2024-07-17 - Conversation with Marik Von Rennenkampff

Source:

Transcript

Marik (00:00:02):

Alright, Dr. Kirkpatrick, thank you so much for making the time. Appreciate it. The focus of this conversation to be on those three well-known UAP videos that have been released. Gimbal, go fast, and FLIR one. But that being said, after I reached out to you and things moved fast in this space, we learned that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reintroduced the UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and love to maybe pick your brain and get some of your feedback. So I'm going to put myself in the position of an average citizen in your former office. The all domain anomaly resolution office put out an extensive report that from my read, categorically denied the existence of these alleged rumored U-F-O-U-A-P retrieval and reverse engineering efforts. Fast forward three or four months to just this last weekend and the Senate Majority Leader has reintroduced legislation that if you read and I can share my screen, I'll maybe add a few key elements that if you read through the lines in between the lines, it almost says that that elements of the US government have hidden this material and that legacy programs that are defined and non-human intelligence is defined and makes almost two dozen appearances.

(00:01:29):

So how am I as an average observer supposed to balance what the findings of your office with this language? And I will quickly, if you don't mind, I'll just quickly share my screen to kind of highlight a couple of those key segments. Lemme know if that's coming through for you.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:01:49):

Yep, that's fine.

Marik (00:01:53):

So the question then is Senate Majority Leader, this is generally a cautious politician set on the Senate floor citing multiple credible sources. That information has illegally been withheld from Congress. That's a pretty stunning allegation from the most powerful senator in Congress. Your thoughts, Dr. Kirkpatrick, on the reintroduction of this following AARO's report?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:02:23):

Well, I mean look, let me be clear. We found no evidence of any of these allegations, none. And I had access to everything there was to have access to. I went up and briefed and testified just as recently as a couple of months ago with the SAP code director and the CAP code director from ODNI, and all of us have gone through everything that we have, everything that witnesses have come forward and said, Hey, this is this hidden program. And it turns out none of them are those hidden programs. None of them. All of them have turned out to be other things that have nothing to do with extraterrestrials reverse engineering. And all of them have been reported to Congress.

Marik (00:03:16):

Right.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:03:16):

And what you will also find is in that extensive volume one historical report, which we conducted under my directorship, you will find a section in there that talks about some of the people involved in these allegations.

(00:03:34):

Those people have all been working this problem if you want to call it a problem for 20 years. And most of them are associated with some of the original work done under Bigelow and the former past Senator Harry Reid and are in a position to benefit from this type of language, which then drives for further investment by Congress and further investigation being directed at AARO at the Pentagon, at the IC to go and look at this. So from this perspective, Senator Schumer is listening to his staffers, his staffers are listening to these people and when they come forward and they say, Hey, we have credible people, okay, you have credible people, I have credible people that government is full of credible people. All of them are experienced in what their role is in government. They do not necessarily know when they come across something from another part of the government, especially when we're talking about the United States ability to maintain technological superiority against adversaries and the research and development that goes into that.

(00:05:09):

Some of these credible people don't have any idea about what they're looking at. In fact, I know all of these credible people and there's not a one of 'em that's a real physicist. So I have a hard time explaining that to the general public because they want to believe, hey, there's some guy claims, he's got information about this. That's true, but none of them have presented any evidence, nothing that is actionable, nothing that can go on. So all of this legislation is all coming from people saying they've seen something or saying they know about something or saying that they saw something but not one of them had provided any actual evidence and all the evidence that we investigated and tracked down and pulled out of archives and declassified everything from the DHS program that we uncovered and declassified to the most recent report that finally got published on the material that had been alleged to come from one of these sites.

(00:06:21):

All of those things we conducted and finished before I retired and none of them turned up anything that was positive, none of them turned up anything that had any credibility as far as this is an extra terrestrial reverse engineering program. So I think this legislation, it's great. Okay, you want to put law out there that says you have to turn over all of this biologic evidence of non-human intelligence and reverse engineering programs and everybody is going to scratch their heads and go, what is it you want to hear about? Where is this that you think this is? I told everybody, in fact, I think I said this in one of my first testimonies last year, nothing would've made me happier than to be able to find evidence of this. That would've been fantastic. But it doesn't exist and nobody wants to believe that it doesn't exist and nobody wants to believe that these people have any other motive other than we know what we're looking at and it must be extra treasury.

Marik (00:07:37):

Would it be fair for me to say just on its face that there's a disconnect. If Schumer and Rounds and all these other co-sponsors introduced it last year and the AARO report comes out says there's nothing here. We've interviewed sources A, B, C, D, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, and I'm sure there's more in the classified report if this legislation were not reintroduced, I'd say, okay, great. They trust AARO, they bought it. It seems to me on its face that there is a disconnect between what AARO put out. Is that a fair characterization or - does that make sense?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:08:14):

Last year we convinced Congress last year not to go down that road because in that Schumer amendment last year was additional legislation, if you recall, that directed NARA to stand up and turn over all of its, but they had already given that responsibility to AARO. So it was duplicative in that they were now directing two different organizations to do the same.

Marik (00:08:46):

I see.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:08:46):

And we told them that's ridiculous. We have already started working with NARA At that time we'd already uncovered more documents that NARA had put out there. NARA had already set up their web portal, linked it to our webpage, we'd already gone down this road, there was no need for additional legislation. And people tend to forget that, right? They complain about the inefficiency of government and here we are, the government trying to say, you're being inefficient. Stop doing that. And everybody gets ticked off. And that's what happened is now they got upset and they're like, well, we're going to just reintroduce it. And why? Because you got the people like Tim Burchett and Luna who are all on the house side who are making all of this noise. None of them are actually cleared to any of the SAP programs that we've uncovered that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial activities. And they're not going to be, because they won't go to their internal senate and house Intel and defense oversight committees and ask for access and be given access. They don't have a need to know. But that's Congress's problem to deal with, not the departments and the IC's.

