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2024-10-31 - Event Horizon Show "What a Pentagon Scientist Found Out About UFOs with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick"

Disclaimer: This is a machine generated transcript and does include errors. Please check the original if necessary. 

John Michael Godier (00:02:35):

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, welcome to the program.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:02:38):

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

John Michael Godier (00:02:40):

Now, Dr. The Fermi Paradox, and this gets into physics in general. The Fermi Paradox comes from Enrico Fermi back in the day, the 1950s, thinking about alien life over lunch and saying, well, where are they? We should be seeing them if they were common. What is your view to sort of set the stage here? What is your view of alien life in the universe as a physicist? Do you think it's probably out there or are you in the camp that No, this is rare and that we shouldn't see it?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:03:10):

Okay, so the Firmi paradox is fascinating and it's simplistic approach to the university. It's a very apt question. It's spawned lots of research. It spawned lots of massive programs. It spawned lots of study programs. It's spawned lots of conjecture and a lot of scientific research. And coming out of that, as you all know, was the famous D Drake equation, which calculates at least at first order the probability of intelligent life in the universe. And statistically, most of the scientific community would agree that well, one, it is statistically improbable that there's not life in the universe outside of Earth. And that across all time that the universe has existed, it is statistically impractical to believe that there hasn't been other intelligent life out in the universe. But that conversation and that exploration of that question is scientifically grounded in a lot of the observations that NASA undertakes to probe the different types of planetary systems throughout the universe as far as we can see today and how that factors into the calculations for the drape equation.

(00:04:37):

And just within our galaxy alone, the last couple of papers I looked at on this was estimating based on current web telescope measurements, somewhere between 30 and 300 planets that can sustain life and may have some form of intelligence in it that's across one galaxy. So as a scientist, it's just mathematically impractical to believe that there's not other intelligent life throughout the vastness of the universe. Where it becomes interesting is carrying that conversation closer to this solar system and closer to earth because those same statistics apply and that the probability of there being an intelligent life form out in the universe that has found this particular solar system and this particular planet is just as rare as us finding them. So I can't see or fathom how that rationally translates to the underlying stories that pervade public perception today.

John Michael Godier (00:05:59):

Well, there is a plausible way, at least now space is vast and crossing space is costly. You're going to need a lot of energy and a lot of time, and we're constricted by things like relativity and the speed of light and things like that that really put a damper on the notion of traveling between star systems. But you can do it as long as you don't care about time and you've got the energy and you don't care about having any connection to where you left your time because everybody's going to be dead by the time you get back unless they live for ridiculously long periods of time. But one plausible way, and I've talked to other physicists about this, is the idea of a Von Neumann probe where you have a machine, essentially self-replicating machine that can populate a galaxy inside of a few million years at sub light speeds, at comfortable speeds, and a machine doesn't really care about the passage of time. So that is the one way that this could happen, where you could have an alien presence in most star systems. And let's face it, 3D printers exist and something could be printing out UAP or atmospheric probes to look at the most interesting planet in this star system, presuming this one is the most interesting one. So there is a plausible way. Did you account for that in AARO, did you think? Well, maybe.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:07:20):

So when we set up AARO, one of the key tenets of setting up AARO and all the processes that I put in place to do so was to follow the data. It was to be open to all hypotheses of what could be possible and then look at where the data led you. And none of the data supported that theory. So we did have a range of hypotheses. I had on one end of the spectrum you have the alien hypothesis, whether it's probe or otherwise. On the other end of the spectrum, you have adversary technology leap ahead technology that they are intentionally trying to hide from us. And then in the middle you have really all of the mundane known objects that just manifest themselves in weird ways because we haven't calibrated our sensors against those. And so what was established was a very rigorous scientific method for how do you test that range of hypotheses against all of the reported observations is that one, you had to start with all of those military sensors, all of those ground-based or air based sensors or even space-based sensors need to be calibrated against known objects.

(00:08:48):

Most of the reporting comes from military or intel, mostly military platforms and pilots. And what everyone needs to understand is those platforms are purpose built. They are designed for one thing, and that is to identify large metallic types of objects coming at them and put a weapon on it. So if it's a missile or an aircraft or a ground system or whatever it might be to identify those large fast moving objects and put a weapon on it, they are not designed to identify, for example, weather balloons or small drones or other types of objects that have been used for a variety of different purposes. And one of the things that one has to do when approaching the scientific method out in the world is start with calibrating all of your sensors and make sure you understand what those sensors would see. And so that was one piece set up the calibration program to identify those known objects.

(00:10:03):

What do they look like in, for example, in F 35, what do they look like in an F 22? What do they look like in a ground radar and catalog all that, understand what those characteristics are. Then you take the reported observations and any data that has been collected with that and compare to the known objects. That's sort of step one. The next two steps involve two different communities. So if you look at that range of hypotheses, again, if I go to the end of the spectrum, that could be adversary, advanced technology that is the purview of the intelligence community. And so I had chartered the intelligence community to go and look for what were some of the research programs that our adversaries were working on and what would happen if they had a breakthrough and that what we thought they were working towards in a decade they were able to achieve today, and what would that look like and what were those signatures?

