THE AARO SAGA
When Congress created AARO, it was with the idea that it was going to facilitate their own work and efforts for transparency on the subject of UAPs. Today we look at how that worked out
CREATION OF AARO
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was created in July 2022 was created by congressional mandate as part of the National Defence Authorization Act 2022 to address the growing number of UAP reports, with the idea that the public would have full transparency and would get to hear the results of their investigations.
AARO is meant to organise the collection and reporting of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) incidents across the Department of Defence (DoD)’s special use airspace (SUA), as well as the collection and reporting of anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects. AARO is to identify and reduce gaps in operational, intelligence and counter-intelligence capability and to recommend policy changes, whether regulatory or statutory, to reduce those gaps.
The organization is also supposed to aim to increase communication between the military and the Intelligence community (IC) over unidentified marine and aerial craft that could threaten U.S. forces and military bases or spy on sensitive facilities. The establishing legislation empowered the office to review records as far back as 1945 to determine if federal government or contractor UFO programs were in existence that may have shielded information from either the White House or the US Congress. Dr Sean Kirkpatrick led AARO from its inception in July 2022 till December 2023.
As reported by Sentinel News, the ex-director of the All-Domain Anomalies Resolution Office (AARO), Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, who resigned from his post in December 2023, addressed on April 9th 2026 the National Capital Area Sceptics (NCAS) in Arlington, Virginia at a press conference. At the end of his talk, he said he would take questions for five minutes. Admiral Tim Gallaudet, one of the beacons of the disclosure movement and highly credible witness who testified about the phenomenon under oath in Congress in the November 13th 2024 UAP hearings, was in the audience and took the opportunity to ask Kirkpatrick a question. The following exchange happened :
Tim Gallaudet : ‘Sean, I respect you, we both have decades of government service together in intelligence and DoD. I’m gonna ask you point blank and put you on the spot on something. After my 2024 UAP hearing testimony in front of congress, you tweeted a response about my statement regarding AARO where you said I came and visited AARO and I was bitter because I didn’t get a job and that you believe that it was because you didn’t hire me because I was prone to conspiracy theories and that you checked with some of my bosses on that statement. It’s well out there, you tweeted it, and ultimately, you know, I didn’t go visit AARO when you were there. It was after you left. I was invited by Mike Washel, the Navy Intel rep who asked me to come there and that’s what I spoke about during my hearing. And of course I didn’t look for a job, he invited me, and for me to actually go for a GS14 job after having been an undersecretary of commerce, that’s kind of preposterous, I would say. At the same time, when you said you checked with my bosses, I had my bosses, two two-stars, four four-stars and a secretary of commerce who I’ve all spoken with and you never really checked with them. So ultimately your statement there was an outright lie and I want to ask you what you have to say about that’.
Sean Kirkpatrick : ‘I’d say that was not an outright lie because Mike brought you in, you sat in my office and we had this conversation about’...
Tim Gallaudet: ‘You weren’t there, you had left, it was Phillips’ ...
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘And the position you were looking for was an SCS position’
Tim Gallaudet: ‘I was not asking for a position. Remember Mike brought me in. He asked me to come’.
Someone in the assembly, probably an organiser: ‘Let me just ask you because time is going to be short. We want to shed any light on the issue itself’.
Someone else: ‘Exactly!’
Tim Gallaudet: ‘Well, good point No, no, ultimately so it’s really clear that you have been executing a misinformation/disinformation campaign about this. This whole slide(show) captures it. And I know you can’t acknowledge it because whoever you’re on the payroll with won’t allow you to. That’s my statement’.
Sean Kirkpatrick : ‘Ok, well, that’s a great statement that has absolutely no bearing from reality. So okay...’
And he looked away to signal the end of the matter.
Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, U.S. Navy (ret) is a career oceanographer and technology consultant who served as the acting Undersecretary and Assistant Secretary of Commerce, acting and Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Oceanographer of the Navy. He is a research affiliate for Harvard University’s Galileo Project and an Advisory Board member for ‘Americans for Safe Aerospace’ (ASA). He seeks to elevate the scientific study of undersea and transmedium UAP to a national research priority.
In his News Nation Q&A program on May 3rd 2026, Ross Coulthart lent his full support to Admiral Tim Gallaudet. He explained how he had extensively checked his credentials and character in the past and the words used by people he asked were consistently ‘exemplary’, ‘honourable’, ‘truthful’ and ‘honest’. The public has had plenty of examples of Gallaudet’s exemplary character, but you might like to revisit this Sentinel News article.
Coulthart was also able to confirm that Gallaudet’s version of events was correct, because he was the one who broke the news that Kirkpatrick left AARO to join the Oakridge National Laboratory. He knows for sure that Kirkpatrick’s last day at AARO was on 01.12.23. Tim Gallaudet’s visit at AARO was on 31.05.24, five months later, with Tim Phillips then acting director of AARO. Coulthart reiterated that Gallaudet had been invited via his intelligence and navy contacts and never sought employment. He added that as a retired rear admiral and the man who used to operate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the idea that he was looking for a job at a much lower level in AARO is ridiculous.
He added that there was a broader context of a long running feud between people like Admiral Gallaudet and Dr Sean Kirkpatrick and that Kirkpatrick had been caught with alternative versions of the truth on several occasions. As an example, he mentioned that Kirkpatrick has previously denied being at a Skinwalker Ranch briefing. But Brandon Fugal, the billionaire owner of Skinwalker Ranch was able to publicly prove him wrong. In an X post, he made the following statement : ‘On April 19th 2018, my team from Skinwalker Ranch was asked to provide a confidential briefing in Washington D.C. to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the U.S. Armed Services Committee. Sean Kirkpatrick was at the head of the table and it lasted 2.5 hours’. He attached a photograph showing Kirkpatrick at the end of the boardroom table. Brandon Fugal also recounted the story in more details to Ross Coulthart.
If you have followed the UAP topic over the last few years, you know that Dr Sean Kirkpatrick has a complex relationship with the truth, but in case you don’t, here is a short history.
A LITTLE HISTORY
AARO came in a long line of other programs studying UAP :
Project Saucer (1946/1947-January 1948)
Project Sign (January 1948 – February 1949)
Project Grudge (February 1949 – August 1949 and July 1950-March 1952)
Project Twinkle, (April 1950-March 1951)
Project Stork (March 1952 – May 1955)
Project Bear (Late 1951-Late 1954)
CIA Study group (1952)
Project Blue Book (1952-1970)
After 1969, the U.S. government’s official line was that it did not investigate UFOs. This was until a shattering article appeared in the New York Times on December 16th, 2017, in which whistleblower Luis Elizondo revealed that he headed a program studying UAP. The pandemonium that ensued forced the government to admit the existence of the following secret programs:
The ‘Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program’ (AAWSAP) which became The ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, (AATIP) from 2007 to 2012, headed by Luis Elizondo;
The UAPTF from 2017 to 2021, used to collect data on military UAP sightings;
The ‘Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group’ (AOIMSG) (2021-2022).
THE THORNY PROBLEM OF DAVID GRUSCH
In June 2023, Retired Air Force veteran David Grusch appeared on News Nation with Ross Coulthart and made the extraordinary claims that the US Government and some private companies have retrieved non-human vehicles and bodies and that they have retro-engineered some of the vehicles. He also alleged that some people have been threatened or even murdered for the information to remain secret.
On April 19th, 2023, Kirkpatrick testified on the mission, activities, oversight, and budget of AARO in an open hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee. He explained that AARO was only about 9 months old, spent mostly on re-organising the collection of data and methods of analysis, etc. He emphasized the importance of scientific rigour and asked to be patient about results as it would take a long time to go through all the data. So it was surprising to hear him say:
‘I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous.’ The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources. While a large number of cases in our holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with these cases. Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of’. He added : ‘I recognize that this answer is unsatisfying to those who in good faith assume that what they see with their eyes, with their cameras, or with their radars is incontrovertible evidence of extraordinary characteristics and performance. Yet, time and again, with sufficient scientific-quality data, it is a fact that UAP often, but not always, resolve into readily-explainable sources. Humans are subject to deception and illusions, sensors to unexpected responses and malfunctions, and in some cases intentional interference. Getting to the handful of cases that pass this level of scrutiny is the mission of AARO’.... By its very nature, the UAP challenge has for decades lent itself to mystery, sensationalism, and even conspiracy. For that reason, AARO remains committed to transparency, accountability, and to sharing as much with the American public’... I should state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extra-terrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics’.
Note that the use of the term ‘extra-terrestrial’ instead of ‘Non Human Intelligence’ (NHI) means that Kirkpatrick and AARO are avoiding the possibilities of intra-terrestrials (from within earth, like the oceans) and ultra-dimensional beings.
On July 26th 2023, David Grusch testified in congress under oath and reiterated all his claims. This was after an extensive process of testifying behind closed doors to members of the congress and after the IGIC (Inspector General of the Intelligence Community) judged his whistleblower claim ‘credible and urgent’
Kirkpatrick immediately responded with : ‘’To be clear, AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse-engineering program for non-human technology,” and added : “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defence and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail’’.
THE (IN)FAMOUS AARO REPORT
MARCH 2024
Although he left AARO in December 2023, Kirkpatrick helped deliver a historical report in March 2024. Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said that AARO conducted a “rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past U.S. government-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the U.S. government and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material. “To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” Ryder said. “Also, AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” he added.“
THE EXPERTS’ RESPONSE
The report was strongly criticised by many serious experts but we will bring you only a few reactions.