Marik (00:10:06):

Can I follow up on, oh sorry, go ahead.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:10:08):

No, so here we are again where they're going to introduce this law. Maybe it gets through the NDAA, maybe it won't or it'll be some form of it, I'm sure. And they're telling the commercial industry, they have to turn over all of this stuff. Well, the commercial industry - and I talked to all of the commercial industry - and they're scratching their heads and they don't know what they're talking about. And that's where this last report with this piece of material comes in. And this is why we keep trying to put all this stuff out here. These are all the pieces of the puzzle. That piece of material that was alleged to be a piece of UAP material from a crash in 1947, no chain of custody, but let's put that aside for a minute. So that is the piece of material that was at one point given to a commercial partner and they were asked to see if they could figure out what it was on the basis of the belief that it was a extraterrestrial UAP. And those guys took a look at it and said, yeah, we can't, there's nothing here. We don't know what this is. This looks like a piece of regular material.

(00:11:33):

And they couldn't recreate it. And the reason they couldn't recreate it is because the material was generated from chemistry that was done back in the fifties that we don't do anymore. But that's not the story that gets propagated into the conspiracy world is all they took was we can't recreate it. Well therefore it must be extraterrestrial because we don't have the technology. Well, no, that's not what that means. It means that we gave up that technology a decades ago because it didn't work. And so the analysis report that finally came out talks about, look, this is a piece of standard magnesium based material. It was the same chemistry that was used in a number of Air Force programs of missiles and missile testing back in the day. That's what it likely is. Are we ever going to prove it a hundred percent? Of course not because we don't have the chemistry anymore to prove it. But what we did prove without a shadow of a doubt is it's not extraterrestrial because the ratio of the isotopes don't match. It's definitely terrestrial and it's definitely a rolled composite. So that's the kind of thought train that gets propagated into the public that then comes around boomerangs around up through Congress and gets turned into whether there must be something there.

Marik (00:13:09):

Yep. Got it. Can I follow up quickly on one thing and I just apologize just because time is tight and I want to be

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:13:15):

That's alright. Go ahead.

Marik (00:13:16):

...respectful of your time, and maybe I misunderstood, but if I heard you correctly, did you say that you or AARO pushed back on the Schumer Rounds amendment when it was proposed last year? That seems to be a big mystery as to how it was, shall we say watered down? Other people say gutted.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:13:35):

So let's be clear about how the process works in the United States government every year the NDAA is put together by proposals from both the Senate and the House side. Correct. Okay. Those proposals are socialized with the department,

Marik (00:13:54):

Right?

Sean Kirkpatrick(00:13:55):

The department then gets an opportunity to write a reclaima that goes back to the hill that says, "Hey, this is not a good idea for these reasons or this would be better if it was written this way or Yeah, we just can't really support this because of these resource constraints or whatever the case may be." And that is true for every piece of the NDAA. It gets farmed back to us and we get to or the department to go look at that. As AARO, the pieces of legislation that were written about AARO come to us and we are allowed to write our thoughts and disclaimers. And so we wrote exactly that. Look, this is duplicative of language you gave us in 22. Let us finish the thing that you told us to do the first time before you write additional legislation.

Marik (00:14:50):

Got it. Did that, if I may go ahead. Did that apply, did AARO's, let's say commentary on this for reclaima, did that extend to the review board? Is that what you see as duplicative? I'm sorry, provide background. I'm sure you're tracking the proposed supposedly blue ribbon panel, right? Was that something AARO opined upon.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:15:13):

Yeah, it's the same. Exactly. We said the same thing on that. We're like, "why do you need that?" Look AARO? Everybody needs to understand AARO is a congressional creation.

Marik (00:15:26):

Yes,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:15:27):

AARO is there to answer the congressional direction to go do these missions. They were given authorities and resources to go do that mission. And what's happening is Congress is getting fed continual misinformation about what is happening and as a consequence, they're not waiting one, they're not waiting for the mission to get executed. It does take time to go through all that. Two, many of those senators have never even asked for an update by the time I had retired. I mean, Schumer had never asked for a briefing. He never got anything from AARO directly. So they never asked the questions. Nobody had an opportunity to answer them, and now they're going to go, well, let's just write more legislation. Well, that is wasteful. Now you are whipsawing the department and the IC and the rest of the interagency to try and convincingly answer them on there is nothing, there has nothing been turned over and you can't prove a negative. So this is not going to end.

Marik (00:16:59):

Can I maybe just slightly play devil's advocate and I hear everything you're saying and I'd like to maybe dive into that just for, and I want to also get to the really what we want to talk about, but just to play devil's advocate from my read, the UAP topic has been deeply stigmatized over many decades. The giggle factor people reflexively, I never thought I'd be sitting here talking to, this is the last thing I ever thought I'd be thinking about. And generally I view the individuals Rubio as vice chairman of Senate, Intel Gillibrand, Schumer certainly as generally cautious politicians, and for my read, it would take a hell of, and this is just me, it would take quite a bit of the evidentiary threshold I feel like should be fairly high for these individuals to stick out their necks and that includes Harry Reed and Senator McCain was interested in this and Lieberman was part of the whole OSEP or the DHS attempted reinvention. So for them to put 64 pages of this highly detailed, I feel like there should be some kind of an evidentiary threshold. Is that a fair opinion for some Americans to have?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:18:12):

That's absolutely. That is a critical thing and that is what I walked into them every time with of you need to have evidence and they don't have any and we didn't find any, but that's not scratching the itch because you have these highly credible people who keep coming forward. Some of these highly credible people still wouldn't come in to talk to us because they know that our threshold, certainly my threshold for evidence was scientifically based, logically based, critical thinking based rational, and we could prove it if you can't prove it, it's just hearsay and everybody that we talked to, it was all turned into circuit circular reporting. Somebody came in and said, I know that this happened because somebody else told me, and then you go talk to that person. We know that happened because somebody else told them.