(00:11:07):

So then you'd have a body of knowledge that involved validated, here are the signatures and capabilities that the intelligence community assesses and adversary would manifest with. You have the measured signatures of all the known objects, and then your last bit is, okay, well what would alien tech look like and how would it potentially manifest itself? And so that was part of the challenge to the scientific community through NASA of, all right, well, we know theoretically how interstellar travel works. While we may not have been able to achieve it from an engineering perspective, we know what the basic underlying physics are. We've seen lots of papers out in literature about it. What does that look like? What kind of signatures would that manifest as? And then keep all of that as your measurements stick, right? And so when you get different reports and you get different data that we then had directed to the military and the IC new reporting requirements to maintain and transmit all of that data, you can then have something to compare to. And as you go through that exercise time and time again, it turns out to be in the middle. It turns out to be mostly the known things that you've characterized and compared to. Was

John Michael Godier (00:12:37):

That frustrating though, when dealing with that with instrumentation? That is not ideal for studying something other than a Chinese fighter jet. Was that frustrating in trying to resolve cases in AARO? In other words, did you wish you had more data?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:12:51):

Oh, absolutely. Always wish we had more data. And so part of what I had done was also design purpose-built monitoring sensors or areas that had high levels of reporting so that we could go out and do persistent surveillance and monitor on a continuing basis what was passing through the airspace and what characterize it as best we can to augment the sensors that were not designed to do that. So what I think a lot of folks failed to understand is that a US aircraft, an F 35 or an F 22 or an F four or 14 or whatever it is that's flying around and collecting is not a scientific platform. It is not meant to collect and characterize unknown things. It is only meant to do one thing. And that is typed a set of known objects, foreign adversary, aircraft, missiles, what have you, and put a weapon on it, not characterize an unknown object.

(00:13:57):

And so when it sees an unknown object, these advanced aircraft and these advanced platforms, the algorithms try to make sense of it. And when they try to make sense of it, they make mistakes. The algorithms make mistakes. I mean, it's just like if you take a ai, you take a chat GPT, and you give it bad data to train on, it's going to give you really weird answers when you talk to it. It's the same concept. It's just in a machine characterization language. And so yes, it has been very frustrating because people then pull on the, well, somebody saw X and the radar said this, and so therefore it must be an alien. I'm like, well, no, it doesn't, right? Because radars make mistakes when the algorithms don't understand what they're looking at. And a great example of that is how a radar operates. So a radar sends a series of pulses out to a target and it looks for the reflections back.

(00:15:00):

And from that, it classifies and characterizes speed and range. If that object is semi, semi-transparent, like a translucent weather balloon that only has a few thick wires through it, those reflections are, they're not well-defined, sporadic, and they tend to give a false range. They give a false speed because the algorithm is trying to fill in the gaps of the missing data. And we've shown this time and again in the lab and in the field where we did live characterization events and tried to get that into our quiver of how do we compare unknown objects to the sensors? Folks don't understand that and they don't know that that's how these things operate, and they pull on this as it must be factual. So yes, that's a long way of saying it's very frustrating.

John Michael Godier (00:16:02):

Now, biases and in science, you always want to try to remove biases and or at least recognize them and your assumptions as well. But in this case, AARO wasn't making the assumption. You didn't go into this saying, well, it's not aliens. You went into it going with an open mind. Now, do you think that's a problem with NASA and techno signature searches? In other words, and you've said it to paraphrase you, the orbit of Mars then views change the closer you get. So a techno signature out at Jupiter would be seen as one thing, or umo, you co-authored a paper on that. That's one thing. But the closer you get to earth, the views begin to change and the profile changes. Now, I have a caveat here. The thing is I can't tell you the difference between if on Neumann probe in the orbit of Jupiter versus one in the atmosphere, it's the same thing functionally. So how do you rectify that? What's your view on that? Where does that bias come in and what does it mean?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:17:03):

Yeah, so let me give you my actual characterization of the scientific discussion, and at some point I think I want to turn it into a political cartoon of some sort of sort of cartoon. So if I have this conversation about the search for extraterrestrial life, whether that's intelligent or a bacterium, and I'm doing it in the context of the scientific community and NASA's mission to find it. And as long as we're talking about it out in the universe across the Milky Way or even into the vastness of the universe with all the other galaxies that are there, then it's a very scientific objective, data driven, evidentiary driven discussion and analysis. As I move that conversation closer to earth, somewhere around my conjecture is somewhere around Mars ish, it becomes more science fiction. You're, there's an element of science fiction that creeps into the discussion. Any number of movies about this have happened.

(00:18:19):

And then as I get that conversation closer to earth, somewhere as I cross the ionosphere, it crosses into conspiracy theory. And clearly the government's lying and we've been hiding alien tech that has crash landed, I don't know, 12 times in the United States, and we're hiding all that. So these are the kinds of things that make it very difficult to have a rational discussion about the evidence and about the data because of that transition from scientific to conspiracy. Now that being said, how do you fix that? I think to your point, how do you get to this? How do you actually have this conversation? How do you distinguish between a techno signature of a probe at Jupiter versus Earth? And the answer is it comes back to the scientific community. And this was something I challenged them with very early on, and I was enlisting the help of NASA to help push that is okay, it's a valid hypothesis.

(00:19:31):

It could be a hypothesis. What is the data that supports that and what would those signatures look like? What kind of propulsion would be evident? What kind of signatures would that propulsion give? What kind of refueling and energy harvesting would need to be done? Why would one put a probe here? And we can talk about that a little bit in the context of NASA sending probes out. Why would we do that? What would we be looking for? And put some peer reviewed scientific papers into the domain that point to if there was a probe in Earth's atmosphere, how would it get here? What are the three most probable ways it would get here? What are the three most probable ways it would maneuver around the earth? What are the three most probable ways it would harvest energy? And take all of that and figure out what the resulting signatures and indicators would be, and then marry that to the data that we have.