Robert Powell, executive board member of The Scientific Coalition for UAP studies (SCU) issued a scathing statement, that we encourage you to read, but here is a quick summary.
He states that this ‘flawed report’ was done in a very short time by people who do not have an understanding or knowledge of the UFO matter and is full of errors. They wrongly described the ‘Kenneth Arnold sighting’, one of the most famous in the world history of UFOs. They gave wrong project names and dates, and wrong data. They made assumptions with ‘maybe’ or ‘likely’ rather than prove things.
Powell reminds us that Congress wanted a compilation of the history of UFO/UAP from approximately 1945 and onwards. Yet early in the paper, AARO states that the goal of the report is “to investigate past U.S. Government (USG)-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the USG and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material.”
Powell goes on saying that a huge amount of the UAP history was ignored, like the Foo Fighters of WW2, for instance, which occurred in 1942, preceding the ‘Kenneth Arnold sighting’ by 5 years. He adds that ‘The AARO paper does not deal with the government involvement in any of the major historical UFO/UAP cases. Instead, it only covers Roswell because it matches up with AARO’s stupor arguing against captured ET craft’.
Powell mentions that numerous historical cases were not included in the report and he lists seven in particular that were investigated by the military and should definitely have been part of the report. He also notes that nothing was mentioned by AARO about the numerous cases above bases with nuclear weapons. He also notes that no mention was made of the Tic-Tac, Gimbal and the Go-fast, and that non-sensical statements were made about events around the Manhattan project, deploring a lack of logic and critical thinking between events and explanations.
He states: ‘The more that I read the paper, the more that it is clear that this is not a paper about the history of UFO/UAP but a paper trying to do whatever is needed to strike back at the conspiracy crowd’. He adds that AARO reiterated the conclusions of the Robertson Panel and the Condon report dismissing the idea of UFOs without saying that they had been engineered to discredit not only the subject but also the witnesses. Finally, as for AARO’s statement that ‘We have found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.” he replies that it cannot be validated if a proper definition of ‘evidence’ has been established.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, who has long advocated for UAP transparency and instigated the New York Times and Washington Post articles with Luis Elizondo issued a damming very detailed analysis of the report. We strongly recommend that you read it for yourself but as it is very long, we have condensed it for you.
For starters, Chris Mellon brought up some unusual oddities. He wondered why the report was presented months before it was expected and if it was because Kirkpatrick wanted to close it with its many errors rather than leave it open to correction by his successor. He also remarked that Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not sign the report off and therefore spared herself and her office ‘considerable embarrassment’, because he asserted that ‘This is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service’. Mellon adds that ‘the AARO report (AAROR) is pervaded by hundreds of unfortunate errors and absurdities involving the history, science, and facts presented in its 63 pages, with ‘dozens –or more– errors on some pages’, starting with the table of contents which is a list of errors in itself. Some unclassified information was left out of the report, including some UAP videos.
Mellon points out an irregularity: The Department of Defence (DoD) Public Affairs invited some selected press outlets (including the New York Times and the Washington Post, that leaked the three videos of the ‘Tic-Tac’, the ‘Gimbal’ and the ‘Go Fast’ that Mellon himself provided them in 2017) for a pre-brief on the report. These outlets then repeated the report and its mistakes to their audiences without calling on scholars and experts such as Jacques Vallée, or Robert Powell who could have pointed to the many mistakes. He adds that it is typical of the stigmatized history of UAP press coverage since World War II. Outlets that specialise on the UAP subject like ‘The Debrief’ were not invited. None of these experts were consulted in order to draw AARO’s conclusions either. He is concerned that the press has a tendency to ‘conflate the UAP topic generally with allegations the government has recovered off-world technology’. He emphasizes that ‘the UAP issue is distinct and critically important regardless of the truth about allegations of recovered extraterrestrial, nonhuman technology’ and regrets that AARO was asked to investigate that allegation.
He adds that the public deserves transparency about UAP, particularly with the growing number of drone-like aircraft that defeat the military and force some of their equipment to be moved to other locations. This shows that the subject of UAP should be taken seriously for national defence purposes. He explains that the system of classification and secrecy is such that very little information can be shared and this causes situations that endanger national security.
Mellon explains that the Congressional legal mandate required that this AARO historical report present the history of UAP and “relating to” UAP, meaning the history of UAP sightings and investigations as recorded in US Government records. However, AARO instead presented a summary history of the records of flawed U.S. Government (USG) investigations of UAP. There are some other points of law that were deliberated ignored or by-passed in order to present a different picture than that required. For instance, all the attempts of obfuscation, cover-up, manipulation of the public, incorrect reports on the subject by the intelligence community were omitted. Some agencies with known investigations or activities relating to UAP were left out of the report. He also noted that the role of the 1953 ‘Robertson Panel’ that was intended to cover-up and ridicule the subject and caused the huge stigma that still exists today was not in AARO’s report, as mandated. And some well-known and documented operations of disinformation and manipulations of civilian UAP enthusiasts on behalf of the Air Force were also omitted.
Mellon also explains that the regulations, set-up by the previous body of UAP investigation, the UAPTF had a very strict code of secrecy and the only thing that could be shared with the public would be an increase in UAP sightings. There could be no mention of place, time, kind of UAP or anything else. Apart from telling the media and the public that the program exists and its mission, the Pentagon is not even allowed to say that the rest of the information detained is ‘classified’. He questions the need of this excessive classification and argues that the videos of the ‘Tic-Tac’, the ‘Gimbal’ and the ‘Go-Fast’, which he released with the New-York Times and the Washington Post articles, by becoming available to law-makers, advanced national security. Yet, this over-classification is generally acceptable as being a major problem, and he adds : ‘As Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in a letter to Congress in 2022, “Over-classification of government secrets both undermines national security by blocking the intelligence community’s ability to share critical information and erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government.”
Mellon notes an extraordinary assumption on AARO’s part. They claim that Project Manhattan, that built the first atomic bomb caused ‘sightings’ and ‘erroneous UAP reporting’. That is despite the fact that the project ended on December 31st 1946, so would not explain the sightings of the modern UAP era started in June 1947. Also, Project Manhattan did not launch any special aerial vehicles of any kind that could be ‘misidentified’ as UAP, and there is no evidence of outside civilians ever mistaking the Project Manhattan and successor operations for UAP. However, people from inside the project reported sightings and recorded hundreds of them. Many of the UAPs reported by scientists and military personnel were described as either “green fireball phenomena” or flying “disks”. The issue was such that the project’s scientists and security officials set up an ‘organized plan’ across the area with instrumented UAP tracking stations and networks.
The Senior Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) made a catalogue of 209 recent ‘Unknown Aerial Phenomena’ sightings and instrument tracking in and around Los Alamos area. He sent the report to the agency director in Washington DC, with a letter stating:
“… the frequency of unexplained aerial phenomenon in the New Mexico area was such that an organized plan of reporting these observations should be undertaken…”... “The observers of these phenomena include scientists, Special Agents of the Office of Special Investigations (IG), USAF, airline pilots, military pilots, Los Alamos Security Inspectors, military personnel, and many other persons of various occupations whose reliability is not questioned.”
The sightings recorded inside Project Manhattan often matched those seen at the same time by civilians. Yet, AARO only mentions the civilians ‘awed by technology they do not understand because it is classified’ and leave the meticulously recorded sightings from within the project out of their report.
AARO likewise blamed the unknowing civilians’ lack of understanding of new technology for seeing seemingly anomalous phenomena around the first satellite and moon missions. They report that the missions were classified so the sightings could not be explained to the public. Mellon argues that only a few elements were classified, hence the live TV moon landing. He also finds the idea that human eyes could see small objects in space and by the moon ridiculous. AARO also explains that the explosion of sightings from the 1940s to the 1960s is due to new experimental technology that civilians did not know about, adding that it is understandable that people could mistake these technologies for something other worldly. They explain that typical erroneous UAP sightings like flying saucers most likely come from rocket launches. So basically, people who had seen the Apollo mission and the moon landing thought a flying saucer and a rocket were the same object.
Mellon also notes that AARO missed 64,000 pages of the Project Blue Book, the longest running project studying UAP, and therefore could not present the cases on these pages in their report. And the records that they talked about where press releases of the time (which reported the lies they were told) Mellon reminds us that all the Project Blue Book files are available to the public on a website and in the National Archives.
AARO claims “More than half of the UFO reports investigated in the 1950s and 1960s were assessed to be U.S. reconnaissance flights” and “that UFO reports would spike when the U-2 was in flight” Mellon estimates that it would mean over 5,000 U-2s mistakenly misidentified as UFOs or alien spacecraft! Yet, contrary to what AARO says, there was no ‘spike; in numbers of purported U-2 ‘UFO’ sightings, and in fact there was not one single reported case. Mellon adds that there were never that many U-2 flights anyway.
Mellon relays Jacques Vallée’s stories from his published diaries for 1957-1969, p 101 where he and Dr J.Allen Hynek, Scientific Consultant on UAP for Project Blue Book, went to Chicago to meet The project’s chief Captain Hector Quintanilla. He claimed that a U-2 was reported as a UFO in 1951, whilst on its way to the Soviet Union. This could not have been the case as the U-2 was first flown in 1955, and the first one to go to the Soviet Union was in 1956. The lie would have originated from the Air Force as a ruse towards the CIA for their own purposes.