Marik (00:19:15):

Right. When I read through the historical report and there's a section in the unclassed version that outlines the various sources and what they've alleged in general terms, and as I go through it, I feel like I can, you don't have to, obviously this is a confidentially, but I feel like the bulk of those individuals are publicly known. You're Eric Davis', your Hal Puthoffs, your Lue Elizondos, your I think Michael Herrera, there's other individuals that have been out. I don't want to break confidentiality. It sounds like those are publicly known figures and the individuals, if I'm understanding you correctly, and is it fair to say that the individuals leading this effort are all publicly known? Is that fair?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:19:57):

I would say the bulk of them are we at that time. I think for volume one, we had interviewed and or questioned 40 some odd people. Okay, that's a lot. That's a lot. And looked at who was saying what to whom and how was all this mapped out and who worked where and who did what and how did this all come about? Some of them are obviously very vocal in the public domain. Some of them are not as vocal in the public domain, but they're all linked. Okay.

Marik (00:20:44):

If I may, I'll just quickly share.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:20:47):

I can give you 15 more minutes after that.

Marik (00:20:49):

Okay. I really appreciate that. Thank you sir. Let me just quickly share with you something that an individual, a senate source that was involved in this topic shared with me and I put this out publicly, so I'd love to just get your response on this because I am trying to get to the public figures versus the private figures. Senator Rubio has said some pretty stunning comments that seem to take you off guard in the signal exchange, but here's what a senate source told me and it said, most of these individuals are completely unknown and then you can read on here questions about motivations when people go public. I don't know if you've seen this or not, and you don't, don't have to trust me, but this is a source that I trust and I know is involved in this topic.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:21:38):

I've had this conversation with Rubio and Warner and Gillibrand and others, let me differentiate 40 some odd people. Most of those are not public,

(00:21:54):

But the core of the people that have been really advocating and have their fingers in a number of these pies are all connected and many of them are public, so there's really two camps, but the camp that's mostly public is getting a lot of their information right from these other folks, but these other folks have no evidence and all of those folks are doing the same. I heard a story. I knew a guy, there was only a couple of people that came close to having what we would call firsthand knowledge, but what they had firsthand knowledge of was not what they thought they had firsthand knowledge of. It turned out to be some other program that had nothing to do with aliens, but it's advanced technology, it's part of the US' push for technological superiority and they're not going to understand those things when they see them if they don't know what they're looking at.

Marik (00:22:59):

Understood. I just want to quickly, I think it looks like I was similarly perhaps intrigued and perhaps stunned by what Senator Rubio said on last year, last June in that News Nation interview, he gave a very long interview and he said some pretty remarkable, he preys the credibility of these individuals, I think two or three times in language like this. And I feel like I'm probably beating a dead horse here with you, but is there some subset of, you've hinted at it, but could there be some subset of individuals that have not gone an AARO that are simply only going to Congress and the inspectors general?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:23:41):

So there is a small number of folks that still refuse to go to AARO, but I have reviewed their testimonies and given my thoughts back to Congress on what is true and what is not true. Most all of it is not right. They got pieces of things right, but they're piecing together stories and information that are very, very similar to things that are out in the public domain with maybe a name change or location change or what have you. There are some very small number of individuals who have gotten in trouble for what we call ticket collecting in the IC where they push to go get access to programs that they shouldn't have access to, not in their job jar. And so those

Marik (00:24:36):

Is that a subtle, if I may interrupt, is that a subtle, perhaps illusion or dig at David Grusch perhaps?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:24:42):

No, no, I just, there's other people involved and some of them have gotten access to things, inadvertent access to things or sometimes intentional access to things that they shouldn't, but they don't know what they're looking at. And when you put all of those things together, people draw conclusions that are erroneous.

Marik (00:25:12):

I don't want to belabor this too much, but last but not least, Grusch. I'm curious if you find him generally credible. He has stated in interviews, I think this was on Joe Rogan, he basically hinted at having spoken to what I interpreted as a president of the United States. He said something along the lines of, I spoke to the highest of the high and an interview with Tucker Carlson. You said you referred to agency directors, so how do you interpret anything along those lines? And this is a statement that Grusch put out. 

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:25:48):

So first of all, if I look at this statement, he shouldn't be aware of any of the primary interview subjects that came to us unless they're talking. Now I've spoken to the same agency directors that he claims he's spoken to, they've told me what they've said. I understand exactly what happened and why it happened and I understand exactly why he and a couple of other individuals drew conclusions that they did, which have nothing to do with actual extraterrestrial programs.

Marik (00:26:26):

Got it.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:26:26):

So they took statements from agency heads and directors and generals in ways that they were not intended. And it is probably an internal bias for this is I want to believe, and so this is what I'm hearing.

Marik (00:26:47):

Got it.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:26:47):

But when you talk to those senior leaders and they have put it on paper, that is not what they said.

Marik (00:26:57):

So they have denied that in memos, in official memoranda. Is that so?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:27:02):

So remember everybody that comes to AARO, there was an interview process where they gave a statement for the record and that was put in that forms the basis of what goes into the reports.

Marik (00:27:13):

Got it, got it. Excellent. Last I promises the last on this topic, you mentioned in your slack, it looks like this is, sorry, signal exchange with former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence, Chris Mellon that the Department of Justice had.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:27:32):

Yeah, I'm at the ICIG.

Marik (00:27:34):

Oh, okay. So this is a- Got it, got it, got it. So this is just an error.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:27:39):

So this is where we get into one of these legal loopholes, right? Yeah. Grusch gave statements to the ICIG and to the DOD IG.

Marik (00:27:50):

Yep.