(00:20:38):

And what you'll find is none of that matches. And so what you're left with is, okay, well then that hypothesis, while it's still a valid hypothesis, has no data to support it as being the answer to what you're seeing. So people when the answer, when the data doesn't support that hypothesis and the scientific community, that means that hypothesis is not correct and that you have to change your hypothesis. It doesn't mean your data. You have to change your data in this particular topic area for reasons that are fascinating from a psychological perspective, the human condition wants it to be an answer that data does not support. So scientifically, to answer your question, if I wanted to distinguish a probe in Jupiter or Earth, you still have the same signatures. Now it's a matter of do any of the signatures you've measured either in Earth or around Jupiter, match your hypothesis. Does that make sense? It

John Michael Godier (00:21:47):

Does, it does. Now I have to ask the point blank question that I'm sure you get a lot. Just to clarify, did you find any evidence or see any evidence of a non-human intelligence present here? And I use that word very specifically because there's ideas floating around the Solarian hypothesis where it isn't aliens but it's still weird and things like that. Did you or did you not see any evidence or even something slightly that made you go

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:22:15):

No, there was nothing in the over, I think by the time I retired, I think we were well over 1300 cases or something like that. And none of them had anything that would give an indication of a non-human intelligence. Now, did we see things that were weird within some of the sensors that did produce data? Yes. Were any of those alien signatures? No. Could they have been adversary signatures? Could they have been commercial signatures? Sure, they could have been a number of other explanations that we uncovered. And I think that's the important part, right? Is alright, let's say I have something that's unusual. If I can come up with three different explanations, one of them being okay, it's an alien and we don't know anything about it. The second one being, okay, well maybe it's this commercial product that this company is advancing and the US government's not really paying attention to and it just happens to be there and we see it.

(00:23:20):

Or the third one being it's an adversary that's doing something that we didn't expect them to do, but there's evidence that they're doing that. Which one are you going to believe is more likely? Is it the alien or is it the adversary or is it the commercial? And you don't know right offhand, but logic would suggest that one of the more common and simple answers, I don't know, it's a commercial thing that's just out there and we can go find what it is and here's what it's, and it could have been this likely could have been that versus that is Occam's razor, right? So that would suggest the more simple explanation is likely versus an alien. But then from a national security perspective, we have to investigate, and this is where the real rub is, and this is really what AARO is kind of focused on is let's make sure that the adversary is not doing something.

(00:24:25):

We need to make sure that the adversaries aren't jumping ahead in a technological advancement and say, I don't know, propulsion or signature management that we weren't tracking or else we were tracking, but they had a breakthrough that we didn't anticipate. Now something that was looked at as an evolutionary technology has suddenly become revolutionary because they had a leap ahead and they're employing it against us. Well, that would be bad from a national security perspective that's bad. That's called, it could be a technological surprise and we don't want that, right? So you've got to look at all aspects of this and it becomes frustrating and even to the point of maddening of where some people come out on, well, it can't be that it must be aliens. And there's no logical reason why one can make that leap, none at all other than belief. And that's just frustrating.

John Michael Godier (00:25:36):

Now, methodology to get a little bit deeper into that with AARO visual artifacts and compression in videos, not to frustrate you further and remind you of frustrating things, but how big of a problem was that when you're looking at something that just isn't there? It's an instrument error

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:25:53):

That a lot and a lot of folks don't understand. If you've not dealt with imagery or imagery intelligence for a large part of your career, you can't understand the types of weird artifacts that show up in advanced sensors that you just would think is something else. And there's an example that we put on AARO's website. It's one in which there's an apparent UAP that's leaving some sort of wake in the video. As you watch the video, it looks like an atmospheric wake behind it. And at first when you look at this, your gut reaction is, wow, that is really weird. That is so cool. That looks like what you might see in some sort of advanced propulsion system. And that must be evidence of an advanced propulsion system that we don't understand. Well, when you peel that onion back, and by that what I mean is you have to go frame by frame and pixel by pixel with the raw data, not the compressed data.

(00:27:12):

And what you'll find is that that wake that you see in this video is it's a shadow image of the object from the frame before. And that's an artifact of the signal processing that occurs frame by frame in the sensor. And so what you have to do in order to accurately analyze some of this data is A, you have to understand what sensor it came from, and B, you have to understand what kind of signal processing and algorithms are done on the platform. And the only way you can do that is you have to go to that particular program office that builds and integrates those sensors on our military platforms and you get a surrogate sensor or you get the software or you get the underlying models that are used to validate the sensor performance and you recreate what it saw and you validate, okay, well this is actually not a wake, a real wake in the atmosphere.

(00:28:25):

This is an artifact of the signal processing. And you can find these kinds of examples in a variety of sensors that actually show like we had one in comparison for that particular example of a predator looking at a ground a scene and there were people walking across the scene and the people were leaving shadow behind them that looked like a wake that was the cutout of the person. And so you see the same artifact in other imagery examples and you really have to understand that how those work and how that operates in order to draw a conclusion. And in that particular case, I believe that was turned out to be another aircraft and it was out of focus. And so it looks like a oblong cigar and it's leaving awake because it's the signal processing of the saturated areas of the scene. So it's a very complex analysis that has to be undertaken for every single one of these reports.

(00:29:39):

And people get frustrated out in the world because they're like, well, why can't you do this faster? Because that's why you have to pull apart every frame. You got to pull out the sensor, you got to pull apart the pixels, and you can't do that level of analysis with a compressed video off the internet because you lose all of that information. Compression to put it onto the internet, gets rid of all of the valuable information at the pixel level of the metadata of the information about the sensor, which you need an actual to do the analysis. So if you were to look at a compressed image of the same sort of weird artifact without having any of that other information to do that analysis, your first response would be, Hey, that's really weird. That looks like evidence of some sort of atmospheric effect when in fact it's not.