Mellon explains that Project Blue Book often ‘successfully’ solved sightings by civilians by dismissing them because they did not procure enough data. Ordinary people would just report on lights or objects in the sky but without some more scientific data like speed, position etc, Blue Book did not investigate them. The officers’ dismissive and disparaging attitude towards the witnesses also tended to discourage reporting and encourage stigma.
Mellon explains that the roles of J Allen Hynek and Edward Rupelt as serious investigators was ignored but that they were expected to debunk ideas of ‘recovered alien craft and extra-terrestrial beings’. Yet, despite acknowledging this deception ploy, AARO repeated the Air Force’s public position and simply states that the Air Force “determined” that “there was no threat to national security, no evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles and no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the USAF that sightings represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge’’.
AARO claimed that there was a 40-year gap when UAP were not investigated, from the end of Project Blue Book till 2009. It is not true, and Mellon sites a number of cases that were well-known, but none as famous as the Tic-Tac from the Nimitz case. This is one of the cases that led to the eventual formation of AARO itself years later. Although there was no official project studying UAP cases, they were still investigated by various divisions and by AAWSAP and AATIP. It is extraordinary that AARO do not mention the case. Likewise, they do not mention the famous and very well documented case of Rendlesham Forest in the UK in 1980.
AARO also explained the materials recovered at Roswell as debris from ‘Project Mogul’, a project using balloons equipped with microphones and flying at high altitudes in the hope of catching distant signals emitting from nuclear testing detonations in the USSR. Mellon explains that it is not possible as the balloon launch was cancelled and the balloon was recycled for another later launch. It never got lost and was fully recovered. Also, without ever giving details of one single sighting, AARO report that most of them are due to some ‘secret programs’ that had nothing secret, like the Apollo missions. But they also give lists of real secret satellites, stealth aircraft and drones.
On December 2nd, 1952 in a memo titled ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’, CIA Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell wrote to Gen. Walter B. Smith, that ‘Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defence installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles. As Mellon explains: The obvious and logically deducible conclusion of these incursions was that they must be the work of either an advanced, unconventional foreign enemy (the Soviet Union) or potentially extraterrestrial intelligence. Chadwell later confirmed that his and his colleague’s conclusion was that the UFO had an extra-terrestrial origin but that the Robertson panel overturned the conclusion. AARO take great pains to contradict the findings of the memo.
Mellon provides a table of identified cases planted by the Air Force to the Robertson panel as ‘the best 12 cases of unidentified UAP’. They were so easy to explain prosaically that the panel dismissed them immediately. This was used to debunk cases to the public.
Mellon remarks that AARO do not mention the famous‘Intelligent UFO Motions’ study by Major Dewey Fournet and presented to the CIA Robertson Panel that validated the extra-terrestrial hypothesis.
According to Mellon, the CIA Special Study Group of (August) 1952 is perhaps the most error-ridden in the entire AARO Report (pp. 16-17), as it appears just about everything is completely wrong, even the dates and the names of CIA personnel and Group members, and omission of bombshell facts.
AARO omitted to mention one of the most well-known UAP events in history: The Washington flap. On two successive weekends, the 19th - 20th and 26th- 27th of July 1952, some UFOs famously flew over the Capitol in Washington. Air Force jets proved unable to stop the UFOs and President Truman, dissatisfied, asked for an investigation about the Air Force’s handling of the matter. AARO made many mistakes, including not saying the president ordered the investigation but instead said it was ordered by the CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence, and gave a wrong name, as they did for most of the people involved in the study. Mellon cites a catalogue of errors too long to repeat here but we can mention that AARO did not report that the report concluded that ’’Air Force’s Project Blue Book UAP effort failed all 4 stages of the intelligence process — Failed at Intelligence Collection, Failed at Analysis, Failed at Production, Failed at Dissemination’.
Mellon describes a long story of in-fighting, treachery, inadequacy and deception that ends up showing that although the Air Force was aware of a real threat from UAP, it misled the CIA about it. None of this well-documented story was reported by AARO. He explains at length the smoke and mirrors used to fool the ordinary citizen who would read the report, unveiling the tactics used to hide the number of cases or put them in categories that will not alarm the public. But with many years spent in the Intelligence community at the highest level, Mellon could not be fooled by the omission and manipulation of data and figures in the report and was able to reveal what AARO tried very hard to hide: 314 unidentified cases out of 510 cases! This represents a formidable 62% unexplained/unidentified’. Mellon goes on uncovering a lot of obscure data difficult to work out for the non-initiated and declares: ‘each year or so, the total cumulative number of unidentified anomalous UAP reports increased (from 143 to 314 to 600). That suggests that each year or so the added new reports with supposedly better “quality of data” were more unexplainable not more resolved with the better data’.
He added that like with Project Blue Book, the better the data gets, the more difficult it is to explain the sightings . AARO also share too little data for scientific scrutiny, verification and critic. Mellon asserts that AARO is behaving just like Blue Book did: in order to ‘get rid’ of the UAP problem, and he exposes in great length the various tools of the trade to do so. Mellon also remarks that despite many scientists having seen UAP, AARO do not mention them.
Mellon reminds us that AARO’s two key conclusions, as presented at the top of its report’s Executive Summary, state:
AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.
AARO has found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.
He then launches into many questions as to the definition of ‘evidence’ and as none was provided by AARO, he hypothesised a few of them.
Contrary to Congress’s mandate, AARO does not mention the issue of ‘stigma’, actively sponsored by the Air Force and the CIA, as well as other agencies, and documented with testimony by active members of the Intelligence Community (IC) operating against civilians and politicians, spreading disinformation and fake documents to maintain stigma and fear.
Mellon also questions why AARO did not find ‘non-disclosure agreements (NDA)’ when it could. He relates the story of military personnel who had to sign an NDA after witnessing a UAP.
Mellon then asks the important question : ‘Is AARO a science project or an Intelligence Organisation?’. He explains that although they claim to apply both scientific and intelligence analysis, they actually dismiss intelligence reports such as sightings when they cannot explain them with today’s science. So any object seen moving with not-yet-understood physics are rejected as ‘not credible’. As Mellon argues, if these objects represent an advanced technology, possibly extra-terrestrial, we cannot afford to dismiss the reports just because we do not understand that technology. Yet it is what AARO does. He reminds us that Dr Hynek exposed the Blue Book policy of ‘It can’t be: therefore it isn’t’, and adds:
‘This is why Dr. Kirkpatrick claims there is no “credible” information of craft demonstrating capabilities that defy our current scientific understanding: “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics’’. This, despite the testimony of Navy squadron Cmdr. Dave Fravor and his colleagues who were involved in the Nimitz incident, backed by dramatic radar-infrared-electro-optical data recordings. AARO does not even mention the Nimitz case or its investigation anywhere in its “complete”, “thorough”, and “accurate” Historical UAP Report.
Mellon reminds us that the ‘Tic-Tac’ UAP observed by three highly-trained pilots and their weapons systems operators, and multiple radar operators and technicians ‘demonstrated almost-instantaneous high g acceleration; achieved hypersonic speed without a sonic boom; showed no evidence of friction or plasma or obvious propulsion, despite the extreme velocities it achieved (estimated peak 90,000 mph in 12 miles going from 0 to 145,000 mph to 0, all in 0.78 seconds, at 5,000 g’s acceleration). The estimated 47-foot wingless white “Tic Tac” shaped craft also thus seemed to survive g forces far greater than any aircraft, rocket, or missile of that size built by man. The tough Navy squadron commander of the Black Aces could not find a terrestrial explanation for what he and his colleagues observed and he has made that clear in sworn testimony to Congress. Is this not relevant?
He adds:
‘What aspect of this case should be thrown out as “not credible” and why? Why are we even bothering to ask pilots to report UAP if we do not deem them credible? Why is this case not viewed as compelling, albeit not absolutely conclusive, evidence of the presence in Earth’s atmosphere of vehicles that are so far advanced we cannot understand or replicate their performance? What evidence would AARO accept – and is AARO going to employ an unspoken rule of today’s academic science that does not see a science of tomorrow, and therefore arbitrarily says it must not have happened, because we don’t understand what was reported’.
Kirkpatrick and AARO conveniently ‘forgot’ to mention these famous UAP that the navy admitted they could not identify, because they must have known their smoke and mirrors couldn’t stand up to scrutiny. If they had had a solid scientific explanation, they would have put it in their report. Kirkpatrick much prefers talking to an audience eager to hear UAP debunking.
And that takes us back to where we started, at the Sceptics Association conference, where Admiral Gallaudet confronted Dr Kirkpatrick. If you remember, the AARO report that we have discussed above dates March 2024. Kirkpatrick had already left by that time, but yet, in April 2026, although he had not been researching the matter for over two years, Kirkpatrick brings up new unfounded explanations about the ‘Tic-Tac’ and the ‘Gimbal’ (also known as a‘cube in a sphere’) that he ‘forgot about’ in the report. What follows below perfectly illustrates Chris Mellon’s point.