Sean Kirkpatrick(00:27:51):

Those fall under law enforcement authorities.

Marik (00:27:54):

Correct.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:27:55):

Even though AARO has law enforcement authorities, because if somebody came in and made a claim about criminal activity, we could refer them directly to the proper law enforcement agency to take action on the criminal activity if they came in. So Grusch had gone in to talk to those two ICIG and DOD IG and we had to get - they couldn't just give me the statement because it's protected under law enforcement whistleblower protections. So we had to go through this long process of getting the relevant data pulled out and separate it from his complaint about wrongful prosecution.

Marik (00:28:44):

Retaliation. Yeah.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:28:47):

Yeah. We had to separate that the data, if he had any from that, the data that was provided, we cross-referenced with what we'd already known because we had interviewed most of the people that he had already talked to and there was nothing new there,

Marik (00:29:06):

AARO received, I just want to get this clear AARO, received portions of Grusch's ICIG complaint.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:29:13):

We got the portions that did not have to do with retaliation.

Marik (00:29:16):

Got it. Okay. That's very helpful. Excellent. Alright, shall we move on to Gimbal? Anything else? Sorry? Anything else that you wanted to add at this point on that element of this, whether it's related to legislation, the Hill, anything along those lines?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:29:34):

I mean, I want to be clear, the senators on the hill are to do their job. They are, however, in many instances being I would say misinformed by people who may have different motives than finding the actual truth. I believe that we found answers to most every one of those allegations and provided that in a classified report up to Congress, volume two will come out that will have additional information that came after our cutoff date for volume one and we'll have the same conclusions, have the same. I don't expect anything new other than

Marik (00:30:27):

Got it. Excellent.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:30:29):

The only other thing I would touch on, and I wasn't paying attention to this too much because it seems to be a very mundane and trivial thing, but it speaks to motivations. I think a couple months ago there was a hoopla from some group that was claiming my involvement in a meeting on the hill back in,

Marik (00:30:58):

Oh geez.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:31:00):

2018. I don't even remember the guys' name.

Marik (00:31:03):

Skinwalker Ranch thing right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:31:05):

Yeah, those guys, right? And they were trying to make the claim that, hey, because I was involved with it way back when, I clearly have some tie to all of this from wherever and even somebody even tried to make the claim that I was misleading the department, which let's be clear, I was asked and told to go do this job. I didn't apply for it. So

Marik (00:31:36):

All and told which happens,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:31:39):

And that particular meeting, I was asked by some of those Senate staffers that are in that picture to come be a objective third party, listen to what they have to say and give us your feedback.

Marik (00:31:57):

Subject matter expert type of a thing, right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:31:59):

Yeah. Well, if one could claim subject matter expertise in this. So I think at the time, if I remember the timeframe correctly, I was actually between assignments.

(00:32:14):

I had been the senior S&TI officer for the Pentagon. I was going to Colorado to stand up space command. I think that was the timeframe and I was asked to come take a listen and give thoughts. I did, I told 'em, I thought it was not real. I thought they were doing pseudoscience and they weren't even really doing their science very well. And it was a publicity thing. I mean there was a picture taken, I think there were several pictures taken and whoever the guy was who I couldn't pick out if I saw him in a lineup had nothing to offer. But then later, a couple of months ago, tried to make this a thing and I think even went so far as to say that I had led the meeting that I had said that this is something that we need to go jump on and nothing could be further from the truth. That's such an embellishment of the circumstances, but those are the same storylines of how these things come about and it's, it's hard to combat misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy with anything other than science and education in fact. And you just have to keep beating on it until cooler heads prevail and critical thinking skills are reintroduced into the general population, which I'm concerned about.

Marik (00:34:03):

Fair point. Speaking of science, I'd love to get to those three videos. Yeah,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:34:07):

Let's jump on that.

Marik (00:34:08):

Before we do that, I know people would love to hear this to the extent that you can comment and you mentioned that there were something, I think it was like two to 4% of the cases that you saw were anomalous just on their face. Could you maybe provide to the extent that you can without getting into classified systems, but what was the most perplexing video or footage or anything sensor data that you saw during your time at AARO?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:34:39):

So I'll tell you the one, and I don't think it's been declassified yet, but it's in the queue to be declassified. These things take time. But there was an event, and I will just loosely describe it as what appears to be another spherical ball balloon, we'll call it a balloon, but a spherical ball at the time it looked like it was moving really fast across, and it's another FLIR video, so all the best ones are FLIR videos. You can't see anything, so it's going really fast and the recreation of the flight pattern seems to make it go, make a turn and come towards you and it looks like it's speeding up and the speeds look like to be, initially it looked like it was around one and a half mach or something like that, and it was near a volcano, which is one of the biggest, everybody loves the UAPs are attracted by volcanoes.

(00:35:51):

And so that one was on its face that's anomalous, that looks weird, and it had taken a year to try to pull the data apart. Now, if people go onto the website, or if you remember some of my early testimonies, the way I had stood up the office and the analytics was a scientific team and intelligence team, and they both look at the data and then they kind of red team each other and they come to a consensus and then that gets peer reviewed and then that comes to me as the director to sign out.

(00:36:33):

This one. The teams had gone back and forth for a year because, and why, and this will get to these three videos. This is a very important point that most people, in fact even many image scientists don't understand. When I'm looking at a two dimensional video and I'm looking at an object, unless I have an unambiguous range to that object or a reference point for that object, then any speed or altitude measurement you calculate is wrong.

Marik (00:37:16):

Right? Absolutely.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:37:17):

Because you don't have the range data to

Marik (00:37:21):

Absolutely

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:37:23):

Right? And that's where parallax comes in in some sense because there's also the optical illusion of you're going faster than it or it's, but from a range perspective, the way you solve a parallax problem is you have to actually recreate the flight path of the camera that's taking the image. Well, the platform that camera's on the angle the camera is pointing at and where the object is moving.