John Michael Godier (00:30:41):

Yeah, I mean technology comes with its problems and with our ever improving technology, it actually sometimes seems to get worse and new problems crop up. Now, one of the most famous cases regarding the military and UAP of recent years, 20 years is the 2004 Nimitz case. And I know that you've said there was sort of a lack of data this distant from that 20 years again, but did you see anything, and I want to ask this a little bit differently than probably most people would ask you, did you see anything that indicated that it was our technology and the pilots simply didn't know about something that we had?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:31:26):

Obviously I get asked about that case a lot. I got asked about that case a lot in Congress. There are a number of challenges, and I'll get to the answer to your question. There's a number of challenges with that case. One is it's 20 years ago and 20 years ago there was no requirement to save all of the data. There was no requirement to process that data. There was no requirement to even report the incident. All of that we changed when we stood up AARO. And it's important to note that it took however many years that was 16 years, 17, 18 years when we stood up AARO from the Nimitz event that that's when we changed all of those policies and made it a requirement that you will report and here's what you'll report and you'll maintain all of that data and you'll transmit it to AARO and to the service for analysis.

(00:32:24):

So there was no requirement to keep all of that. So when people question, well, why is there no data? Well, it's not a big conspiracy, it's a logistics issue. These platforms don't save the data. They have a single recording device that is overwritten every mission. So there's no data off of those platforms. Now there's allegations that, hey, there was a Aegis around and it collected data, and why don't we have that data? Well, it's a similar argument. There's no requirement for that. We don't have the Aegis data for every mission that was ever flown, including every training exercise, which this was, and your training in a range that is a test range. So now let's walk into answering your question. I spent a good amount of time talking with one of the pilots to get some descriptions of what exactly was being seen and how was it being seen so that we could get a little bit better understanding of some of the signatures associated with it.

(00:33:38):

For example, was this something that may have come out of the water versus going into the water and if it came out of the water and what does it look like? What did it look like as you were flying? What speeds, what angles and so forth. It's interesting to note that there are several programs, both US and Foreign that could explain that, especially if you're in an experimental test range where one side of the range doesn't know what the other side of the range is doing. If you're thinking it's a US technology and if it's an adversary, well they want to know what we're doing in our test range. There are some ways to do that. So let me give you an example. There was a declassified CIA program back in that timeframe where they would launch their balloons with retro reflectors inside of them from the water to monitor what responses would be from ground radars and aircraft responses, what would they see and how would they respond? Why would we think we're the only ones that thought of that, right? So I'm not saying that I have data to support that that is exactly what it was, but that is certainly a more logical explanation than it was aliens. And the problem is I can come up with a couple of hypotheses for what that was, but we don't have any data to analyze. So you're never going to answer that question, right? We're just not going to be able to answer what that was because there is no data.

John Michael Godier (00:35:29):

I'm glad that I don't work for the US government because that just got me thinking when I was growing up. My dad was a field test engineer and worked at the Nevada test site, which is enormous. And I can just imagine how many different tests are going on and the person that knows about all of the tests happening at the same time and has all the details, which probably is a very few people do. Imagine coordinating that to make sure your F1 17 doesn't hit a weather balloon or something like that. It's got to be maddening, wouldn't you think?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:35:59):

Exactly. That kind of deconfliction is what test range managers are supposed to be doing. And no, if a test squadron on one end of the range happens to see a classified program on another end of the range, mitigation of that can range from ignoring it and pretending it never happened to bringing the people in and making them sign inadvertent disclosure agreements, which is essentially an NDA that says, Hey, you saw a classified program you weren't supposed to see and you're not briefed to and you're not allowed to talk about it. That is a standard practice of inadvertent disclosures across the classified community, whether it's DOD or IC or anybody. But again, there's no hard evidence one way or the other. So we could come up with all kinds of these scenarios and explanations and hypotheses, but unless I have data, there's not a lot to be done about that.

John Michael Godier (00:37:07):

Yeah, no data then might as well be confetti, unfortunately, and I think everybody wishes there were more data, but again, I have to hammer home the point that you're dealing with sensors or we're dealing with sensors that weren't designed to look for UAP, they were designed to look for Russian and Chinese aircraft.

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:37:24):

That's right.

John Michael Godier (00:37:25):

However, we do have some interesting wild cards and that is the NRO. Now, there was a Freedom of Information Act released that they had seen something that looked like a tic-tac from orbit. And I was wondering, did you look into that? Are you aware of it? And were you able to do anything with that satellite data?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:37:42):

Yeah, so there were a couple of those reports and we actually worked with them very closely to do some research into historical imagery and forward imagery and even tasking, trying to get tasking in real time to when an event may have been seen. And all of those turned out to be weather balloons, radio songs, and in one instance it was another sensor anomaly on basically cosmic ray in the sensor. So without getting into details about NROs business, because that's obviously all very classified, yes, we did look into a number of these things. None of them turned out to be tic-Tacs in the popular sense, they turned out to be aerostats or weather balloons or radio songs.

John Michael Godier (00:38:45):

I guess that's probably going to be pretty crazy too, is because anybody can launch a balloon, right? Anybody and of, well, obviously drones, but there's limits on that. But the balloons, I don't think there are much limits and any private individual or group say you like to study clouds or whatever, that's your hobby can launch a balloon. So there's stuff all over, but does that worry you? And then I got another question related to this, but does that worry you about aviation safety that these balloons are going unchecked?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:39:14):

Oh yeah. So that was one of the primary drivers for why the department agreed to stand up AARO was safety of flight, safety of flight issues, not just for the military but for FAA and NASA and everybody else associated with it. So there's a couple of key things to understand that we learned as we were standing all this up. There is an international community of balloon professional balloons, civil scientific balloon organizations, and they have agreed amongst themselves, and I think there's some sort of agreement that underlies this to put essentially beacons on their balloons and they launched them and you can track them in real time. In fact, we put the website links on AARO's website. If you go there and you look under the resources, you can go and look up, here's all the balloons that are registered with this community, here are the beacons, here's where they are today, here's what country owns them.

