When the French statesman Talleyrand (1754–1838), not the most straightforward of men, died, Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, is said to have commented, “What did he mean by that?”
And so we come to the announcement that Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), will be stepping down. AARO is the principal government body responsible for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the fancy name for UFOs. Kirkpatrick, a physicist with long experience in the defense and intelligence fields, has only been in the job for 18 months, but, Politico reports, he deferred his retirement to take on the AARO job, and now feels that it’s time to move on, having “accomplished everything I said I was going to do”.
Politico’s Lara Seligman notes that:
Kirkpatrick . . . made headlines this summer when he fired back at a whistleblower’s explosive claim that the government is covering up a decadeslong program to reverse-engineer alien craft. AARO has not uncovered any evidence to support the claim, Kirkpatrick said at the time, calling the comments “insulting.”
The whistleblower, retired Air Force intelligence officer Maj. David Grusch, has refused multiple requests to interview with AARO, Kirkpatrick said.
Seligman:
Another memorable moment came when [Kirkpatrick] co-authored a draft academic paper positing that the unidentified objects AARO is studying could be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth.
Kirkpatrick said the document that was posted online was in draft form and did not have permission to be published. However, he does not regret his involvement.
In fact, he believes “the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens” — because the alternative is a much bigger problem.
“If we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard,” he said. “And that’s not good.”
Agreed.
But . . . mothership? Alien probes?
Click on the link to discover that this draft was co-authored with Harvard professor Avi Loeb, an interesting choice.
The Financial Times July 28, 2023:
Loeb suggests is that aliens have visited our solar system — notably in the form of an object, ‘Oumuamua, whose path through our solar system in 2017 did not seem explicable by the sun’s gravity. Loeb also argues that a meteor which fell into the sea near Papua New Guinea in 2014 may have been a non-natural creation from another solar system. This month he retrieved tiny remnants of the meteor from the ocean floor.
Loeb is a distinguished scientist, but (as is noted in the FT), some of his colleagues believe that he extrapolates a little too much. For what it’s worth (I have no intention in coming between warring scientists), the conclusion of a report by a group of astronomers that appeared in Nature Astronomy was that ‘Oumuamua is an asteroid.
In an earlier article for Politico, Seligman reports that Loeb had been struck by the fact that (before there was any suggestion of a joint paper) Kirkpatrick had made contact with him “out of the blue.” He thought that it suggested that “there is something out there they don’t understand, and scientists could potentially help.”
Kirkpatrick’s exit from the office came just over a week after a protracted media exchange in which he admitted that claims made by whistleblower David Grusch — whose allegations about widespread alien coverups and the government’s possession of reverse-engineered alien technology the AARO head had previously called “insulting” — just might have had some merit after all.
“We’re investigating each and every one of [Grusch’s claims],” the now-resigned AARO director said during the off-camera Halloween meeting with the press. “We’re cross-referencing those. There are some bits of information that are turning out to be things and events that really happened.”
Turn to the transcript of the “media exchange” (in fact, this was a roundtable on October 31) in which the question of Grusch’s, uh, interesting claims (some of which were the subject of his testimony in July to a House Oversight subcommittee) came up, and it turns out Kirkpatrick’s remarks are less dramatic than Byte’s account suggests. And that would mean that there was no reason to think that the roundtable had anything to do with Kirkpatrick’s departure.
To start with (and as referred to in the Politico account), in reply to one question, Kirkpatrick said that, despite invitations, Grusch had not come to see AARO. Nor had he provided it with any information (the questioner had said that Grusch had claimed that he tried to get in touch “to share his discoveries,” but there had been no follow-up). Not only that, Kirkpatrick said that AARO had invited Grusch to talk at least four or five times in the previous eight months, but those invitations had been declined. Moreover, Kirkpatrick said that he had not talked to Grusch for five years, “and it was not on this topic.”
Contrary to Byte’s summary, Kirkpatrick did not claim to have investigated “each and every one of Grusch’s claims” (understandably enough, there are quite a few of them, some of which stretch back quite a while: One involves a crashed UAP, Mussolini’s Italy, and the Vatican). To paraphrase, he did say that AARO had interviewed over 30 people on the topic of Grusch’s “discoveries,” including most (although he didn’t know that for sure) of those that Grusch may have talked to.
And as for what those people had said:
There is a — there is a, if you think of it as a story arc, there’s a number of people that kind of fit into this story arc.
But then there’s these little offshoots and variations on themes. We’re investigating each and every one of them. We’re cross-referencing those. There are some bits of information that are turning out to be things and events that really happened. A lot of it is still under review, and we’re putting all that together into our historical report.
That’s not the same as investigating “each and every one” of Grush’s claims. Nor does it sound to me like a hint that AARO has uncovered evidence of reverse-engineered alien technology.
But then, would we ever be told that? Eyes narrow.