BACK IN THE SCEPTICS CONFERENCE
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘Most sightings and associated narratives, especially the ones that made it into the public domain, always failed to account for some of the more obvious explanations: Radar reflection cubes and calibration spheres. Another one of my favourites. The sensor, phenomenologies, testing configurations. Now I’ll talk about some sensor phenomenologies real quick. So, a radar, most of you know how radars work, right? Sends pulse out, gets reflection, pulse comes back, collects it. But today there’s an algorithmic engine behind it. There’s a fusion engine. They are AI driven things that are accelerating how we take that data and turn it into information.
What happens when a brand new radar waveform is tested and it goes against an object that’s semi-transparent to the radar? Maybe I get a missing pulse. Maybe I get only one out of every five pulses depending on what it is that it’s reflecting off of. And when I see that, if you look at how the fusion engines then interpret that missing information, it tries to extrapolate to the next data point. And when it does that, you get really exciting things like,’ ‘hey, that object accelerated from 0.5 MK to 2 and a half Mach in, half a second’. But it’s not until you pull the raw data out and you look at each individual pulse train in that pulse train you understand ‘oh well it missed these data and now if I go and I simulate that in the fusion engine I can recreate that effect’. That happened a lot and it really happens when you’re testing new waveforms like when DARPA tests new waveforms, which happened on the Nimitz. It’s very exciting. Radar reflection cubes and calibration spheres. We use those to calibrate our radars. That’s what they’re for. They’re basically balloons with corner cubes in them and we launch them and we shoot radars at them. We get the returns off them. We use them to calibrate, set those up. It’s awesome. So, there’s a little known, declassified, CIA program from the late 80s, I think, maybe in the 90s. And this declassified program was essentially taking radar reflection cubes, calibration spheres, sneaking them up underwater off the shore of adversaries and popping them out of the water and sitting back and watching what happens: ‘ How many? what are their radars? What whether they turn on? What’s their response time?’ Right. Really cool. Why wouldn’t somebody do that to us?
This is where Admiral Gallaudet intervened:
Tim Gallaudet: ‘Sean, may I ask a question here? Nice to connect with you in person for the first time. Uh, but about the Nimitz... I’ve met all four pilots who had visual observations of the contact. And, how do you explain that?’
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘I explain it by a couple of different things. One, because I’ve spoken with them as well, and we’ve decided we’ve actually determined that the water underneath the main object that was being observed uh, was welling up, not down, which means the object came out of the water, not into it. It wasn’t pushing down. There was no propulsion associated with it. So, there’s a couple of things here. One, you’ve got a really cool optical illusion called ‘parallax’ that pilots are prone to. I am certain that played into this since we’re talking about 2004. It’s a long time ago for people to remember. We’ve got actual data observations that suggest whatever this thing was came out of the water and not propulsing over it. And then we have the radar. Lots of people like to point to the radar. The radar was actually being tested by DARPA on a new calibration. It was going through its shake and bake and all those anomalies were from that radar. So, can I say that 100%? No. But it sure as hell is a lot more convincing and realistic than a bunch of aliens’.
Tim Gallaudet: I’m not claiming aliens, but it came out of the water and then it also trajected to the CAP point. And these are trained aviators...
(The ‘CAP Point’ that Gallaudet is talking about is a highly secret meeting point in the air space, only known by the individuals involved in the operation. Yet, as testified by Commander David Fravor, the Tic-Tac positioned itself at the CAP point, 60 miles away in less than a minute).
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘I understand that they’re trained aviators, but they’re also trained aviators that are prone to optical illusions like everybody else. And there’s no data that suggests that that thing went from point A to point B. It’s only a visual report. Right?
Someone else: ‘They can look at things like hydro state, hydraulic stuff from the water?’
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘That’s what I had them recreate for me. What they saw on the water was an up-welling, not a down-welling. From where the object came out.’
Someone: ‘What object?’
Sean Kirkpatrick (pointing towards Tim Gallaudet and obviously reluctant to reply): Uh... the tic tac.
Someone else: But could it have been anything else?
Sean Kirkpatrick: No, it couldn’t have been anything else.
Tim Gallaudet: ‘Well, so Sean, I respect you immensely. My name is Tim Gallaudet, retired admiral, former NOAA administrator (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration). Having a PhD in oceanography, I don’t have any other explanation geophysically for what they observed in terms of that. But yeah, fine if that’s what’...
Sean Kirkpatrick: I wasn’t suggesting it’s geophysical. I’m suggesting that it is probably one of these calibration spheres that pops out of the water. And could it have been from somebody else? Absolutely. Because as I said, late 80s we declassified the CIA program. There is absolutely no reason to believe that somebody else wouldn’t do that in our test ranges and we would not know it because our SOSUS network is not all that great. So...
(Sound Surveillance System - SOSUS) was the original name for a submarine detection system based on passive sonar developed by the United States Navy to track Soviet submarines).
Tim Gallaudet: ‘Wow. Okay, this is a great thing to bring up here in public because if our SOSUS range and our West Coast training range...
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘in the early 2000s’...
Tim Gallaudet: ‘are being infiltrated by adversaries like the Chinese, that is a really important talking point, wouldn’t it?’
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘Yeah, exactly right’.
Tim Gallaudet: ‘Why is Congress not investigating that?
Sean Kirkpatrick (sarcastically) : ‘Oh, that is a fantastic question. Why don’t you ask them that?’
The audience laughs...
Tim Gallaudet: ‘I like that. Yes, exactly right’.
Why aren’t they doing that as opposed to other things? So look going through all these things is difficult especially the farther back in time you go which brings me to that next major data point. There’s an inverse correlation between how far back in the past an event occurred and the amount of data available to actually analyze it. Right? So the farther back in time you go the less data there is to analyze which means everybody can speculate all they want. You’re never going to actually know. And that is a problem, right? And I told Congress ‘you can keep asking me about the Nimitz all you want, but until somebody has actual raw data to analyze, visual reporting is not evidence. It is a starting point for an investigation that requires data and more evidence’.
Someone asks a questions which we can’t hear...
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘So what Ryan described to us was a sphere with a cube in it. So a sphere with a cube in it is a calibration sphere. That’s what he described’.
Same person: ‘But that’s something that the general public wouldn’t know!’
Sean Kirkpatrick: ‘That’s exactly right. And yet he should know that as an aviator, right?
And the conference goes on with disparaging stories about pilots, witnesses, and congress.
THE FIGHTER-JET PILOT COUNTER-ATTACKS
The ‘Ryan’ Kirkpatrick mentions and belittles is none other than F18 pilot Ryan Graves who, on July 26th, 2023, testified in congress about a UAP described as a cube in a sphere splitting two F18 Super-Hornets. A trained pilot known to be very analytical, Graves explained that these sightings are not rare, they are actually routine, seen most days by pilots. These objects have no visible engines/jet plumes, appear to reach hypersonic speeds, flew at multiple elevations ranging from just above the ocean to 35,000 feet, and appear to be able to perform very quick accelerations and turns that human pilots would not survive. They are often seen at very high altitudes of around 30,000 to 35,000 feet (approximately 9 km to 10.5 km) and sometimes in category 4 hurricanes, without moving. In January 2024, Kirkpatrick, after leaving AARO, said that the ‘cubes in spheres’ UFOs were ‘likely next generation spherical drones that move very accurately.’ (notice that he gave a different explanation at the Sceptics conference).
This casual assessment was highly criticised, not least by Ryan Graves himself, who strongly disagreed with Kirkpatrick, arguing about the following points:
Impossible Kinematics: Graves has ruled out common drones, stating that the objects observed by his squadron showed impossible capabilities, such as remaining stationary during category 4 hurricane winds.
Performance Inconsistency: While Kirkpatrick points to emerging drone technology, Graves argues that the speed and manoeuvrability of the objects he witnessed far exceed any known drones.
Timeline Inconsistency: Graves reported these incidents as occurring frequently, sometimes daily, around 2014-2015, whereas the technology Kirkpatrick references is often from much later.
Safety Risk: Graves noted that these objects flew between F-18 jets and were close enough to cause safety concerns, arguing that a foreign adversary would not likely be testing drones in this manner in restricted US airspace without detection.
Ryan Graves founded ‘Americans for Safe Aerospace’, a website dedicated to civilian, commercial and military pilots and ground personnel as well as sea-faring witnesses to reported sightings of UAP in the sky or in the sea (Unidentified Submerged Objects – USOs). Anyone who has witnessed something they would like to report, you can do so in complete confidentiality.
But Kirkpatrick has more to say about the object:
In July 2024, Marik Von Rennenkampf, journalist at the Hill and contributor to ‘News Nation’ reported on an exchange he had with Kirkpatrick when he questioned a few irregularities he noticed coming from either Kirkpatrick or AARO.
One of them was the fact that Kirkpatrick explained that the strong, highly anomalous infrared signature in the ‘Gimbal’ video is likely due to a ‘glare’ reflection from the sun, which could not be the case as the film was taken at night. Kirkpatrick also made the assertion that the anomalous ‘stepped’ rotation in the ‘Gimbal’ video was due to an image compression.
Von RennenKampff wonders how the AARO director could know so little about the most famous and recognisable UAP footage in the world. ‘Gimbal’ is one of the three videos leaked with the New York Times article, with that of the ‘Tic Tac’ and the ‘GoFast’. Von Rennenkampff said: ‘Similarly, Kirkpatrick endorsed a deeply flawed NASA analysis of the well-known ‘GoFast’ video, stating: ‘GoFast’ was actually explained by NASA panel. They did a nice job of pulling that apart’. But after I highlighted the study’s glaring errors to Kirkpatrick, he told me ‘I haven’t looked at NASA’s analysis’.
