A top Pentagon official called claims made during this week’s widely watched US congressional hearing on UFOs “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accused a key witness of not cooperating with the official US government investigation.
US All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Director Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated on Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired US Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.
Retired US Air Force major David Grusch on Wednesday testified that the US has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.
Photo: AFP
Grusch testified that part of what the US has recovered were nonhuman “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”
A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s AARO, which was intended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in the past few years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.
Kirkpatrick wrote the letter on Thursday and the US Department of Defense on Friday confirmed that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter.
“I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail,” he wrote.
“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”
In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by Grusch before a US House of Representatives oversight subcommittee.
The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said.
Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,” she added.
Kirkpatrick wrote that the “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for nonhuman technology.”
He had briefed reporters in December last year that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.
Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”
“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said.
He did not explicitly name Grusch, who he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a US representative asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.
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