(00:40:26):

And then there's a hobbyist community that has done the same thing. So there's another website that you can track hobbyist balloons and you can watch them and see where they are. So on one sense, you have a database of overt legitimate balloon payloads and operators around the world in real time. So you should be able to deconflict with those. It's the ones that don't have those beacons or are flying in the airspace they're not supposed to be that you got to worry about. And so part of what we established were rules for how to deconflict that and get that out with the operators and all of the airspace to go, Hey, if you see something, first thing you need to do is deconflict with these two websites and let's make sure that those are not what you're seeing. And then there's a third place, and that's Noah.

(00:41:31):

Noah and NASA have a database as well. It's not quite as user-friendly as the two websites, but it is complete and tracks everything that is registered with a beacon on it. So you can think of these beacons much like aircraft a IS systems and they beacon out, here's who I am and here's what I am and here's where I'm going. And you can follow them around. But it does still worry everyone. And it worries me that these balloons don't, while they're beaconed and they're tracked and they're there, there's not a lot of coordination between that community and say the test ranges of military on or even the FAA on knowing what to do with that. Because many of them are at the, of course, the mercy of the winds and the climate. Some of them have the ability to maneuver limited, though it may be, but they can.

(00:42:38):

So how do you integrate that airspace in a safe manner and alert the pilots and the operators that what you're seeing is this balloon from a group in Japan or Norway or us and you need to avoid it, but there's a lot of them out there. I mean there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these balloons that are launched daily and are tracked all over the world. It's just phenomenal to me that we've got that kind of air domain congestion problem that is increasing and we haven't quite figured out how to deconflict. And instead, people come upon these things and don't know what they are because they're flying really fast by them. Causes challenges. It causes problems. If you run into one of those things, especially one that's got a payload hanging off of the bottom that's going to rip a wing off. If you're flying it M1 in a jet and you happen to run into a balloon with a payload hanging off the end, that's probably not a good day for that pilot.

John Michael Godier (00:44:04):

No, that is scary. I've thought about that, that at high speed, you're in an F 22 or something like that hitting one of these balloons and like you say, a payload not good. It seems like an accident waiting to happen. Now, all domain, anomaly, resolution, office AARO, all domain, what are the submarines seeing? Because I know that the hydrophone network has picked up some strange sounds that took 20, 30 years to come up with a hypothesis as to what they were, which is usually ice moving in Antarctica, things like that. What are they seeing and is that a lot harder to deal with than things in the air?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:44:44):

Oh, absolutely. So the maritime domain, integrating the maritime and the space domain was something I had started last I guess the summer a year ago. Space was actually, I think an easier step than the maritime domain because in the maritime domain under sea is noisy. And not only is it noisy, but everything is anomalous because there are so many unknown noises that crop up that people have to try to sort out. I had one report that turned out to be some guy scraping barnacles off of his boat with a new type of scraper, two bays away from where the sound was picked up. But it took six months to figure that out. I mean, these are not trivial events and they haven't in the maritime domain, at least by the time I retired, we hadn't come up with a good way of distinguishing. Alright, when you hear something, what are the characteristics that would cause you to claim that is an anomalous technological thing that we need to go investigate versus it's a underwater volcano or it's a whale or it's a school fish or whatever the things are that while we may know what those sound like, again, I go back to the way the architectures are set up, A lot of this is automatic and you record some noise and the algorithms don't know what it is.

(00:46:27):

And so they put it off to the side for somebody to listen to and then analyze, well, okay, how many of those do we get? And there's a lot of unknown there.

(00:46:41):

So we didn't have a lot of, to answer your question more directly, we did not have a lot of undersea reporting because of that very fact because everything is anomalous and nobody knows, well, what qualifies as something we would report that's just not there yet. Now in space, it's a little easier. We have a good track of everything that's in space and we have a catalog that monitors this and we have objects that show up called that are designated ucts, right? So there are uncorrelated tracks. That's what that stands for. And basically it's an object that shows up. Could be a micrometer, right? It could be a screw that off of somebody's satellite, it could be anything. And it gets us a couple of returns off of one of the radars and now we've got a track and well, what is it? And now you've got to figure out what that is.

(00:47:42):

Well, I hate to tell you this, but space congestion is a really, really bad problem. And we have, when we turned on space fence, I want to say, if I remember correctly, we had the number of ucts went to 40,000 ish and it was a daily deluge of thousands of objects that nobody knows really what they are. But the good news is they all obey keplerian physics. So if it's not obeying keplerian physics, well that would be anomalous and that would be easy to pick out and report and know there were none of those. But trying to work through the, okay, well what's going to be the reporting process and how do we build that into the sensors and the algorithms so that you can pull those kinds of things out. That takes time. But there was a good path forward on how to do that. So I think that one is more achievable than the undersea one at this point.

John Michael Godier (00:48:49):

But the thing is that that problem is going to get worse space with the amount of launching. I mean, just look at starlink speaking of something that could be mistaken for A UAP. It's just astounding. Thousands, tens of thousands of satellites and constellations, all full of parts that can get

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:49:07):

John Michael Godier (00:50:15):

Now you had a slide, and I believe you showed it at your NASA presentation. You had a slide about UAP reporting trends and it had some interesting stuff hidden in there. One was radio emissions section that said one to three gigahertz and then eight to 12 gigahertz. How did you arrive at those radio frequencies as being associated with UAP?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:50:38):

So let me be clear about what that section of that chart said. If you look at the top of that, it should say reported UAP or something to that effect. That set of characteristics that we put in there was taken from all of the various reports at that time. We've had reports about their spherical, we've had reports about there being possible radio frequencies that might be correlated with it. And those were the radio frequencies that were reported. We never measured those radio frequencies, but there were some, I want to say it was one or two reports that said that those were potentially correlated with the observation of A UAP. Now what's important is it just so happens that one to three gigahertz is also wifi, and the eight to 10 is a near one of the X xan radars. So there are other potential explanations for what those radio frequencies were, but that was what was reported and we were trying to capture in that chart, here's kind of everything we're looking for. And how we're trying to go about doing that is, well, yeah, alright, we're going to put some sensors out to measure those frequencies and we're going to look at can I correlate that with any observations of uap? And we did not. We found none of that.

