Sean Kirkpatrick — UAP Files Podcast S4|21: “Former Pentagon UFO Chief Answers the Biggest Questions” (May 29 2026)
- Speaker: Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, former Director of AARO. ~1h01m.
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/q-IncaY7zQ8 (UAP Files Podcast, 2026-05-29)
- Captured: 2026-05-30 via yt-dlp audio → Whisper.
- Primary for kirkpatrick-scientific-american-2024 and kirkpatrick-and-aaro. A recent restatement of his consistent positions: most cases resolve to foreign-adversary activity (“in our backyard”) or known objects; nothing truly anomalous survived bit-level analysis; social media runs off with conclusions before the analysis is done; his sociological interest in believers/debunkers/experiencers.
- NOTE: Whisper auto-transcript; verify quotes against audio.
where we’re talking about government cover-ups that have persisted for 80 years. As an intelligence officer, I would expect all of you to expect me to lie to you. Recently, the former Arrow director, known as Sean Kilpatrick, attacked our witnesses and members on this committee. It should be noted that he’s a documented liar and brings into question what his purpose at Arrow really was if it was not to follow up on investigations and disclose his findings to members of Congress. Are you aware of Skywatcher, Jake Barber and those guys that say that they’ve got data and they’re able to summon and they’ve got a dog whistle and all that sort of stuff? Have you had any contact with those guys? I’ve heard about that, yep. We’ve talked to them. And I stopped my public affairs officer at the moment. She was explaining this to me and I said, wait, wait, wait. I’ve just spent my entire career having it drilled into my head that if I end up on TV, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Don’t worry, we’ll spend some time practicing. And I’m like, yeah, OK, this is not going to go well. A real world example, a tip and a FOIA request. So John Greenwald is a guy that’s got, you may have heard of him, the Black Vault. I’m sure he’s a pain in their ass. But he’s constantly requesting things to try and get information out. And at one point they were sort of hiding the acronym ATIP and it wasn’t coming out. And it was only much, much, much later that it was released. And it didn’t seem like any legitimate reason to do it. It’s the same thing’s going to be true with this whole issue with Yankee Blue, right? That people are able to have contact with whatever is out there. And so they will attempt CE5. You’ve probably heard of Stephen Greer, who’s got a protocol. There are other versions and variations. Would you have looked at something, I don’t know, let’s say attempting to contact CE5, for example, would that be something or would that be, I’m a man of science. I’m not even going to go there. But then later on in the article, it said, Kirkpatrick has also said that none of the hundreds of military UFO reports recently analysed by his office have positively attributed to foreign activities. So it kind of sounds like we’re saying that there’s stuff going on in the backyard, but it’s not foreign adversaries and it’s not aliens. Alex is unique in this in that she was super helpful as we were sitting down and going through. The new director of Arrow, Dr. John Kozlowski, has said that there are cases that with my physics and engineering backgrounds and time and intelligence community, I do not understand. And I do not know anybody else who understands them either. That seems to sort of contradict quite a bit with your experience. He seems to be saying there is some stuff that doesn’t make any sense. Of all the people in the UFO UAP community, I’ve wanted to interview Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick more than any of them. Why? I don’t know. The guy is something of an enigma and I’m fascinated by psychology as well as technology, the nuts and bolts and why people think a certain way. Debunkers, sceptics, scientists on both sides, experiences, contactees. I find it all fascinating and I think it’s really useful to understand people. And so far, I haven’t really seen an interview where we get into who is Sean Kirkpatrick? What’s inside his brain? How does it work? How does he think? And I think the best way of doing that is to try and have a down to earth conversation. So, yes, we do get into it. Yes, I do push back. Yes, I do ask some difficult questions, but I’m also trying to build some rapport with Sean. And I know I’m going to lose some subscribers for this. People say you shouldn’t platform him. I understand. I get that. I just think more information is better than less information. And we can pick that apart later. Can I ask you a favor before we jump into the main interview? Please consider a like and a subscribe and share and leave a comment below. Let me know what you think of this interview. Let’s get into it. Is it OK? I’d just like to sort of break the ice a little bit and just get to know who who Sean is. And the best way of doing it, I always think that you tell a lot by a man, by the music they listens to. So if Sean’s driving home from a stressful day at work, what would be your go to band or your go to song that you’d listen to on the drive back? Well, it’s going to depend on what kind of day I had. It’s really stressful and dark. It’s probably going to be 80s alternative grunge. Anything from a little Nirvana or even some late Nickelback, early Nickelback, late 80s, early 90s. Could be some Sheryl Crow if I was feeling a little less dark. But it could be some light jazz, could be some classical. But again, not too far from the, you know, Rite of the Valkyries or Kareena Burana. Yeah. Wow. I mean, I mean, I’m impressed that you’ve mentioned Nickelback. That’s that’s it takes some guts, but I’m with you. If today was your last day, it’s a fantastic song when you’re really in a bad mood. This is true. This is true. How are you these days? I mean, I’m a father of three kids and that’s stressful enough. I’ve got a two year old at home and honestly, sometimes I don’t know how I’ve not got more