? In your experience, is there a significant collection of sightings or radar collections or other sensor collections in space that are of concern or should be of concern and are those getting attention that they need to understand what happened and why and all that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:39:52):

So I can speak to the plan that I had laid out, the framework I had laid out before, how they're going forward, you'd have to go back and talk to AARO about. But the way we laid it out before was again in, let's start with the air domain because that is where the bulk of the reporting is coming from. So we focused on getting those requirements in place, the reporting requirements in place, the data storage and data retention policies in place. How do you get all that information saved and transitioned over to aero and lay all that out? The next domain to integrate was the space domain. And we had started working that with the space community last summer or a little bit before last spring. And again, that is a domain awareness problem. There's a lot of data associated with everything from debris to satellite tracking on orbit.

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The question is the same to the space community as it is to the air community of, okay, well how much of that data are we training our algorithms to look for anomalous behavior? And the answer is actually on the space domain a lot more than in the air domain because it's easier to define what is anomalous in the space domain because you have Kepler's laws that you have to baseline and get straight. So a piece of debris that suddenly starts maneuvering is an anomalous thing and should be investigated. But that's what US Space Command does, right? So it's a question of is there anything that falls outside of that purview that we need to then look at? And the answer is largely no.

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There were one or two things that somebody sent me on pictures that were taken from the space station of objects that were going around the earth and they looked odd, but when you correlate it, it's just debris. And so people are taking pictures of debris from the Space station because they take pictures of everything from the space station and somebody got a hold of it and tried to make the claim that it was a UAP that was coming down from orbit. Well, there was no radar data to support that. The piece of the object tracked back to a piece of debris. Those are the kinds of things that we didn't even bother to go much further than that with. There were however, some historical cases, going back to the historical report of there were the allegations of pictures from one of the early astronaut missions, I think it was Apollo 13 that was allegedly supposed to have evidence of a tic-tac thing in its field of view.

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Well, we pulled those original images and looked at them and it's actually a film defect. It's not anything that has anything to do with UAP. And then there was another allegation of Mars. There was a Mars story. I love that one, where there was an oblong thing that was imaged and it oriented differently. And when you pull that imagery, NASA pulled that one and it is another image artifact because the image actually goes outside of the field of outside of the frame and it's on the actual outer edge outer margins of the image outside of the image. So that was a different camera issue, but those are the kinds of things that get spun up as space things. And we've had no evidence of any space UAP that substantiates into an actual UAP

Chris Williams (00:44:30):

And US government. You and congressional testimony have highlighted certain videos and other activities that some of which are explained and some of which are not. Can you tell us more about what the government knows about the so-called tic-tac gimbal and go fast cases where wherein US military pilots saw what appeared to them as unusual aircraft that had were demonstrating highly unusual behaviors. Are those cases still open? Have they been resolved? Can you tell us the status of the investigations into those particular cases incidents?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:45:09):

Well, I can't tell you what the status is today. I can tell you where I left it. When I left. I testified multiple times on the fact that tic-tac, there's some great eyewitness accounts of what is described as the tic-tac. What was lacking is data. So I worked with one of the pilots to try to tease out a little bit more of what exactly was it that we were potentially witnessing and by the descriptions of everything from water to water disturbance to motion relative motion and how you can maybe see what you're seeing. Unfortunately what's going to happen is I think that one, my opinion is that one is going to remain unresolved because there is no data, there is no radar data allegations of the secret black helicopter that came and picked up the tapes. None of that happened. There's no evidence that somebody pulled the tapes off.

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What does happen, and this is why we had to change the data retention policy, was all of these platforms have fixed storage or fixed amount of storage and they only retain the data for any given mission maybe a day unless there is a problem with the platform that they use the data for diagnostics for. Then the next time that platform goes out, the data is overwritten. So there's no conspiracy in that. That's just how the military operates with these data tapes and whatnot. So we did write new policy that said, Hey look, if you're reporting a UAP, you have to save all of that data and transmit it to error within some period of time. So I think the tic-tac is so far back in time, there's no data. We went and looked for all the data, but the other thing that I asked around a bit, which I don't know, it certainly hadn't been answered by the time I left, was there wasn't a lot of asking or questioning of other activities that might've been going on at the time, either naval activities or adversary activities.

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And both of those needed to be explored at that time because records of when tests, for example, were done that far back in time may not be accurate or exist and records of any adversary activity will be hard to track down for exact date and timestamps. Right? And those are the kinds of things that you want to get. So we'd have to look at that. Alright, so go Fast. Actually was explained at the NASA panel, they did a really nice job of pulling that apart and demonstrating that that was parallax. I think where I left that with AARO was to take the analysis from nasa, double check everybody, double checks everybody, and then put that out as closure. I don't know where the status of that is. That's where I left it. And Gimbal, we had hypothesized was likely an artifact of how the sensor operates as well as looking at a known object, probably a jet, and then seeing how that a FLIR blurs all of that kind of information. And so the only way you're going to prove that is you actually have to recreate it in the lab. And so one of the things that, again, that I had tried to get started before I retired was to do that, get the actual sensor platform or one of the laboratory surrogates and go recreate the entire scene in the lab and make sure that it does what we think it does so that you could close that out as well. I don't know where that stands today, but that's what I had intended. Then

Chris Williams (00:50:08):

We have a number of questions from the audience. Let me pose a couple of 'em to you here in the remaining time. One question is, have any UAPs demonstrated capabilities that are beyond our technical understanding?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:22):

No.