Von Rennenkakpff is not only a journalist specializing in UAPs. His conclusions are informed by years spent as an analyst with the US Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Non-proliferation. You can see his detailed analysis of the ‘Gimbal’ here.
Von Rennenkampff goes on saying that he attempted to clarify several things with Dr Kirkpatrick but in particular, why AARO grossly misrepresented the first truly scientific study of UAP. Although Battelle in the ‘Project Blue Book Special Report No 14’ found that 33% of the highest-quality UAP reports with sufficient data to evaluate were ‘unknown’, AARO, in Volume 1 of its ‘Historical Records Review’ falsely claimed that Batelle’s scientific analysis found that ‘all cases that had enough data were resolved and readily explainable’.
ENTER THE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Sentinel News has reported on several occasions on the frustration among lawmakers towards AARO and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, not least with the allegations of retaliation coming from whistleblowers. The ‘whistleblower protection act 1989 ’ is a U.S. federal law protecting federal employees and applicants from retaliation for disclosing illegal or improper government activities, including mismanagement, waste, abuse of authority, or danger to public health. It prohibits retaliatory personnel actions and is enforced by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
AARO has a responsibility to take depositions from whistleblowers and protect them from retaliation, but that is not what the house representatives and senators were hearing from whistleblowers behind closed doors. They had already heard David Grusch, the most famous whistleblower during his congressional hearing testimony under oath in July 2023 claim that he suffered brutal retaliation to hurt him both professionally and personally for reporting on his own findings that he was actually missioned with. He added that he was fearful for his life and when asked if he knew of anyone murdered, he said he had to be careful what he said but he directed the people with the knowledge to the relevant authorities. He also mentioned that other colleagues had been at the receiving end of similar treatment. In 2022, David Grusch became the first government official in the history of the United States to file an Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) complaint. The Inspector General found his complaint to be ‘credible and urgent’ for congress and a summary was immediately submitted to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Congressional Intelligence Committees, The JPSCI and SSCI. Grusch provided his testimony behind closed doors.
On October 31st 2023, in an off-camera round-table with the press, Kirkpatrick declared :
‘I currently have no evidence of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial UAP program. We do have a requirement by law to bring those whistleblowers or other interviewees in who think that it does exist, and they may have information that pertains to that. We do not have any of that evidence right now. And why should they come to us? Well, they should come to us because, well, it’s in law that we are the authorized reporting authority for them to come to, they are protected under the Whistleblower Act that they extended those protections to last year’s legislation and we have the security mechanisms by which to anonymously and confidentially bring them in, hear what they have to say, research that information and protect it if it is in truly classified. And if it’s not classified, then we can validate that as well’.
In 2023, Ross Coulthart, who was the first to introduce David Grusch to the public, even before his hearings, explained: ‘David Grusch has admitted to me that he circumvented going to AARO because he didn’t trust AARO. He didn’t trust Sean Kirkpatrick. He went directly to the Congress and the Inspector General. And the reason he did that was because he did not have faith that his allegations would be properly investigated. We’ve got a situation now where the legislation mandates that AARO should be being administered and answerable to the Secretary of Defence. Instead, it’s being kept within the office of the Undersecretary of Defence, Intelligence and Security, which is the very agency inside the Pentagon that Lou Elizondo and others are telling me is responsible for part of the cover-up’.
As Coulthart reported, there actually was a very obvious effort by AARO to make it difficult for whistleblowers to come forward, because it had no website, no telephone number and no email address. The AARO Tweeter page did not tweet anything. David Grusch is not the only whistleblower who didn’t trust AARO. Coulthart said that some were coming to him, asking how they could report their evidence, and he recommended that they should go to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Committee, the Inspector General of the Defence force or to the Senate Intelligence Committee with their evidence. But mistrust can be contagious and this is why although some of them have gone directly to congress, others have gone to journalists such as Ross Coulthart (Jake Barber, Don Paul Bales, Col John Blitch and others who have wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals), as well as Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp of the ‘Weaponized’ podcast (Matthew Brown).
As reported by Ross Couthart at the beginning of this article, Kirkpatrick left on December 12th, 2023.
On November 7th, 2023, in a Politico article, Kirkpatrick had declared : “I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do,” adding that he still wants to finish a few tasks, including wrapping up the first volume of a historical review of the unidentified anomalous phenomena issue, before leaving (see chapter five).
Yet, on January 19th, 2024, in an article by the Scientific American, Kirkpatrick gives a different version of the reasons for his departure:
‘After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, 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.The result of this whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same, was a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims—as if we didn’t have anything better to do’.
He proceeded to deconstruct and ridicule David Grush’s testimony, saying it had been ‘told and retold by a small group of interconnected believers with possibly less than honest intentions’.
He argues that it is impossible that no president, no intelligence officer or member of congress knew about any covert program. He goes on to say that the idea of a covert program of retrieving and reverse-engineering UFOs is a narrative propagated by AATIP, Robert Bigelow and Senator Harry Reid. He said that tax payer money was inappropriated for research at Skin Walker Ranch.
He added that AARO’s historical report (that was being prepared at the time) will demonstrate that ‘many of the circulating allegations described derive from inadvertant or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technologies’.
He goes on to say how important AARO’s mission to understand what pilots witness is, but says that the media drive the stories faster than the science and peer reviews can validate them. He criticises the public and some members of congress for accepting stories without scientific evidence. He criticises those who bring their evidence via sensationalist claims rather than go to AARO (a clear reference to whistlebowers who went to journalists such as Ross Coulthart, Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp).
He ends by praising the AARO team and the quality of their work. It is the very same team that assembled the historical report that was so strongly criticised by the experts in Chapter five.
In November 2024, Jon Kosloski was appointed as new director of AARO after Tim Phillips. It raised hopes and optimism that he would change the existing modus operandi but Kirkpatrick had got there first...
In an interview with Donald Trump Junior, Ross Coulthart gave us a glimpse of what it was to succeed Dr Sean Kirkpatrick:
‘I’m talking, Don to scientists inside the program and these witnesses, who are military people who’ve actually worked at the highest level of the military, including one of them who’s worked in ‘Deltaforce’* and they’re talking exclusively for the first time about their knowledge of these programs, their first-hand role in the recovery of what they say and know are alien vehicles. They haven’t done this willy-nilly, they have actually done the right thing: they have given the Pentagon the information. This is the real kicker here. I can tell you with their authorisation that they took this information to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon’s UFO office. He knew about this and yet he told congress something different. That’s something that should be investigated. They told me they presented definitive evidence including imagery of UAPs to Dr Sean Kirkpatrick of AARO and he did nothing with it, and Don, this is a real concern, and something I would urge your dad to order an investigation into. Please, the public has the right to know this. When Dr Jon Kosloski, who’s a good guy, I am told, who’s taken over AARO, when he came into the job late last last year, he couldn’t find, when he was approached by the same team who came to him to tell him the same information, he couldn’t find that information inside the Pentagon’s UFO office. It had disappeared! And so the very office that has been set up by the defence department to investigate this issue and to supposedly to give you and me and the general public the truth about what the government really knows about UAP, it would appear the information somehow got ‘lost’.
* The 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (1st SFOD-D), also known as Delta Force is a special operations force of the United States Army under the operational control of JSOC. The unit’s missions primarily involve counterterrorism, hostage rescue, direct action, and special reconnaissance, often against high-value targets. It is one of the forces that are tasked with performing the most complex, covert, and dangerous missions directed by the president of the United States and the secretary of defense.
In February 2025, Tim Burchett introduced the UAP disclosure act (UAPDA), as part of the final National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026. He also introduced H.R.5060 - UAP Whistleblower Protection Act. It would have made it easier for whistleblowers to come forward with their stories without fear of intimidation or retaliation but as explained by Ross Coulthart, they were blocked in congress at the behest of the defence aerospace industry, those very same that allegedly hold UFOs and have reverse-engineered some of them.
On September 9th 2025, during a House oversight committee hearing on “Restoring Public Trust through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection” in which Representative Anna Paulina Luna calls Kirkpatrick a ‘documented liar’, witnesses raised allegations that AARO ignored sighting reports from witnesses as well as reports of intimidation or retaliation.
U.S. Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli testified in his opening statement that “Transparency is the foundation of truth. Without it, witnesses like us are dismissed. Protect the witnesses. Many stay silent out of fear for their careers, reputations, and the safety of their families’’. After reporting on a sighting, he said : ‘The witnesses to this event were threatened and intimidated afterwards. They were told to keep quiet and think about what they were reporting’. You can read Jeffrey Nuccetelli’s full testimony here.
Chief Wiggins pleaded for “Reporting-without-stigma protection, without retribution. Sailors need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers. Congress can help by reinforcing witness protection and by directing the relevant office to maintain confidential destigmatized channels for service members who step forward with data.” You can read Chief Wiggin’s written statement here.
In a very powerful speech, whistleblower and U.S. Air Force Veteran Dylan Borland testified : ‘ I’m a federal whistleblower, having testified to both the ICIG and AARO with direct firsthand knowledge of and experience with craft and technologies that are not ours and are reportedly operating without congressional oversight. Because of my direct knowledge of the reality of certain legacy UAP programs, my professional career was deliberately obstructed and I have endured sustained reprisals from government agencies for over a decade...