gray hair. But working in a job like yours, especially the stuff that you do, not even related to the UFO, UAP stuff, but to then be thrust into the spotlight, what was how are you these days? It’s a personal question, but. You know, I’ve spent most of my career in the shadows because that’s what intelligence officers do. Coming into that job in particular, I was I was told within the first week that I would have to. Go through a number of interviews, have some public speaking events. Answer questions of that sort. And I stopped my public affairs officer at the moment. She was explaining this to me and I said, wait, wait, wait, wait. I’ve just spent my entire career having it drilled into my head that if I end up on TV, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong and there is a there is something bad happening in national security. So you’re now telling me I have to do that as part of this job? She goes, yes, yes, we know. We know. Don’t worry. We’re going to we’ll spend some time practicing. And I’m like, yeah, OK, this is not going to go well for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is I am well known for not suffering fools, whether those fools are my own bosses or my peers or what. But I am also known for being extraordinarily fierce about protecting my people and taking care of them. And so where this comes to conflict in, you know, whether it’s dealing with this issue, dealing with the people who are willfully resisting any sort of logical or rational discourse on the problem or attacking my people. And that gets me very upset and angry. And so a lot of what you see and a lot of where I’m at today is. You know, me continuing to defend those people, whether they’re military or civilian, they deserve the respect and and appreciation of the American public for doing their job. So to answer your question. You know, I’m I’m semi retired. I do some consulting. I don’t work inside the government anymore. I’ve had a long career and I’m happy to spend some time trying to teach the next generation. Was there a moment when you were in perhaps when you first started or perhaps even further down the line, when when you sort of realized that it was going to change your life? I mean, I appreciate you’ve gone from in the shadows into into the public space. But when it actually said, OK, this is this is a unique situation. I think it was a unique situation, you know, prior to me even being announced just some of the. Responses that, you know, started to to crop up within the government, let alone outside as as things became public. I realized really very early on that was going to be. A challenge. And, you know, going back to the children, I have one daughter. I think everybody knows that I am trying to keep her away from all of this. But there are people who have intentionally been trying to find out about her and, you know, dox her and hunt her down. And that’s that is. Woefully out of bounds and off limits. And so that does make me concerned even more so. Yeah, understandable. Understandable. I mean, I would. Yeah, there’s there’s nothing that would. There’s nothing that would get in the way of me and my family. And I can, you know, as a as a parent, I completely understand that the aspect of it. And I think one of the things about the Internet especially is that it just and somebody that’s in a public spotlight, even worse so if you’re sort of a villain within the the conversation for whatever reason, whether it’s, you know, created by memes or whatever, that internal instinct of human instincts, rather of a father to to look after their family. So I understand that. And I think that part of it was ridiculous. I think I said that to you once before and I reached out and said, you know, when I’d heard that people had turned up at your address or and, you know, that was just unacceptable. Absolutely ridiculous and disgusting. And I think one of the things that really frustrated me is because I’m technically part of that community, so to speak, that reflected badly on the rest of us because, OK, well, they’re all like that and we’re not. There are some really bad people and it’s, you know. There absolutely are. And it does reflect. And I would have to say, you know, that hasn’t gone away. We we get a visitor about once a quarter. Wow. An unwanted visitor about once a quarter. The local sheriff’s department is very familiar with having to come out here and collect people and get them away. Yeah. And that is a continuing and unfortunate issue that does reflect badly on on that part of the community. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say that there’s some incredible people in this community that I’ve had the good fortune of meeting on the flip side of that. You know, I’ve interviewed maybe 200 people on camera and probably spoken to thousands behind the scenes and some fantastic, wonderful people of all different levels of the sort of spectrum of belief and what they believe in. And some some really ethical people. But of course, there are some some bad guys. Definitely. What some. Did you see the the Jesse Michaels tweet that he put out where he was offering you? I think it started off at fifty thousand dollars and then it went up to one hundred thousand dollars to come on his podcast and talk to him and debate him. Did you see that? No, actually, I don’t have a Twitter account or an ex account. And since no one actually reached directly out to me to even discuss such a thing, I heard about it. I don’t know. Week or so later, somebody one of my colleagues called up and said, hey, are you going to do this? I’m like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So to my mind, that was certainly more for show than seriousness. I mean, it’s not like I’m difficult to find. People find me all the time in a variety of different venues. Anybody could have reached out and and asked a serious question like that. No one ever did. So, again, that I took that as being more theatrics than serious. Maybe. I mean, Jesse’s got a few. He’s got a few quid. So I wouldn’t I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say