Chris Williams (00:50:28):

Let's see.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:32):

So let me comment a little bit more on that. So all the ones that people think we're doing things like one of my favorites is the Puerto Rico one where everybody claims it goes into the water and out of the water and then disappears. That is actually not what happens. The way a FLIR operates is when the object is at the range at it is measuring relative differences to the background. So it's contrast. So when an object is IR reflecting or cool to the same ambient temperature as the background or a radiance as the background, it will look like it disappears. And in this case, this particular object was both a factor of parallax, which has been recreated, and I believe the status of that is still being declassified or reviewed for public release. I don't think it's classified. And then the temperature radiance, I had actually gotten the models for that system and had it recreate that whole thing. And it does exactly that. It makes an object disappear. And I think that is something that we're going to, I think NASA is looking at recreating or nova, actually it's Nova. Nova is going to recreate that as part of their analysis for their series.

Chris Williams (00:52:24):

Let's see. A couple of other questions. There are allegations in the media that you were forced to resign. Are those accurate?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:52:33):

No, that's ludicrous. Both the Deputy Secretary of Defense put a statement out. Pentagon put a statement out. I actually told Deputy Secretary last July that I would likely retire by the end of the year once I met all of my goals and objectives for AARO, which I kept on our scorecard, which I briefed to Congress and to her on a regular basis. So that was not a surprise to anyone and it was known since July.

Chris Williams (00:53:14):

And we have another question from the audience. Does aero possess the legal access required legal authorities required to retrieve information from government agencies or private companies about UAPs and or is there additional, are additional authorities needed to strengthen the ability to collect information?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:53:39):

I get asked that question almost every time, and the answer is always the same. A O has all the legal authorities IT needs. It is written into law and NDA 23. We've had general counsel review it and put the statement out to that effect. We've had DOD and IC and other partners write letters that say, we're all agreed, this is how we're going to do this. And they're authorized to receive everything. And we've not had anything denied to us, at least at that time. As I left, that was all done. ICE had stood up with the SCO and capco a security construct to handle all that information. And I think the evidence of it working is the DHS psap, right? That was a PSAP in somebody else's authorities that we discovered and were able to work with them to get declassified and released.

Chris Williams (00:54:46):

Let's see. There are several questions from the audience concerning a 2004 Nimitz UAP incident that one writer here says was widely covered in CBS 60 minutes. Another media, can you comment on that particular incident? And the specific question that a number of folks have asked is that particular incident was not included in the historical report. That's

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:55:15):

That. That was the tic-tac. And so remember there's a volume two that will include anything that we didn't input in volume one, which is not going to be a whole lot more, I don't think. But that's up to them to see what else goes. But Nimitz is the tic-TAC incident. And again, there's not a lot that you can put in there that's not already out in the public domain. So I wouldn't expect you're going to get a lot of resolution on that, but we'll wait and see what comes out.

Chris Williams (00:55:56):

We have just a couple of minutes left. Let me ask you to give you a chance to kind of summarize with this question, what does the history report tell you about US government interest in and action on UAP sightings over the years? What lessons did you draw from the historical look that dated back many decades and the reaction to events and how they responded to a previous government's administrations responded to different events, et cetera? What are the right lessons to be learned from the history report?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:56:36):

That's a good question. There are a number of things to take away from this, not the least of which is that the complexity of the different contributing factors that go into the general belief and conclusion and continued persistent conspiracy theory, it comes up periodically. So if you look back in time, the contemporary allegations that we're dealing with today had their roots 60, 70 years ago, and it waxes and wanes with some variation on that story over time. Every time the little variations that go into that tend to not bear fruit, they end up being not true. But the fact that no one will recognize that means that there's some other fundamental factor at play here because the truth is contrary to the belief. And so I think the thing to take away from this is there is a belief without evidence that is never going to go away.

(00:58:15):

I think the thing that is most troublesome to me is the number of people that are in government that I may have worked with for decades that I did not know had that belief until they sat down in my office and told me, I'm not going to help you because you are part of the government coverup of all the alien technology. And for somebody who I've known for a while and worked on highly sensitive national security problems on, to say that without evidence as a belief is disturbing and should be a flag for the national security community because how can you then trust those people if they are not objective enough to understand evidentiary based assertions like that or lack of evidence in those, how can you trust them with our national secrets? I think that is a point of research by somebody else at another time, but I think that is certainly a concern.

Chris Williams (00:59:38):

Well, thank you very much. We are unfortunately out of time, Dr. Kirkpatrick. We appreciate your service and the fact that you're willing to spend some of your day with us today. I appreciate you answering the questions in a straightforward manner and we look forward to having our viewers back for the next iteration of our Space Time interview series. So Sean, thank you again and for all of our viewers, be on the lookout for additional notifications of upcoming space time events and reports from the National Security Space Association. Thank you very much and everyone have a great day out here,

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:00:15):

Chris. Bye.