WSJ: AARO fails to recover direct evidence of UFOs from a safe
Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha describe how, under the direction of Dr. Kirkpatrick, AARO took hours to reach the location of a safe , even though it was in Lue Elizondo's office.
While the second part of the article by the two WSJ journalists still does not relay the protests of the many prominent figures who contradict their main source, Dr Kirkpatrick, a notable passage can be found within the article.
While being interviewed, Lue Elizondo revealed that his investigation had uncovered a secret program that had recovered extraterrestrial biological material. Elizondo also stated that solid evidence from his investigation, stored on a hard drive, was safely locked in a safe in his former office. He specified that a contact had confirmed to him a few days earlier that the hard drive was still there.
Hours after hearing of Elizondo’s evidence, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force’s investigations unit cordoned the office and gathered with a drill to break open the safe. As they approached it, they realized the drawer wasn’t actually locked. When they opened it, they found yet another surprise: It was empty.
This raises several questions. While the presence of AFOSI may be one of them, this is not the first time it has been involved in UFO investigations. In fact, it has been involved many times before.
AFOSI is the Air Force's felony-level investigative service that detects and neutralizes threats to personnel and resources. It investigates crimes, fraud, espionage, terrorism, and information systems, and provides specialized services and support to DOD.
For example, Richard Doty, one of its agents, is known for actively spreading disinformation about UFOs.
The FBI's involvement in the subject of UFOs has long been known, and their presence in the operation corroborates this. Recently, FBI representatives provided US elected officials with a secret briefing on UFOs, showing them the results of their investigations. The briefing was so convincing that the officials are considering entrusting the UFO investigation mission and budget directly to the FBI, given the AARO's lack of convincing results and questionable analysis.
Interestingly, with regard to the investigation itself, the AARO had to call on its own rival, probably because it lacked the necessary expertise.
This organizational inefficiency likely caused a delay in accessing the safe, despite the fact that a simple on-site check could have verified whether the safe was unlocked.
Those wasted hours may have been enough for staff to intervene and retrieve the evidence, especially since both AFOSI and the FBI had been notified, increasing the risk of information leaks.
The WSJ article does not mention any investigation into the theft of evidence, despite it taking place in a US defense office, an area one would expect to be monitored. The method of theft is also unusual: the safe was left open rather than being broken into, suggesting that the thief was familiar with this type of government security and able to infiltrate the premises without arousing suspicion.
Comments from Lue Elizondo
The comments from Luis Elizondo regarding the theft are reproduced in full below:
It should be to no one’s surprise that Kirkpatrick managed to get to my safe four years after I had left the Department. The USDI and the AFOSI had by then conducted at least two investigations against me (and found no wrong doing). How Kirkpatrick could possibly be surprised to find the safe unlocked and empty after four years is truly absurd. Why didn’t Kirkpatrick sound the alarm? Why didn’t he ask the obvious follow up questions like:
“Who opened the safe?”
“Under whose authority was the safe emptied?”
“Where did the files go?”
“Who left it safe unlocked?”
Didn’t Kirkpatrick find it a bit suspicious that a safe, within a vault, within a SCIF, would be left unsecure and emptied?
Instead, Kirkpatrick seems to take the position of: “oh well, I guess there’s nothing to see here!”
To simply not follow up is profoundly irresponsible and further highlights the bias of both Kirkpatrick and the WSJ for not asking the obvious questions. Lazy reporting in my opinion.
The rest of the WSJ article also reveals a lack of knowledge regarding a source cited by Sentinel News in its previous article.
The authors appear to be mocking the fact that the UAP investigations focused on something very strange: a werewolf. They also tried to implicate Luis Elizondo, whose portrait appears in the header of the article. We, again, recommend looking into his publicly available book Imminent.
“Personally, I never understood the need to go down the civilian experiencer route in the first place. Private research organizations already did that and did it well. We worked for the Pentagon. It was safer to confine ourselves solely to military and intelligence encounters with UAP.”
“I had recently accepted a new position as Director of National Programs, Special Management Staff, nestled within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The program managed national-level special-access programs directly for the National Security Council and the White House.”
“Now that I had broader authorities than before, Jay, John Robert, and I decided to move the remnants of the effort away from DIA and house it within my portfolio of national programs, ensuring the prying eyes of our detractors would no longer have any visibility. At the same time, Jay, myself, and a handful of government civilians and contractors would continue to run AATIP under the proverbial radar.”
While AAWSAP examined all aspects of strangeness in search of new breakthrough technologies for the DIA, Lue Elizondo’s AATIP was limited to military encounters with UAPs showing evidence of a threat to national security.
At the time of writing, the Department of Defense had not responded to questions regarding the investigation into the safe.
Update 25-6-2025 : added Lue Elizondo’s comment