that is out of bounds. I’m sure that if he watches this, that he would be more than happy for you to come on. But anyway, that’s I just wondered because if somebody offered me one hundred thousand dollars to go on a podcast, even if it was not going to go their way. Yeah. No problem at all. I would have been up for it. Unfortunately, I can’t. I can’t offer that kind of a fee from my humble spare room. But yeah. So you said that you’re sort of semi-retired now. What does that what does that look like? So you’re consulting for Arrow still? Are you still connected to Arrow? No, I don’t. I don’t consult for Arrow. I had a. First of all, I had as a senior executive, you have a two year restriction against representing back to the organization you came from when you retired. So I had a two year restriction on on. Essentially having Arrow hire me as a consultant until really just this past December was my two year mark, and I have plenty of other things to be doing across the national security spectrum that are more in line with actual national security issues like space, counter space, nuclear deterrence, acquisition, you know, how we’re buying everything from munitions to new satellites. So I’ve got my hands full doing a number of other things. Yeah. What’s it like having secrets? What’s it like keeping secrets? I mean, you are a very unique person. And, you know, I said this to I told a couple of people that, you know, there was a possibility of having a conversation with you. And the reason for that is because I think I mean, I’m fascinated by by psychology and by engineering. So it’s the the engineering of whatever’s out there. If there is something out there, I believe that there is. And the psychology of people involved in the subject, whether that’s people that are in your position, people that are experiences or believers or debunkers or hardened skeptics, whatever. I find it fascinating. And you are an incredibly fascinating person, whether you realize it from from our point of view or not, you know, genuinely somebody that’s been in a position to have all of these secrets and to have, you know, some really important stuff that you’re working on that the public will never see or perhaps not for many, many years or hear about. But then to keep that secret from family, from friends. What’s it like holding on to secrets and being so careful about what you can say? So, you know. I was I worked in national security for almost 30 years and arguably I still work in national security today. You are trained early on about. The importance of secrets, why you have them. What’s at stake, what’s at risk if if they are compromised and that is. Part of your culture as you are developing as a young officer throughout your career. And I have this conversation with young officers often, and it’s it’s something that that the general public doesn’t fully appreciate. Keeping secrets. Is is a very difficult thing when you’re faced with, you know, family, friends, you know, there are. And it is a. Not everybody’s cut out for it. Not everybody is cut out for that. There are young officers, young analysts who have a have a hard time. Learning the lessons about being an intelligence officer. Keeping the secrets. Doing your analysis, doing your work. Coming up with a result. Briefing that to the decision makers, whether they’re policymakers or acquisition people or military officers. And. Stepping back at that point and let those individuals take that information and go and make a decision, an informed decision, and that’s what’s important is that you are informing. Right. That’s the whole purpose of being an intelligence officer is to understand fact and analysis and inform the decision makers. Now, where analysts sometimes get into two problems. And there’s a very, very public example of this in the first Iraq war is. Analysts sometimes present that information, and if the policymaker doesn’t make a decision. That the analysts felt was what they. What their analysis suggested was the right course of action. They get they get upset about that. And why is that? Why is that important? Well, decision makers don’t have to take the intelligence. Right or wrong. A policymaker can look at a piece of intelligence and make a completely different decision, which may involve other factors, whether it’s economic, geopolitical, trade, whatever the case may be. The analyst has to understand, hey, look, that’s that’s their job, that’s their right. But then I have to keep they have to keep that secret. Now you have on top of I have to keep secrets. I have to keep secrets that maybe I don’t agree with. And that’s that can be very hard. And so we you know, there are times where I’ve had to sit down young analysts and go. And to explain that to them and go, you’re not you either have to accept that or you’re not cut out for this kind of work. The same thing is true on the collection side of people that go out and collect intelligence, whether it’s technical or it’s human or it’s signals or what have you. It’s a little easier to understand what you’re protecting. If I’m going out to if I’ve developed a new sensor and I and it’s classified and I go out to collect. On a target, I know that I have to protect that information about that sensor, about the operation, because I can compromise technology or I can compromise an operation. And therefore, you know, people people get rolled up or they they get killed. So there’s. There are severe implications to all of this, which is why and this is actually something that that has fed into the UFO mythology, certainly on the conspiracy side of, you know, look. Everybody has to sign NDAs. You’ve heard about these NDAs, people have signed NDAs. I have probably signed thousands of NDAs. Everybody signs an NDA as soon as you get a clearance. And every time you get access to a new program or new clearance level, you sign a new NDA and you have to re-up those NDAs every few years. Well, we I think we put some of this into the into the report, but, you know, going back in history a little bit. All those