(00:37:54):

But you have to recreate that for every layer of range because you don't have range, and then you have to match each one of those to what you see, to figure out where in that range it most likely is. And every time we did that, every time, including I think it was the go fast one, it turns out to be that most logical, most, the one that matches most to the data is the object is moving very slow or moving with the wind and the platform is moving faster and rotating, and so you're getting that parallax because there's no frame of reference against the water, for example.

Marik (00:38:44):

We will absolutely get to all of that. Any specific ones that stood out to you that were not resolved, Dr. Kirkpatrick? Anything that as the time you've left where you're like, wow, that's interesting and we still don't

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:38:55):

Yeah, so let's be clear. If it's not resolved, it's either we didn't get to it yet or analysis that's undergoing or more data is required. There was nothing that was not resolved that I thought could absolutely be what everybody's claiming

Marik (00:39:16):

Anomalous. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:39:17):

Anomalous to the point of extra terrestrial or advanced technology.

Marik (00:39:22):

Got it. Okay. Without further ado, I'll quickly, I know we're really tight on time here, so I will try to do this as expeditiously as possible, but let me switch over to this and I owe, I don't dunno if you're familiar with Ryan Graves. He was a former FA18 fighter pilot. He recreated this, this is the situational awareness display as he remembers it. I don't know if you can see my mouse, but this is the gimbal object. This is on the radar, had it about eight nautical miles at this point, give or take. This is a 20 nautical mile range, so that's this distance here. Gimbal's proceeding in one direction as he recalls it, and he viewed this tape several times in the debrief and the debrief room with the admiral present and the Navy sent out an email said, Hey, this is happening in the middle of daily incursions according to the aviators, we're seeing these frequently.

(00:40:22):

Then the object comes to a brief stop and then reverses direction without a radius of turn while this quote unquote "fleet of objects" does this direction reversal with they turn into the air like an airplane would the gimbal object does this, the flat direction change, right? There's no lateral movement observed on the radar display. That's interesting. We won't go into, so bottom line is what I worked with a colleague of mine and also Mick West is a well-known skeptic who he's created a 3D modeling system and we created our own 3D models, but we used to your point, the elevation, we have a two degree angle of depression. We looked at the azimuth and we can literally trace a flight path for these objects for this object in 3D space. And to your point, the range is the key. But here's what's really interesting. When you account for wind direction of wind and critically, most critically the F eighteens flight path, and when you count for wind and how that deflects the flight path, we can find that trajectory that was seen on radar, that moving in a straight line and then immediately reversing direction that from an overhead view, that would not just scale, but that would be something like this.

(00:41:38):

So you see the F 18 and then you have the gimbal object doing that ping, right? It goes directly and reverses direction. And I hope this doesn't get too pixelated, but that this is a lateral view of that flight path that can be found in the line of sight. I cannot stress enough that the odds of finding that line of sight in the data at the range provided by the aviators with high confidence is pretty remarkable. And that's just the tip of the iceberg because we get, these are all direct quotes from Lieutenant Ryan Graves, but what's fascinating is the way this object rotates down to the second at the apex of that turn, and here it is right here, that long continuous rotation matches to the second at that range given by the aviators. That is from a math and science perspective, that's extraordinary. The odds of finding that highly anomalous track and also matching visually the rotation. This is another view of that I find to be astounding. That's like a one in trillion chance, right? So this rotation, that green line is that reconstructed flight path at that roughly six nautical mile range and that rotation in that animated on the left, that is not in any way fudge. That is the actual rotation of the object in the video. What do you think about that, Dr. Kirkpatrick? What are your thoughts on that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:08):

How did you get the range?

Marik (00:43:11):

I can give you that. That was from Lieutenant Graves, he stated with very high confidence. I can pull up the actual quote.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:21):

So here's my problem with all of that. Yeah, a couple of things. One, it doesn't take into account the sensor and how the sensor works and how it rotates as well.

Marik (00:43:33):

It doesn't rotate in steps. I talked to the patent.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:38):

We have the sensor.

Marik (00:43:41):

Does it rotate in steps?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:42):

Sensor works very much. Do you remember, did you ever see, I'm sure you have, Maverick?

Marik (00:43:49):

Absolutely. Top gun you mean, yes?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:52):

No, Maverick.

Marik (00:43:53):

Oh, okay. Yes.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:43:55):

If you saw Maverick, you saw how the laser sensor on the laser guided weapon rotates.

Marik (00:44:06):

On the, Sure. Okay. On the bomb you're talking about the,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:44:10):

No, so it's a laser guided missile,

Marik (00:44:15):

Right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:44:16):

Laser stays on the platform and it rotates to put beam on there and then the beam rider missile follows the beam, right?

Marik (00:44:26):

That's right. Absolutely.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:44:28):

A lot of these sensors, they do the same thing. All of the FLIR pods, all of the imaging sensors because they rotate as the platform rotates. And so I would just be cautious about that one two,

Marik (00:44:46):

Can I just quickly add to that? Okay. All right. So let me just quickly add to that. I've talked to just about every SME in the military and the private sector about this. So this is, how is this coming through for you? Can you see the video? Yeah. This is an actual recreation down to every detail that we can add. That's how the sensor would have rotated in the gimbal engagement. There's no need to introduce steps into that. That's just not how that system works. I'll play it again.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:45:17):

So I'm not saying there's steps. I'm saying that's how it rotates because, but when it rotates, the object would rotate.

Marik (00:45:26):

Well, we've looked at, there's a lot of, first of all, the object rotates in four distinct rotations, right? They're choppy, they're disconnected,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:45:36):

Okay, but you don't have the raw data. You're using internet data. So anything that's choppy is from image compression. It has absolutely nothing to do with the raw data.

