Sean Kirkpatrick was once the man in charge of a D.C.-backed agency tasked with investigating claims into unidentified anomalous phenomena, the new term for what most people still call UFOs. He stepped down from the position in December, and has now published a excoriating farewell letter in Scientific American detailing some of the reasons why.
So why did he stop hunting for UFOs on behalf of the American government? In short: Because congressional leaders believe in conspiracy theories with absolutely no substantial proof. “Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative,” Kirkpatrick said in Scientific American.
The world has long been obsessed with strange lights in the skies and what it might mean for our place in the cosmos. The current craze around UFOs, now UAPs, began in 2017 when a research group backed by Blink-182 frontman Tom Delonge published videos of UFOs purportedly taken by U.S. Navy pilots. Years later, The New York Times reported on it and the Pentagon declassified the videos.
The videos were real, but it wasn’t clear that they showed aliens. After debate and furor, the Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and put Kirkpatrick in charge of it. They’ve issued reports over the past few years that have routinely debunked the idea that the Earth has been visited by visitors from the stars. “AARO discovered a few things, and none were about aliens,” Kirkpatrick said in Scientific American.
According to Kirkpatrick, what the AARO discovered was a web of governmental leaders who believed in bizarre conspiracy theories and were willing to spend taxpayer dollars on it. He also succinctly laid out the UFOlogists view of the world.
“The U.S. has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UAP/UFOs from as early as the 1960s and perhaps earlier,” he said. “This great cover-up and conspiracy failed to produce any salient results, and consequently the effort was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors to continue the work. Sometime later, the story continues, those private sector contractors wanted to bring the whole program back under U.S. government (USG) auspices. Apparently, the CIA stopped this supposed transfer back to the USG.”
It’s a paragraph that’s destined to be edited down and taken out of context by people who believe in a vast conspiracy about UFOs and the U.S. government. I can see a future where I read the same paragraph in a conspiracy blog with phrases like “the story continues” edited out and the critical context is excised.
Kirkpatrick said that the AARO did investigate this tale. “No record exists of any president or living DOD or intelligence community leader knowing about this alleged program, nor any congressional committee having such knowledge,” he said.
He also outlined how, in the 2000s, how senator Harry Reid asked the Pentagon to find the supposed alien material uncovered by the U.S. government. “[The Defense Intelligence Agency] concluded that not only did no such material exist, but taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah,” Kirkpatrick said.
Despite several reports from the AARO about what it knows, the conspiracies continued, culminating in a Congressional Hearing where UFO “whistleblower” David Grusch held court before members of the Congress and talked at length about impossible craft, aliens, and threats on his life. Kirkpatrick has repeatedly said, in public, that Grusch would not talk to him or the AARO.“As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’ and statement for the record despite numerous invitations,” he said in Scientific American.
Kirkpatrick’s Scientific American piece is angry and it’s easy to understand why. He was telling people a boring truth they didn’t want to hear. “Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter,” he said.