At the end of March 2023, I agreed to meet with AARO, following the suggestion of other federal officials, believing it was what our nation required of me. I had reservations about AARO due to assessments they were reporting publicly at that time as a “misrepresentation” of the truth. Because of these concerns, I did not share sources and methods information to protect current and former federal personnel who had firsthand exposure to “technologies of unknown origin.” I did not want anyone to face further retaliation beyond what they had already endured.
After David Grusch testified under oath in the summer of 2023 and provided historic disclosure, I was then asked to go to the ICIG, and I did so in August 2023. It was very clear early on during my intake interview, which was video recorded under oath, that their objective was solely to assess just how much I know, not to move forward with an investigation based on new information. The aftermath of that IG complaint still troubles me to this day.
Since my ICIG complaint, I have been prevented from resuming my prior employment and can confirm I am still blacklisted from certain agencies within the Intelligence Community. In addition, multiple agencies attempted phishing attacks to assess what I had divulged to the Inspector General, including being asked to disclose details of my ICIG complaint during a CI polygraph for a position entirely unrelated to UFO/UAP matters in November 2024. As I sit before you today, I and many other whistleblowers have no job prospects and no foreseeable professional future in a nation all of us came forward to defend. Numerous individuals have come forward in various ways to reveal the truth of the UAP reality as patriots and defenders of our nation. Yet many feel discarded, isolated, and hopeless, separated from the country they serve. Efforts to rectify the situation for all whistleblowers have been difficult and troubling, and to my fellow whistleblowers and officials who have encountered these programs, I offer my apology that you are in this position.
Dylan Borland’s full written statement is available here.
Investigative journalist George Knapp, who was also testifying under oath didn’t hold back on what he thought:
‘They (AARO) invited people to come forward, service members who knew or saw things and had experiences. And I can tell you that the people that I have talked to who went through that are deeply disappointed. There was a guy named Bob Jacobs who was a lieutenant attached to Vandenberg in 1964. His unit would record missile tests. They recorded all of them. On one of these particular tests, a UFO comes out of nowhere, zaps what looks like a laser beam at what would have been a nuclear dummy, a nuclear weapon, and disabled it. And he is called into the commander’s
office. Uh, two guys in suits clip that film footage out that shows the UFO, and he’s ordered to never talk about it. He comes forward to AARO. He heeds the call thinking he’s doing his duty as an American to tell that story and they completely dismissed him. They made up a story that they had tracked down the original footage and there was nothing like that in it. Well, there was no original footage. It had been taken away the day the footage was recorded. He’s deeply disappointed’.
He goes on:
‘People like Bob Sallas who had worked at a nuclear ICBM base who saw UFOs flying over the base and these missile silos were taken down. He went to AARO too and was completely disregarded. It almost looks like AARO operated as a counter intelligence operation to get people to come in, tell their stories, and then discredit all of them. I can’t imagine that any whistleblower or witness will ever go to AARO again because of what happened under the first director (Kirkpatrick), who’s now long gone, but still seems to act as the spokesperson for that organization’’. You can read George Knapp’s full testimony here.
Mr Biggs, addressing Anna Paulina Luna: ‘I would say, Madam Chair, maybe at some point we need to really dig deep into AARO. And I would encourage us...’
Anna Paulina Luna: ‘Oh, I’d be happy to send maybe a subpoena to Mr. Kirkpatrick’.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AARO?
As of yet, this subpoena has not been served. But in March 2026, Luna announced that she was recommending to the Chairman of the Department of Government Efficiency Subcommittee known as DOGE (now run by Representative Tim Burchett) that AARO should be completely disbanded and defunded.
As reported by Sentinel News, Tim Burchett previously mentioned that he was ‘tired of restructuring government’. He was referring to the massive ‘shake-up’ he introduced in DOGE after he took over. Burchett has many times said that his primary objective is to identify and stop money waste wherever it is, and it is his main reason to be in the UAP Caucus.
And so it is that on April 6th 2026, Tim Burchett presented a bill to not just defund AARO but shut it down all together within 60 days. Its functions would be redistributed across the military branches and would stop any centralised successor. It has not been passed yet but is currently being reviewed by the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
A GIANT LEAP FORWARD
It is tempting to go on and on about Kirkpatrick and AARO’s alternative take on the truth, because there are many more examples, but I do not need to, because, as reported by Sentinel News, on Friday May 8th, 2026, as recently indicated by President Trump, the department of war released its first tranche of UAP documents, showing that there was plenty of evidence of a cover-up on the part of AARO and NASA.
Kirkpatrick responded to the first release with this statement:
“There’s nothing unexpected in their release. And without any analysis or context, it will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and armchair pseudoscience, particularly from the playhouse politics theatre company”.
Whist NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman used a different, more appeasing style:
“I applaud President Trump’s whole-of-government effort to bring greater transparency to the American people on unidentified anomalous phenomena. At NASA, our job is to bring the brightest minds and most advanced scientific instruments to bear, follow the data, and share what we learn. We will remain candid about what we know to be true, what we have yet to understand, and all that remains to be discovered. Exploration and the pursuit of knowledge are core to NASA’s mission as we endeavor to unlock the secrets of the universe. “
Social networks were abuzz with reactions, and here are just a few from the main actors:
Rep Eric Burlison:
08.05.26: ‘Every previous president dismissed or openly mocked the UAP topic. President Trump is choosing transparency. What dropped today is just the tip of the iceberg; I anticipate that much more compelling disclosures are coming’.
11.05.26: ‘Regardless of where you land on UAPs, one thing is undeniable: The era of simply dismissing the conversation and hiding everything behind classification walls is starting to come apart’.
13.05.26: “This was the low hanging fruit. Apollo 17 photos. Pilot accounts. Predator drone footage. More is still classified, and I’ve seen some of it. If the administration doesn’t release it, I will, under Speech or Debate.”
REP TIM BURCHETT:
09.05.26: ‘I do want to thank President Trump for keeping his word to me personally. We had a long conversation and I brought that up to him and he said he was going to get it throughout and dad gummit, he kept his word but I want to warn people though this early stuff that we’re seeing is not all of it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But trump’s having to fight, you know he’s having to fight the deep state. And it’s just... the next files will be tougher to get. But I suspect he’ll get them because he is Trump and he knows how to work this thing. And there’s going to be more questions’.
10.05.26: ‘I think there’s going to be some misinformation they’re going to put out too in this next group of files, which you’ll obviously be able to see some of this stuff obviously and it is a balloon or some of this other stuff. I’ve seen some of these videos. I’m wondering why the heck they’re even putting them out’.
(This is the same tactic exposed by Chris Mellon above where alleged UAP incidents can be easily explained and therefore people just do not take the matter seriously and debunkers use these examples to perpetuate the culture of ridicule).
Rep Anna Paulina Luna:
08.05.26: ‘The American people deserve transparency, accountability, and access to information regarding UAP’s and disclosure that the government has kept hidden from the public for decades. This is a massive first step in the right direction’.
08.05.26: ‘Let history reflect that Sean Kirkpatrick is a documented liar, deep state shill, and having a very bad day. He was lying to the American people and intimidating witnesses. He was the FORMER director of AARO’
AN UNEXPECTED TURN
On May 15th, 2026, In a Sol Foundation video with Peter Skafish and Avi Loeb, Anna Paulina Luna stated that she actually liked the new AARO Administrator Jon Kosloski and revealed that when he introduced himself ‘recently’ to her and numerous members of the congress, he had apologised for Kirkpatrick’s behaviour and the way he had engaged with congress. But she still insisted that whilst she liked Kosloski, she still believed that AARO was intentionally set up to block, stonewall, and suppress information and no longer needed to exist as she and her colleagues had a good relationship with the FBI and could work with them instead. She did not say why they had only recently met with Kosloski when he has been in his post since August 2024.
The same day (May 15th, 2026), Luna dismayed the UFO community with a post in which she announced a turn that no-one expected:
‘Finished review of 40+ videos set for declassification out of @depofWar in coming weeks this am. We are standing with the NEW and very QUALIFIED Director of AARO who now has my full support and has proven through action that he is working in good faith on declass efforts’.
The message was accompanied by a photograph of Jon Kosloski, framed by Anna Paulina Luna herself and Eric Burlison.
As previously reported by Sentinel News, the sentiment in the UAP Caucus and the UAP community at large towards AARO has been one of on-going mistrust, despite a rise in hope immediately after the arrival of Kosloski in August 2024. So why this sudden change of heart? Luna’s message hints that AARO have shown good will in providing the videos she asked for in her letter.
There has indeed been a show of goodwill, because the second release of documents and videos happened on Friday, May 22nd, sooner that most people expected. Here are a few reactions :
Rep Anna Paulina Luna Luna expressed her satisfaction that Congress received the specific videos requested, though she emphasized that there is still much more to be seen and highlighted the ongoing resistance from within the intelligence community.
Tim Burchett and Lue Elizondo warned that alphabet agencies are actively blocking Disclosure—and the CIA is intentionally pushing misinformation in recent releases.
Tim Burchet said ‘The truth is @realDonaldTrump wants total disclosure but the Deep State is trying to block him. My money is on Trump’.