John Michael Godier (00:52:13):

Now the other part of it that I found interesting was stationary to mock two. Did you ever see anything anomalous that was going mach two because a balloon is not going to do that? Or was that just under that same categorization that you're like, well, this is what we should look for these speeds, but why not faster?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:52:30):

No, that's what was, again, that was what was reported. The high end of that range came from a report from a radar that seemed to indicate that an object was going from roughly, I want to say it was around 0.4, mock up to not quite two, but one and a half mock or something like that. And then dropping back down. And what we think that actually turned out to be was this phenomenon with the radar where the pulses were not all returned, and the onboard algorithm, which was trying to calculate range and speed, was filling in the gaps with the missing data. And that essentially made it calculate this very rapid acceleration. So we think that particular case was essentially a radar of artifact, but again, all of those parameters are things that had been reported. And so we wanted to capture all of that as a holistic, here is the entirety of what's been reported and we're going to be investigating each of those and we're going to see if we can measure anything in a more controlled fashion with better fidelity that would substantiate any of those characteristics that were reported.

John Michael Godier (00:54:04):

Other countries, now we're not the only country in the world and other countries have looked into UAP. In fact, France has looked into it for decades through their Guy Pen program and they've correlated all kinds of stuff. And there was even a semi-official report that concluded that aliens were the best option. Was there any international coordination between aero and other countries regarding what they see with UAP and in particular France? Because a lot of people associate UAP with nuclear energy, and France is the only other country that operates a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. Did you ever call the French and ask them, what do you guys see?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:54:45):

Yeah, we had coordinated with a number of countries and we were trying to get a level set of what does each country actually see? What do they have data to support and what kind of framework are they putting in place, if any, to do the same sort of measurement and analysis that we were? And most all of them, in fact, all of them came back with, we don't actually have any substantiating data, however, like your framework, and we would like to leverage your framework on how we're going to go about collecting and analyzing this, and we'd like to share data and see if we can try to get to the bottom of some of these things. Now they put into place, to my knowledge, many of the same reporting requirements and data requirements, but they haven't gotten anything and they certainly hadn't provided anything to us by the time I retired.

John Michael Godier (00:55:45):

Now moving further instrumentation on mounted on military assets. Now, you've touched on this a little bit, but let's go into it deeper. The idea of classification, and you've said this many times, is not because of what you're seeing. A bird isn't classified, the instrument is, and you can't tell other nation states your capabilities and you want to keep that as secret as possible. But can you go out and take, I don't know, off the shelf stuff, sort of like what the Galileo project is doing and create an experiment to watch and then mount it on an aircraft carrier in a way that doesn't show anything sensitive and do a dataset like that will AARO try to proactively collect data on UAP from military assets?

Sean Kirkpatrick (00:56:29):

So that was the plan. I'd have to refer you back to them to see how far they've gotten down on that roadmap. But let's talk about the classification of data for a minute because that's an important aspect that keeps coming up. So there are two ways data gets classified, right? I can have a classified sensor that has state-of-the-art technology. I don't want my adversary to know what my sensor can do. If the adversary knows what my sensor can do, then they can defeat it or they can spoof it or they can jam it or they can do whatever. But if I have a great sensor and it's on a platform and it takes a picture of a Coke can, that picture is classified because if I release that picture as it is, then somebody can take that picture and reverse engineer the picture and figure out what the sensor can do, and then you've given away a susceptibility of the sensor.

(00:57:37):

That doesn't mean that the Coke can is classified, it just means that the image is because of that. So to declassify, that takes time because the owner of the sensor and the platform has to do a couple of things. One, they have to scrub the data down to remove anything that could be exploited by an adversary, and that can mean everything from reducing resolution to scrubbing all the metadata and all the things off of that. And then they have to evaluate it based on where it was taken, because if it was taken during a sensitive operation, you don't want to give away details about the operation. And so the owner operator has to sign off on that. All of that takes time, and the time that it takes is directly proportional to the priority of said thing. So for example, there was the incident last year, I think it was last year sometime, where the Russians flew at the Predator and we had the video and we got the video declassified within, I want to say it was like 36 hours and sent out.

(00:58:59):

Well, that's because there was a high priority with international relations with Russia, and the White House was very interested in making sure we got that out. So under that kind of pressure, that declassification is going to happen very quickly. Now, there's a whole other way that a set of data can become classified, and this gets to commercial technology or scientific technology that the sensor isn't classified. But if I take a camera and I go out and I take the picture of the backend of the new B 21 1 that's classified because we're hiding certain characteristics of the platform even though the sensor wasn't. So you have to balance and you have to understand what is being collected. So one of the issues is not imagery, but actual signals. So what signals are being collected off of, say, military comm systems or radar systems or platforms that you don't want others to know about? Because then that gives them access to command and control and how the sensor RF might operate. And that's just as vulnerable as the imagery aspect of it. So there's a wide range of things that affect classification, but the collection of a UAP is not classified unless it comes from a classified sensor that we have to then have declassified unless it's being taken in front of a new stealthy platform that we don't want anybody to know about. So those are the kinds of things that affect classification and how fast you can get it declassified.

John Michael Godier (01:01:10):

Now, what of agencies within the Pentagon that have a different classification system, lesser perhaps or classified for completely different reasons. And I would implicate the Coast Guard here because they do similar things to the Navy. The Navy sees UAP. What does the Coast Guard see and is that less classified?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:01:31):

So if the Coast Guard saw anything, unless they're using a special sensor to collect it, it shouldn't be classified. But the Coast Guard didn't give us any reports of anything.