Marik (00:45:48):

But I thought the rotation was because of the sensor was rotating.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:45:52):

The rotation is, but the steps that I think you're referring to

(00:45:58):

May not be real. That's what I'm getting at. So what I'm trying to get to is those videos that everybody is over analyzing until they're blue in the face is not raw data and without raw data, you have image compressed data that's out on the internet and image compression does all kinds of weird stuff, all kinds of weird stuff to videos. There's image compressions videos where you can see shadows of people after the people have gone by. There are image compressions of people where things of objects where they get pixelated or they blur or they jump because you've missed a frame because it's compressed. So unless you have the raw data, it is really hard to draw a conclusion about things that might look like optical effects.

Marik (00:47:00):

Well, here's where, and this is where the rotation is so critical because there are four, and hopefully this doesn't come through choppy, but the four distinct rotations in that video are noted in this video, and I highlight them. And the key is that third one, it's long and continuous and it is down to the second a match with that reconstructed flight path. Here's one, here's two, and here comes the long continuous one. The odds of that matching the flight path, which matches what is seen on radar, which the aviators have extremely high confidence, was at six to eight nautical miles. That's extraordinary, right? You can't just simply,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:47:41):

Well, I wouldn't say it's extraordinary because one, I don't have high confidence in what the aviators are saying. They don't have a laser lock on it.

Marik (00:47:50):

Well they don't use the FLIR laser in midair. It's just not used in midair. That's

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:47:55):

A lot of them have that data now. They didn't do it then. So they don't have laser ranging of these things. And if you didn't turn your laser ranger on, you have no unambiguous range.

Marik (00:48:11):

That's just not common aviators. They're trained not to turn their laser on in air-to-air engagements,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:48:17):

But they are now because they've been told to

Marik (00:48:20):

Really, that's news. Okay. That's actually,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:48:22):

That's part of some of the driving training of some of the aviators when it comes to things like this is you got to turn all your sensors on. If you're seeing something, turn it all on and save it. They don't have ambiguous range. A pilot estimates range with his thumb and speed with his thumb, and you can't put any credibility into that. As much as I love our pilots and they're the best pilots in the world, when you're talking about trying to apply a guesstimate to something that somebody remembered from however many years or decades ago in a scientific rigorous and technical evaluation, you're going to come up with all kinds of interesting things.

Marik (00:49:13):

Let me rephrase. I guess the point is the data and the science from what we're seeing confirms the range data given by aviators, let's put it that way. We just plug the data

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:49:24):

That's not what it says. That's not what it says. What it says is you have a range of solutions to this flight path. One of those matches what people are wanting to believe. One of them also matches the most likely scenario. And so which one are you going to pick? The one that everybody wants to believe or the one that is more likely?

Marik (00:49:51):

And I'd be curious to know what the more likely scenario is here, because we've looked at all the flight paths at distances up to at 50 nautical miles, and we haven't found anything that looks plausible.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:06):

So the most plausible thing is that it is a stationary object moving with the wind and the rotation you're seeing is coming from the sensor rotation.

Marik (00:50:17):

Again, the at flare doesn't. Okay, but it's So, I'm sorry, you're confusing me. You're saying that the rotation is sensor art. Sorry compress...

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:26):

It's a sensor. It's a sensor artifact from it rotating because a lot of that is glare that you're also getting off of the reflection. That's why it's so apparently hot because you have to now do the sun angles off of,

Marik (00:50:41):

This was at night, first of all.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:43):

Okay, it was at night. That's right. This is the gimbal.

Marik (00:50:45):

This happened 10 minutes after the go fast video, a hundred, 200, 300 nautical miles off the coast of Florida. And there's no balloon trajectory. We looked at every single possible. There's no plausible within the lines of sight, within the AT flare lines of sight. That's the elevation in the azimuth. There's no plausible balloon trajectory within the lines of sight.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:51:09):

But you don't have range. So I don't understand what you mean. There's no trajectory in the line of sight because there is one, it was recreated. There is a way to do that where you get

Marik (00:51:21):

I'd love to see that analysis. I don't think even the likes of Mick West who spent more time than anybody on this, has found a trajectory that finds this moving in the wind as a balloon 300 miles off the coast of Jacksonville.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:51:37):

Okay, well

Marik (00:51:38):

Let's move on. Let's move on. I've got a lot more just briefly, quickly on, go fast. NASA did not account for wind. That's a pretty major, that's a massive scientific error. And when you count for wind, you get a speed. If you're assuming the range is correct and this object was at 13,000 feet, you get a speed that's closer to a hundred knots, 120 miles an hour. That's a pretty stunning error on NASA's part. I think, plane don't fly in vacuums, right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:52:11):

I haven't looked at NASA's analysis.

Marik (00:52:13):

You have not looked at NASA's analysis. Okay. But is it fair? You get the point right that they admitted right there. This is from directly from NASA's report. Our calculation is neglected wind effects. That's a pretty stunning error on their part. And to your point about range, we have used 3D recreations and matched the background. And this object was again, happened 10 minutes prior to gimbal at night, hundreds of miles off the shore, off the coast of Jacksonville. Pretty anomalous amid daily FLIR and radar locks on those objects.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:52:49):

I'm not really sure I'd go that far. I really wouldn't. The number of objects, especially balloons that are in the Jacksonville area or in the PAX area or over CONUS at any given time is huge.

Marik (00:53:04):

So you have two seemingly anomalous objects at let's say 13 to 20,000 feet. 200, 300 miles off the coast.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:53:15):

Yeah, we get up. Do you know where those objects come from? They follow the jet stream.

Marik (00:53:21):

Sure. And they go west to east. Yeah, I am tracking.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:53:24):

I mean, get 'em all the time,

Marik (00:53:26):

Right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:53:28):

So this is why pattern of life analysis is so important, why you've got to have 24 7 coverage of these things all the time of these areas all the time. So you can count the number of stuff that comes through there. And when we've been looking, it's a lot. I mean, when people say there are daily incursions, sure there's crap in our airspace all the time. All the time. Finding out where it is and what it is is what the challenge comes down to.