Marik von Rennenkampff notes that many videos lack critical information because essential symbology—such as camera orientation and flight data—has been redacted, limiting their analytical value. However, he highlights two specific cases from the release: A video showing a spherical object manoeuvring through clouds and a Military Testing Range Incident: A late 2025 event involving senior intelligence officials who observed bright, reddish-orange orbs in close proximity to their helicopter, which appeared in a T-shaped formation, corroborated by infrared sensor images.
Von Rennenkampff argues that, based on his analysis of 80 years of records and consistent patterns in object capabilities, he is convinced these objects demonstrate advanced technology that must be taken seriously as potentially interdimensional or non-human intelligence.
For a comprehensive view of the major English-speaking newspaper headlines on the event, take a look at Sentinel News’s partner Matt Laslo’s Ask-A-Pol’s page.
Ross Coulthart:
‘There are certainly videos in the release of these last few days which do suggest anomalous phenomena. They do show what we call the five observables: instantaneous acceleration, going from naught to extreme speeds in the blink of an eye. They’re tuning corners without stopping. These are things that normal human technology, prosaic human technology can not do. People are starting to use the word ‘alien’ word. This is non-human. But the Trump administration, what they’re doing is : they’re saying to the public ‘we’re going to let you be the judge. We’re going to let you make the judgment yourself’ and what I fear is they’re kind of playing with the public a bit because I know from my own sources, they have absolutely categorical ‘wipe the floor’ evidence that shows beyond any whatsoever doubt that we are indeed being visited by non-human intelligences and the United States government has known this for decades. Why it’s kept that secret, I don’t know but it’s breaching trust with the American tax payer, the public, unless they’re told the full story. The one that’s still to come out’.
Interviewer : ‘So the President and the White House often call themselves ‘the most transparent in history’, but you’re essentially saying they could go a step further. Do you want them to go a step further? The public seems to think that they should, right?’.
RC: ‘Yes, Sir, I do. and I think they may - will be considering doing that. There’s a lot of speculation. I’m hearing from people inside the administration that The Trump administration is indeed soliciting advice about how to tell the public that we’re not alone. There are consultations taking place with spiritual leaders. I’m now able to confirm that there was some speculation a couple of weeks ago about a group of pastors but it turned out it wasn’t directly related to the White House. But there are religious leaders that have been consulted by the White House. I’m aware of people in the administration who’ve reached out and I have actually spoken to people myself who have asked what I think would be the anthological shock for the public and I told them that frankly I think the biggest shock for the public would be the sense of a betrayal of trust if the government doesn’t follow through and tell the whole story. We’ve had some astonishing allegations in the last few weeks. We’ve got an allegation of course long standing from people like David Grusch, the very reputable whistleblower who came forward to us on News Nation three years ago. David referred to the existence of a covert retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving alien technology. That bear in the room is still not answered and the other allegations including one from Lue Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program. He’s talked about hybridization programs that he’s been told about from within the intelligence community’.
Interviewer: ‘Ross, is there any concern that this over-dumping of files and videos and documents, is sort of diluting the water in terms of what’s important for the public to take away, meaning that there’s just so much happening, this oversaturation that it’s hard for us to even tell what’s new, what’s important and for us to actually really grasp how important it all is?’
Ross Coulthart: ‘Everybody I speak to tells me that they think that the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community (IC) are trying to bore us into submission. That they’re hoping the public will just shrug their shoulders and go ‘oh yeah, hum hum...’ and go away. I don’t think there’s a genuine intention from within the pentagon and the Intelligence Community to release this information which would go further, but I’m told President Trump and his team are genuinely thinking about making a full candid disclosure so we can only hold our breath and hope that the President follows through with his genuine promises of transparency’.
A TWIST IN THE TALE
On Friday May 22nd, 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was resigning from her post. As per the government’s website, the Director of National Intelligence serves as the head of the Intelligence Community (IC), overseeing and directing the implementation of the National Intelligence Program budget and serving as the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to national security. The U.S. Intelligence Community is a coalition of 18 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI. The IC agencies fall within the Executive Branch, and work both independently and collaboratively to gather and analyze the intelligence necessary to conduct foreign relations and national security activities. Gabbard’s title — Director of National Intelligence — was created in response to public outrage over the intelligence community’s failure to prevent 9/11.
A TALE IN THE TWIST
Due to her role as the overseer of all intelligence matters, Tulsi Gabbard was instrumental in the release of the UAP files. She also admitted that she believed in the possibility of extra-terrestrials.
In April 2025, Tulsi Gabbard established a task force called ‘The Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) to investigate the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, the origins of COVID-19, Crossfire Hurricane, the Biden Administration’s domestic surveillance, Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI), and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
James Erdman III, a current senior operation officer at the CIA working on joint duty at the DIG was tasked with the investigations related to the origins of COVID, anomalous health incidents (including the ‘Havana Syndrome’) , and UAP.
On May 13th, 2026 , Erdman testified to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and described how the CIA obstructed his investigations. Although he was testifying about the corruption he witnessed around the COVID matter (namely the cover-up that COVID-19 was created by a Chinese laboratory and did not come from animals), some of the tactics used by the CIA and IC were used for the UAP investigation too. He declared under oath that the CIA was refusing to provide him with the information that he was tasked to look into, and that analytic standards had been violated. He also stated the Congress oversight was by-passed and revealed that the CIA was illegally monitoring the computer and phone usage of the DIG personnel and that CIA employees lost their job after collaborating with the DIG. And he stated that 40 boxes of JFK files and MK Ultra files being prepared for public release, as per President Trump’s orders, were taken by the CIA. Erdman raised the alarm over the CIA overstepping the mark about presidential directives.
In a June 3rd, 2026 podcast, Jeremy Corbell expressed his anger about the CIA spying on the DIG : ‘The CIA was spying on whistleblowers in the UAP field. Everybody I brought in to the dig, they were spying on their phones and computers and listening in. And I brought them in because they told me that they would be absolutely protected under whistleblower law. It is the most illegal thing’.
Tulsi Gabbard publicly denied that the CIA had ‘raided’ her office but Anna Paulina Luna, Chair of the house on declassification, confirmed that the documents (that the CIA had previously denied existed) had been taken from the ODNI by the CIA and not returned. Luna and Chairman Comer sent a request of ‘preservation of documents’ to John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA at the White House. She explained that the CIA does not have jurisdiction to work against the President’s order. She added that the fact that this happened when both the President and John Ratcliffe were out of the country seems to be ‘a coup’.
Meanwhile, Eric Burlison has been at work. After the first release of UAP files, he declared:
‘The first batch of UAP files released was just the low-hanging fruit. The deeper investigation is into the partnership between government agencies and private contractors like RAND, MITRE, and Lincoln Labs’.
True to his word, he has followed up on this.
What are ‘Rand’, ‘Mitre’ and ‘Lincoln Labs’? They are part of what is called ‘FFRDC’s (Federally Funded Research and Development Centers). They are private non-profit entities that receive privileged access to classified facilities, sensitive data, federal programs, and government funded research.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory is one of the oldest FFRDC in the country, founded in 1951 to build the SAGE air defense network.
On May 7th, 2026, Burlison sent a letter to Lincoln Labs asking them to submit a 1952 recording from the Beacon Hill Study, labelled “flying saucer talk,” with Edward J. Ruppelt listed as the briefer, as it appears to be a potentially significant historical record bearing directly on the federal government’s early handling of unidentified aerial - or anomalous phenomena - related matters. He added to also include all elements relating to UAP : audio recordings, motion-picture film, transcripts, briefing materials, memoranda, correspondence, technical reports, accession records, inventories, metadata, classification guidance, and declassification review records.
The MITRE Corporation is one of the largest and most influential FFRDC’s in the USA. On May 22nd, 2026, Burlison transmitted legislative interrogatories and production requests, specifically for the purpose of seeking answers regarding MITRE’s potential custody, control, analysis, transfer, destruction, or withholding of records related to UAP, anomalous aerospace or undersea events, recovered materials, technologies of unknown origin, and alleged legacy crash-retrieval or reverse-engineering programs.
As often cited by Rep Tim Burchett, private entities have been entrusted with UAP material because they can escape the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ that allows citizens to demand information from the federal government. However, private organisations do not fall under this obligation and therefore, all materials and documents are kept out of public scrutiny.
As per Burlison : “If you really want to hide something from Congress, you don’t put it in a government file cabinet. You hand it to a private contractor. That’s why my investigation is following the trail into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world”.
On May 31st, 2026, In a post on X, Burlison said:
‘MITRE is now moving to comply with my formal demand for UAP records dating back to 1930.My 10-page interrogatory asks them to preserve everything, designate a senior official, and produce all unclassified records within 45 days. If the Pentagon hid UAP materials in private contractor networks, the American people deserve to know’
THE PRESS CONFERENCE
On June 9th 2026, a press conference outside the Capitol in Washington took place. The speakers were Film maker and UAP investigator James Fox, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Jared Moskowitz, Scott Perry, journalist Leslie Keane, and whistleblower David Grush.
They gave a brief summary of what the situation was and appealed to President Trump to give orders for full disclosure and guarantee full immunity to whistle blowers. David Grush reiterated his claims that the USA have retrieved non-human vehicles and non-human intelligences.
You can read about David Grush’s claims here.
Rep Eric Burlison finished with : ‘ We want to see if any individuals have any information. Do not be afraid to come to a member of Congress. We will protect you and we will make sure that the truth is out there. Thank you’.
It was a veiled manner for Burlison to tell would-be whistleblowers NOT to go to AARO.