John Michael Godier (01:01:43):

So nothing from the Coast Guard. That's interesting.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:01:46):

Nope.

John Michael Godier (01:01:46):

For comparison reasons with the Navy, but different instruments, they're working with a completely different set of Coast Guard.

Speaker 4 (01:01:54):

Completely different.

John Michael Godier (01:01:55):

Yeah, A Coast Guard cutter is going to have a lot of different equipment related to law enforcement more than military.

Speaker 4 (01:02:01):

That's right.

John Michael Godier (01:02:02):

At least in peacetime anyway. Now, as the director of AARO now, former director, had you found something in the halls of government, let's say a frozen alien body sitting at an Air Force base or something like that, area 51 or whatever, how would have handled that? And would you have disclosed it? I mean, what would you do if you had found something and then a future director of aero? What if they find something hidden and they're like, how do I release this? Or do I,

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:02:32):

So nothing would've made me happier than to be able to actually find aliens, but I didn't. So I've actually had this conversation with multiple folks in leadership, both my previous boss, the deputy secretary, and the undersecretary INS. And the question was just that, right? If we find something or we measure something or we collect on something, what classification is it? What should it be? Is it even classified? And the answer that I think we all settled on was the discovery of Extraterrestrial life is not a Department of Defense or IC mission mission. It is NASA's mission. And so if we had found anything to that sort, it would have been turned over to NASA for disclosure and announcement and analysis,

John Michael Godier (01:03:27):

Yes. But what if it was technologically advantageous? So you get a piece of a UFO, that's very, very high technology that we could back engineer and use. I don't know that you would hand that over to nasa. So how would you classify that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:03:40):

Anybody? I don't know that anyone would actually to, so they might keep the technology to try and understand how to use it, but the existence thereof would still be turned over to nasa.

John Michael Godier (01:03:59):

So openness. Were you happy with the openness that you got within investigating branches of the government? Asking around, did you run into anything where you're like, well, this person's being evasive or anything like that? And the thing is, is that you can't read a person into every program, every SAP or everything, because that's dangerous. You don't want somebody knowing too much. So were you happy with the openness or did you ever hit any brick walls? Now people sometimes speak about that, that hitting brick walls and government, like the Department of Energy perhaps. Did you run into any of that?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:04:35):

No. In fact, everybody across multiple departments, Homeland Security, D-O-E-D-O-D-I-C, everybody, nasa, everybody was fully open and transparent because they wanted to put data to this problem. They wanted to address this problem because frankly, they wanted to stop having to answer the questions. They wanted to move on with the missions that were really important to them, like a couple of world wars and some conflicts and maybe going back to the moon and of that nature. So I never ran into any hesitation. I was given access across the board on everything that we needed, everything that we came across, if I came across something that I didn't already have access to, I would get access to it. And then we analyzed and assessed everything. And it's fascinating to me how folks try to hide behind that. And I don't know how many ways I can say this. Clearly, every program that people named as being potentially part of this conspiracy, we had full access to hold the programs out of the archives in many instances, got exactly what they were. And when I wrote up the final assessment, there was a very classified version that had all of those programs that were identified in there and what they actually were and what the conspiracy theorists were claiming they were. And that is with the congressional leadership and with the department leadership and with the IC leadership.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):

Yeah,

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:06:29):

And so going into the future that will continue, the next director will finish that analysis with the next set of data that had come in As I was retiring, we had reviewed all of those programs. Same thing, nothing extraterrestrial there, but fascinating nonetheless.

John Michael Godier (01:06:53):

Do you think the government sometimes shoots itself in the foot however, and creates mistrust? And we have to point out, during the Cold War, all sorts of weird things happened. Things like, for example, the church committee uncovering hidden documents that were stuck in a warehouse when were a bunch of 'em had been destroyed by, I believe the CIA or testing radiation patterns by dumping radioactive materials off buildings in St. Louis, giving people syphilis, all of that. The government is a terrible track record from that period for openness and transparency and not sticking to government stuff, that ethical stuff that it should. I'm not saying that this is going on now, but it did happen. Could it be that during that period the US government was perpetuating an alien origin hypothesis for UAP in order to hide the very programs that you looked into that people are associating with UFOs?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:07:45):

Yeah, that is a very plausible hypothesis, and yes, the government tends to shoot itself in the foot often. I think one of my windmills that I tilt at is the lack of really communication and transparent, not transparency, but a lack of communication in what they're finding and how it was found to try to mitigate some of the narrative and get control of the narrative that's out there. Certainly that is a possibility. What we found, and I think again, what is important to understand from a historical perspective is there was no organized Pentagon level concerted effort to perpetrate such a cover story. If you'll, there is some anecdotal evidence of local officers or local commands jumping on that bandwagon in order to hide programs because that was an easy cover story and it was fun to do. But it's come back, I think to really bite them. And now that you've got to be able to demonstrate that through data documents and people who can attest to, and that's going to take time and investigation. And a lot of it, I'm sure is going to be protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act that everybody pushed to get forward. And well, it protects both ways, right? So anybody that comes forward to talk about their knowledge of that kind of a coverup is also protected. So it's going to be hard to untangle a lot of that.