Marik (00:54:03):

Absolutely. And this comes, sorry, go ahead.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:54:07):

No, I was just going to say, but it always turns into slower moving objects than people think and not anything that's super exciting, to be honest.

Marik (00:54:24):

Speaking of super exciting, are you familiar with these, these are hazard reports that were filed by, I believe these were by VFA 11 flying out of Oceania in 2014. And this is what spurred Lieutenant Graves to come forward because they were seeing objects on FLIR, CATM-9x, visually occasionally, and on radar that were stationary against direct quotes or hurricane force winds and they have multi-sensor eyeballs on these objects on a daily basis. That's interesting to me. I don't know what to make of that. And then,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:55:01):

Okay, is there any data, was there any data submitted with that?

Marik (00:55:05):

I fear not. I think this is absolutely pre AARO, but

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:55:13):

This is what I'm getting at, right? The pilots see things and they're highly trained and very professional pilots, but they are still human and they are still subject to error and optical illusion. They're saying they saw something against hurricane force winds. How do we know that? What did they save? What data do we have to analyze?

Marik (00:55:41):

Fair. Fair.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:55:42):

Without that, this is all the evidence you have.

Marik (00:55:46):

I understand, but I'd like to think that when these guys are frustrated and the navy, their commanders are calling this a critical and a severe risk, severe threat to naval aviation.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:55:56):

I don't doubt and I do not disagree with their frustration with the bureaucracy within the Navy or the Air Force or the DOD at doing something. I absolutely understand that frustration. But you've got to separate that frustration from science and fact. So that is what led to Congress telling us to go do something about it. So now they're doing something,

Marik (00:56:23):

This reads to me like a range Fouler minus the data. So got a radar track, stable radar track and a CATM-9X, which for folks not tracking this, it's an infrared training missile, but it's an infrared sensor. So that means there's something there. So you have both a radar and infrared, they flew on and they have the emmic system, the helmet mounted queuing system that allows them to place this visually in three dimensional space. They fly up within 200 feet, see nothing visually. How do you get multi-sensor seeing there's something there? Eyeballs say there's nothing there. That's interesting. And this is just not a one-off, right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:57:05):

What was the time of day?

Marik (00:57:08):

I don't have that at my fingertips,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:57:11):

So I'm going to guess that it was in low lighting conditions, whether it's evening, dusk, or night.

Marik (00:57:18):

Yeah,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:57:20):

Because we get these often because here's what happens. There's a couple of things that people again don't know unless you go and do the science,

Marik (00:57:28):

Right.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:57:29):

The radars, the sensors have never been calibrated against balloons ever. That was one of the things that we stood up AARO to go do was go calibrate all this stuff. And why is that important? Because a weather balloon is made of different material depending on the altitude at which it needs to go. Some of them have metal strips in them, some of them are Mylar, some of them are not, and they're just latex. For those not familiar. Mylar is a metal, it's like aluminum foil, but much thinner. And the metal strips or all of that gives spurious radar returns. Why is that important? Because the sensors are attached to machine learning AI or just plain old advanced data analytics that estimates speed and range and whatnot based on those radar returns. If those radar returns are spurious or are missing, it calculates something that is nonsensical. And oftentimes that leads to, we've even had data where reports where they provided data and the data says, Hey, this thing went from half a mock to one mock.

Marik (00:59:00):

Right.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:59:01):

Okay, well when you pull the raw data out and you look at the radar returns, it turns out that some of those radar returns are missing or many of them are missing. And what that means is when it does its calculation and it displays it on the hud, it says it went from 0.5 to one. Well, the only reason it did that is it missed some of that and it's estimating where its next place should be.

Marik (00:59:26):

Yeah, Got it.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:59:26):

And so those are errors that are built into the system because the systems are not designed for slow moving balloon like objects.

Marik (00:59:37):

I can quickly, I just looked up that one report we looked at, and that was during the daytime, I'm trying to get it. It was at 12:47 PM So middle of the day, that particular,

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:59:45):

That's fine because a translucent balloon at whatever speed they're flying by, they're not going to see very well.

Marik (00:59:53):

But presumably radar reflectors would, you could see that at 200 miles, 250

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:59:58):

If the radar is seeing it, maybe. But if you're telling me that they're flying up to it and they optically can't see it, it's probably because it's translucent.

Marik (01:00:12):

Okay.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:00:13):

That's plain fact of it. It's not magical. It's just translucent and you're flying in a jet going really fast.

Marik (01:00:23):

We had two jets flying in trail. Right? But anyway, that's

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:00:26):

Doesn't matter. Same thing. If it's translucent, you're not going to see it very well.

Marik (01:00:30):

And I know we're over time. I got to ask you at the NASA panel where you presented, you mentioned you guys AARO was tracking or getting reports of direct quote from you in the slide was metallic orbs. They've been seen all over the world making very interesting apparent maneuvers. That's interesting.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:00:54):

Yep. Turns out most of them are all Mylar balloons and not really doing anything special because of optical illusion and parallax.

Marik (01:01:05):

I only ask because in the reporting, the historical reporting, and this is a lot I know, but when you look at on the right are all the roundups from the USG silver spheres, metallic spheres, flying against the wind and doing all kinds of seemingly anomalous movements are replete in the reporting, let's just say. And so that raised I think some interest, right? Because this goes back to World War ii guys seeing aviator, seeing identical objects, metallic looking sphere. So had to ask about that.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:01:42):

So there's a declassified program, I forget what it's called, where metallic Mylar balloons. Mylar spheres are launched into an area to test radar responses and aircraft responses,

Marik (01:02:08):

[Unintelligble] Right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:02:08):

I mean, no, I mean a foreign country tosses a bunch of these things in the air to see what somebody's going to do and how well do they detect it and how well do they figure it out. Those kinds of things happen all the time and have happened since World War II when we had radars. That's kind of how you do intelligence.