You can view the special video of Sentinel News on the press conference here.
PURSUE RELEASES
As promised by President Donald Trump, the department of war started releasing some UAP data. Some of the documents and videos show again that AARO - and NASA - have not been completely honest about the phenomenon.
You can view the releases on : www.war.gov
First Release:
New UFO Declassification Website Launched Following Presidential Announcement by Baptiste Friscourt
New declassification website launched by Baptiste Friscourt
Has ‘Disclosure Day’ arrived? by Alban Deschamps
Second Release
Third Release
Red Orbs in the American West , byAlban Deschamps.
Fourth Release
U.S. Military Test Grounds Regularly Penetrated by Unknown Platforms by Alban Deschamps
Department of War Releases Clear UFO footage for the first time By Baptiste Friscourt
AARO LOOSES ITS GRIP…
As the UAP Caucus makes steady progress and establishes itself as the champion of UAP transparency, AARO is gradually losing a grip on the situation and the narrative. It is not the first time that Congress by-passes AARO….
The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 118-31, Sections 1841-1843) required the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish the ‘‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection.” The law required that by October 20, 2024, each federal agency review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.
As per the published guidance:
‘The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Records Collection will consist of “copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects).”
Agencies must identify all UAP records that exist in any format. Agencies must make digital copies of these records and prepare them for transfer to NARA by the deadline established by the act. NARA will only accept the digital versions of UAP records.
Publicly releasable copies of UAP records transferred to NARA will be made available online in the National Archives Catalog. NARA will provide an online finding aid that will be integrated with the Catalog.
Agencies will continue to manage the original source records in their custody according to the NARA approved disposition schedule. Temporary records will eventually be destroyed. Permanent records will eventually be transferred to NARA, even if a copy has already been transmitted as part of the UAP collection.’
As yet, despite the deadline, not all agencies have fully complied, and the information is trickling rather than pouring, but some of the data can be seen on the NARA site. This information is therefore escaping AARO’s oversight and tendency to be ‘economical’ with data release.
NEW INITIATIVE BY THE WHITE HOUSE
On June 14th, in a post on X, professor Avi Loeb wrote:
‘I was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community to lead and assemble a team of scientists and experts for a new UAP Science Advisory Council. The council includes Prof. Carol Cleland: anomaly identification; Dr. Richard Cloete (@RichAC2020): data analysis and AI tools; Dr. Omer Eldadi: data management, AI, and human psychology; Dr. Tim Gallaudet (@GallaudetTim): oceanography; Ross Howard: communication; Dr. Devesh Nandal: numerical analysis and astrophysics; Prof. Garry Nolan (@GarryPNolan): molecular biology and materials science; Dr. Regina Sarmiento: data analysis and AI-assisted data management; Dr. Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer): the study of anomalies; Prof. Peter Skafish: anthropology; Prof. Matthew Szydagis: instrumentation and data collection; and Dr. Jennice Vilhauer: quantitative psychology. This constitutes an amazing A-team of exceptional scientists and experts’.
On July 20th, Professor Loeb wrote in ‘Medium’ that he was visited by someone from ODNI who asked him: “Would you be willing to establish and lead a new advisory council for the U.S. Government on the science of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?’’. He wrote: ‘There was no doubt in my mind that I should accept this role. As a U.S. citizen, I feel obligated to help ODNI and the Pentagon fulfil their mission of protecting national security. Moreover, if one in a million UAP happens to have a non-human origin, this will constitute the biggest cosmic discovery ever made by humanity’.
He explains that the request is unusual as governments do not tend to ask civilian scientists for help, or to admit that the best sensors1 in the military are unable to explain the objects in the sky, especially if they assume that they are from adversary nations. He adds that the council has already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information concerning past incidents and possible related materials. The council’s scientific analysis and findings will be shared publicly on the website https://uapsac.com/.
The new council is a multidisciplinary team of expert researchers assembled to supply scientific guidance to the U.S. government’s new interagency UAP Governance Board. The aim is to help agencies determine whether unexplained sightings pose national security threats or represent major new discoveries.
Many were surprised by the inclusion in the council of Michael Shermer, a noted skeptic, but Professor Loeb explains : ‘I also included a skeptic to make sure that there are no biases in the analysis and to make sure that the conclusions reached are beyond any doubt’.
No doubt well aware of the mistrust surrounding AARO, Professor Loeb declared: “My leadership style promotes transparency and trust. This is why I was the longest serving chair, for three terms of 3 years, in the history of Harvard’s Astronomy department,”
He goes on:
‘The council will process only unclassified information. This is intentional as it allows scientific analysis, methods, and conclusions to be shared publicly. Classified access goes through the UAP Governing Board and relevant agencies, which the council advises.The council is not starting with a conclusion. Unknown does not mean extraterrestrial, but it also should not be explained away without evidence. The task is to reduce uncertainty by improving the quality of the data.The nature of UAP is a detective story and we should resolve it by collecting new clues that were not recognized before. I will do my best to overcome the anti-science sentiments expressed too often by believers and skeptics. The future can be better than the past. History does not have to repeat itself.The best is yet to come. Stay tuned!’
Sentinel News will stay tuned indeed and will endeavour to report on the new council’s findings.
A GLIMMER OF HOPE FOR WHISTLEBLOWERS
On July 21st, Fox News reported these exclusive news:
‘President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to waive prior nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) for former government employees and contractors cooperating with unidentified anomalous phenomena investigations. President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives — AARO or the President’s UAP taskforce, ‘PURSUE’ — and have their prior NDAs abrogated,” a senior administration official said, with AARO referring to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office established to investigate UFOs and other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs)’.
Whilst this is most certainly a show of goodwill from President Trump , one must remember that there is already a whistleblower protection act in place that seems to have been of little effect for a number of whistleblowers, especially if they went to AARO for protection, as reported above. The wording was disappointing, as Fox New’s reported the order was for ‘former government employees and contractors’, so leaves out all the current employees.
However, the acting director of national intelligence, Mr. Aaron Lucas, wrote the following. “President Trump is delivering on his commitment to unprecedented transparency. With non-disclosure agreements no longer standing in the way, current and former government employees and contractors with relevant UAP information can come forward through clear channels. ODNI.gov will soon issue guidance to ensure the intelligence community swiftly and consistently implements the president’s directive.”
So the question is : Is the order for former or current and former employees? For most of them, it doesn’t matter anyway…
Astrophysicist Eric Davis, who has long worked on the UAP subject has expressed in the past that he would say everything he knows if his NDA was waived. On July 22nd, he had a number of exchanges with UFO researcher Jo Murgia and assessed that “Trump’s order did not forbid committing acts of official or unofficial off-books retaliation against whistleblowers.” He added that ‘Trump’s order (which doesn’t add value to the same NDA waiver language already in a previous NDAA that was enacted into law) isn’t about sharing classified UAP information with the public. It’s about sharing classified information with AARO and PURSUE in a classified setting. Trump did NOT issue a SF-312 NDA waiver for us whistleblowers to reveal classified information to the public. BTW, Hal Puthoff and I already shared our classified UAP information with @RepLuna‘s task force, AARO, a certain law enforcement agency, and I shared my information with the SSCI (twice) and the SASC….In other words, the earlier SF-312 NDA waiver in an earlier enacted NDAA and Trump’s waiver order of yesterday DO NOT ADDRESS the protection of whistleblowers from government or unofficial off-books retaliation or impose serious consequences upon those who commit acts of retaliation against whistleblowers.
Sentinel News discusses the matter here.
FINAL WORDS ON DR SEAN KIRKPATRICK
Despite the initial intention by Congress to obtain valuable help from AARO to achieve transparency, the opposite has been true, and whistleblowers, politicians and members of the public are not he only ones to be frustrated.
In a Question & Answer session on June 14th 2026, Ross Coulthart did not hold back on what he thinks of Dr Kikpatrick:
‘At some stage in history, the ignominious performance of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick will be commemorated as the last gasp of the gatekeepers. I’m sorry. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper. He’s somebody who’s working inside the legacy program. As we revealed exclusively on Reality Check, even before he left his job in AARO, he was given a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. That ties him directly into the legacy program. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper. He’s somebody who’s working inside the legacy program. As we revealed exclusively on Reality Check, even before he left his job in AARO, he was given a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratories that ties him directly into the legacy program. Sean Kirkpatrick is a gatekeeper.
He’s one of those who’s read in to the program and his job all the way along with AARO - and that’s why the defense department appointed him - was to hinder, delay, obfuscate and it is to the eternal credit of the UAP caucus in Congress and to the efforts of good people inside Arrow that he has been consigned to the dustbin of history and he will be remembered eventually as the deceitful anti-disclosure gatekeeper. I’m sorry. He’s a lying scoundrel and he really does deserve to be exposed, and eventually he will be. All he’s done all along is lie and deceive. I was talking to somebody just this week and I know this person presented very detailed evidence of the legacy program to Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. Everything that he gave them was ignored, swept under the table. Kirk Patrick’s role at AARO was essentially to hinder any revelation that might give the public any chance at all of obtaining any scintilla of evidence about the legacy program’.
THE SECOND AARO REPORT
As we are writing the last lines of this article that focussed mostly on AARO and Dr Kirkpatrick’s unusual relationship with the truth, the second report by AARO has finally arrived, after a delay of more than six months. You will find the analysis of this report in Baptiste Friscourt’s article.