John Michael Godier (01:09:33):

Do you think it's possible in your position, which everybody knew what you were doing and you were appointed to it and doing it, do you think it's possible that you were misled by anybody in the contractor system particularly? Do you think that, was there any indication that you thought, well, maybe I could be misled here?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:09:53):

No, I had no indication of that. A lot of these folks, especially in the contractor communities I've known for many, many, many years, had working relationships with, they bent over backwards to try to not only help me find records or evidence, but also people who had knowledge, kind of firsthand knowledge of story origins and what was actually happening at the time that this, a particular event was said to have occurred and got them to come in to talk to us so that we could document all of that and write it down and investigate it and cross-reference it. So we actually untangled quite a bit of one of the allegations for a contractor hiding this technology and where that actually came from and how it was linked to some of these other stories that don't have any validity either. So it's an interesting way that the story is propagated. But from a misled perspective, no. I had no indication that I was being misled by anyone other than some of the whistleblowers that were coming in.

John Michael Godier (01:11:16):

Now there is something burning the internet down and it's another FOIA thing talking about recovery and materials transfer in a document. What did that mean? What is the story behind that document?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:11:30):

Yeah. Okay. So Aero was congressionally directed to come up with not just standard reporting procedures, but also mitigation and response procedures for in the event of a shoot down or a collection of any sort of UAP, keeping in mind that UAP involves everything from balloons to drones to alleged alien tech. And so to do that mitigation and response as well as standardized reporting will occur through all of the combatant commands. And so that particular meeting was to go meet with the J three who's in charge of operations to start the discussion on how we're going to define those procedures and whether or not we have to provide a flyaway team in the event of any sort of shootdown to collect whatever is there. Because by law Congress told AARO it had to come up with mitigation and response procedures as well as develop flyaway teams or whatnot to go and collect anything that had to be done.

(01:12:50):

The problem is those types of activities are already covered under foreign material collection and analysis. So there's already a process and procedures in place for many of these things. And so this conversation was really to start, how do we document that for UAP and what kind of procedures do we need to put in place and what kind of processes do we put in place? And I started with Space Command because that's where I came from, and that was kind of an easy way to get this started to address congressional concerns. So there wasn't an actual thing. It was a, Hey, we need to go have a conversation about how we're going to do this and get the teams started and documenting that that goes into the J three, which is the director of operations operational procedures and processes.

John Michael Godier (01:13:52):

So you literally created a UFO recovery team. In short, in the event something like that were to happen,

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:13:59):

It is any UAP recovery. And it was really more the process and procedure because they already have people in place that would collect, if we shot down another Chinese high altitude balloon, it's that team that would go and collect it, right? It's those procedures and processes on how it gets notified and how we go and get it. And that would be now true for pretty much anything.

John Michael Godier (01:14:26):

Does the government have an Indiana Jones warehouse where they have all of these foreign materials, Russian, Soviet materials from the Cold War planes and things like that that they recovered parts of missiles and everything else that are archived somewhere and still kept secret because it's sensitive because of foreign relations?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:14:45):

I wish we had a big old warehouse like that, but that would be fun. But we do the IC and the DOD collects foreign material and they exploit it just like foreign adversaries collect on us and exploit it. And so some of that stuff is stored in places.

John Michael Godier (01:15:02):

I had to ask the question because obviously it's burning the internet down, so, alright, aliens, I got two more questions for you. And this one's just aliens in general, is that treated as a national security concern? In other words, say you had found something, wouldn't that be really scary to have an alien civilization, a presence here of very highly advanced nature, far beyond anything we can do? Does the government say that's a national security threat? In other words, would that have been a high priority, we need to build some missiles or something like that? Or do they just assume that'd had done something by now if they were here?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:15:41):

No. And this will be a wholly unsatisfying answer, but we actually, again, when we had this conversation about if we actually found anything, what would the classification be and how would we handle it? Most of that apart from the part of, okay, we're going to get, NASA will take lead, but it's also going to be, it's got to go up to the president for a decision on is it a national security issue or is it a humanity civilization issue? And so I think what would actually happen is it would get briefed over probably in partnership with the department by NASA up to the president for a decision.

John Michael Godier (01:16:30):

Yeah. And I know certain presidents have thought about it because I believe Ronald Reagan asked Gorbachev if the Soviets would help us if there was an alien threat. And Gorbachev said yes. But again, that's presidential level. Now my last question, and this is a fun one, in looking into all of these programs and past programs and finding not evidence of aliens, but did you find weird historical stuff that's eventually going to come out about programs that we did that's just really cool? In other words, we really did make this kind of a plane or something like that, and it's just not out there yet. Was there anything that you thought, wow, that's amazing?

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:17:09):

Well, obviously I would have to say I am very impressed and deeply proud of both the DOD and the ICS capabilities that they are developing and building to protect this nation. And I think everybody should take some solace in that. There are some really, really great technologies that are coming really great.

John Michael Godier (01:17:37):

I'm hoping for fusion energy.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:17:39):

Well, everybody's hoping for

John Michael Godier (01:17:42):

That. Everybody's hoping. Well, imagine if you had, I remember Lockheed was developing a compact or trying to develop a compact fusion reactor that could be launched into space that was the size of a truck. And I'm like, man, if we had that and we had fusion energy in space, it's Battlestar Galactica.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:18:00):

Oh yeah. That'd be awesome.

John Michael Godier (01:18:02):

It would be. Alright. Dr. Kirk Kipa. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:18:05):

No, I was just going to say there's a Fusion Energy Conference coming up here at the end of next month. I think we'll talk about the state of the art of Fusion community. I think that would be a fascinating thing to listen to.

John Michael Godier (01:18:19):

Oh, absolutely. Alright, Dr. Kirkpatrick, thank you for joining us and giving me so much time and good luck in your endeavors from now on. And I will continue to watch AARO under the new director and see what they find or don't find.

Sean Kirkpatrick (01:18:32):

Alright. Not fun. Yes. Alright, well, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. Let me know if there's anything else you need.

John Michael Godier (01:18:41):

Event Horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube memberships, early ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and sleep focused content. Sign up now by clicking the links below to your platform of choice.

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