Marik (01:02:29):

That's right. Well, palladium I think is the famous agency example. Alright, last I promise. This is it. Last but not least, the

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:02:36):

You've been promising for 10 minutes.

Marik (01:02:38):

I'm happy to cut it off here if you want to, but I did want to get to the, so-called tic-TAC video. Do you have two minutes to talk about that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:02:49):

Alright, two minutes.

Marik (01:02:51):

I appreciate it. Thank you. So if we do just a little, some very basic, is that full screen coming through?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:03:00):

Yep.

Marik (01:03:01):

Some basic no wizardry here, just some basic adjustments. You get something that looks something like a tic-TAC Commander. Fravor, Lieutenant Commander Dietrich both mentioned these low profile appendages or they called them possibly looking like Pitot tubes. I'm not going to belabor this, but we've done the same 3D analysis. Any aircraft that within those lines of sight, it's significantly constrained because in the TIC-TAC video, you're looking five, six degrees up and they're already at 20,000 feet. So you're very constrained in terms of range of what's plausible and reasonable for an aircraft. And any aircraft that's flying in a remotely level attitude or trajectory profile would look like. What you have on the left here, that's the line of sight from the FA18 that recorded the video clearly doesn't match what's on the right. We don't need to belabor this point, but it does rule out an aircraft unless it has, we calculated a 13 or 14 degree angle of attack, which no plane would be doing for a minute and a half or whatever, however long that was.

(01:04:14):

So interesting. Far more interesting is thanks to Mick West, he created this system or simulator where you can actually put different objects in and you can actually play around with the pixelation and the degradation of the data and you can get a pretty darn good match with damnit. That looks like a tic-tac shaped object with the appendages that the eyewitnesses recalled. Again, this is about an hour or so after Commander Fravor and then the other air crews saw this at closer range. And you get another version of this here, pretty darn good match when you put in and 3D modeling a tic-tac. And last but not least, we've gotten quite a bit of into the weeds, don't need to dive into this too much, but the bottom line is the anti-air warfare coordinator, the radar operator if you will, was very specific about the metrics of this object or these objects at a very specific altitude, about 28,000 feet tracking south at a hundred knots. You can see that. You can find that in the data. So this is back to the range issue with gimbal, right? You can find in the data what the eyewitnesses described with generally high confidence, your thoughts. I know that was quick and dirty, but we did account, I'm fortunate enough to work with a climate scientist. So we have really good high fidelity data on wind as well.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:05:44):

So I will go back to what I started with, which is you're using internet data and without the raw data, and this is what I've told Congress, we don't have raw data, we don't have radar data, we don't have any of the data that is claimed to have been taken. The navy does not have it. The Navy doesn't have a lot of data and it's not a conspiracy, it's just that it's very inefficient to keep data for longer than periods than it needs to. So there's nothing really to analyze except that data

Marik (01:06:24):

In the flare video, right?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:06:26):

Which is not raw data. It's not the raw data. It doesn't have the pixel by pixel data from the frame. It's compressed. And any compression, unless you have the compression algorithm and you can uncompress it, even if you did uncompress it, you're going to introduce more errors is subject to speculation. That's one.

Marik (01:06:52):

Okay.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:06:53):

And it has a lot of, any compressed data will give you artifacts and some of those artifacts look like some of these things. I can't say that those are artifacts. I can't say they're not, unless you have the raw data, you're never going to get to that truth. The second thing is, I will go back to you've got pilots, you have humans who are recalling from 20 years ago what they have a high confidence of. I can't accept that in a scientific rigorous analysis. It's just not possible. Unless you have something that measures that range, unless you have the radar data, then you know, you're at at best, medium confidence. And even then you don't have a lot to go off of. So you can overanalyze these videos until we're all dead, but we're never going to get an answer. And that is what I have told Congress.

(01:08:09):

If you don't have the raw data, if you don't have the original data, you're not going to get an answer. It is too far back in history. There is nothing much to go on there. I will go back to the declassified program I just told you about. What makes you think we're the only ones doing that. And the second thing is you do recall that this is a test range where people go and test things. And if I'm an adversary, I'm going to want to know what you're testing. What are you doing? So this could be simple as it was somebody else trying to spy on us or trying to measure what we are responses were. But I can't say that there is any evidence to support what people remember the maneuverability or the speeds or the altitudes to be because there are other solutions to that eigen value problem. So we can debate this all day, but you're never going to get to the answer because we don't have the data.

Marik (01:09:27):

I would just submit that the FLIR data and the azimuth and elevation angles are indeed data that we can,

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:09:34):

That is something, that is something,

Marik (01:09:36):

Absolutely. It's incredibly valuable because we can say that gimbal is not a balloon. Right? We can say it's not in the lines of sight, it's just impossible for it to be moving against the wind or with the wind or what have you.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:09:50):

I don't know that we can say that, but we'll say that you have a piece of data with [unintelligible] data. That's what AARO has been working with NGA and the other image scientists across the community to unravel and especially when we have the raw data and the meta file, the metadata that goes with it.

Marik (01:10:12):

Right. All that I'll say, and I'll leave it at this, I promise, and I really want to thank you again for your time. You've been incredibly generous, is that given the limited data that we do have, the fact that we can find what aviators and radar operators have said in the data and those are highly anomalous observations, is I think non-trivial and we don't need to belabor that point. But thank you, Dr. Kirkpatrick, for your time. I truly appreciate it and let's stay in touch.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:10:41):

Alright, have a good night.

Marik (01:10:43):

Thank you. You as well.