NDAs were different at one point. Well, every service had a different version and every agency had a different version. But ultimately, it all came down to the same congressional codes, the law that that they are referencing for violating the Secrets Act. And in it, there is a there is a clause in the law that says, you know, if you willingly give away secrets to a foreign adversary. You are punishable, you know, by imprisonment, fines up to and including death, depending on the severity of of your transgression. And it used to be, you know, again, back in the day when all of these were different, some of those NDAs actually had the language spelled out in the NDA. And if you’re a young officer and you’ve signed that for the first time, that that will stick with you. I remember when I signed a couple of them and it said, you know, punishable by death, you have to protect this for the rest of your life. And I’m like, well, that’s serious. Right. You don’t want to you don’t want to screw that up. But that those were there were lots of those. And then somewhere in the early 2000s, they did a the government did something that I wish they’d do more of today. They actually took a look at the bureaucracy and said there was too much bureaucracy around this and we need to standardize these. So they came up with essentially two standard forms now, the 4414 and the SF312. And they all say the same thing. And now everybody uses the same form. And all it does in there now is just reference the title code in U.S. law where those clauses are still at. But it doesn’t like spill it out for you now. So anyway, that’s a long, long way of saying, hey, there’s you know, there are ways everybody has to learn how to do this. Is it hard? Yes. I mean, I can tell you for a fact that some of the secrets that I’ve had. You know, the fact that I couldn’t even share with family where I was going or how long I would be gone absolutely contributed to, you know, the my the loss of my first marriage. There are people that just don’t understand that and wouldn’t accept that. There’s lots of other problems that arise. When we when I got married the second time, we had this great reception and half of the people there were from the State Department and they all knew each other. And the other half were people from my community. And they all knew each other, but none of them could say they were actually intelligence officers. And so everybody had their own little story. And I was you know, I was a physicist in the Air Force. And and it wasn’t until kind of halfway through the reception that one of the. Well, I should say that preface is that one of my one of my agency friends and I built a drone that would stream video. Now, this was well before drones were commercially available. So we kind of built it by scratch and we had it tethered via an infrasonic beacon and it would circle around and stream to this camera. And we thought it was cool that we’d have this thing flying around streaming pictures of the reception. And finally, one of the one of my wife’s State Department friends come up to her and I and she just kind of leans over and she goes, you know, all of your friends are very. Opaque, and we would really like to know why is the drone always over top of the State Department people and not taking pictures of anybody else? Oh, it’s just the wind is where it was. It was parked and there was just nothing I could do about that. But, you know, those kinds of things crop up and it becomes a it can become an issue and it can become a relationship issue. But it can also be fun if you kind of poke at it a little bit. Yeah. Have there been secrets that you felt the public should know, but it wasn’t your place to share them, obviously. And punishable by death is obviously a, you know, a good contributing factor of not sharing it. But things that you thought that’s not right. Um, no. And let me caveat that with, you know, real legitimate programs that have a legitimate reason to be classified for national security reasons have no place in the public domain. There is a reason we keep those secrets. There are national security reasons we keep those secrets. And no matter how many times we try to explain that, that’s not going to change, right? I am not going to share information about a sensor or an operation or human operation or how we know different things because that gives away capabilities to an adversary that that we don’t want. And then many times, you know, we’re speaking UK to US, you know, we have, despite strains today, we have allies and partners. There are a number of things that, you know, we wouldn’t want to give to the public domain because it might compromise on ally or partner. And then you have all kinds of issues that come up from that. So, no. What I will say, though, is that there have been one or two times throughout my career that I’ve come across things where somebody tried to classify something because it was embarrassing. And it is drilled into us from day one that that is, one, illegal. And two, you cannot classify things because it might bring you and bring you or the government embarrassment. That’s just not what classification authorities can give you. And in fact, when you discover that as an officer, you are obligated to raise that issue and have it adjudicated at a higher level. And inevitably, they declassify whatever it was that was embarrassing or whatnot. And so that is a real but rare issue that comes up. It does not happen often. It’s usually by a younger, inexperienced officer that is trying to do the right thing, but inevitably runs afoul of, you know, that’s you can’t do that. Yeah. Do you think, though? I mean, we’re talking before about sort of conspiratorial stuff and how how things are easily turned into conspiracy theories. I think if I could push back just slightly, or perhaps that’s more my perspective on it, it does feel as if sometimes the secrecy and the classification fuels that conspiracy thinking sometimes. Because, I mean, if you have, let’s say for example, a real world example, ATIP and FOIA requests. So John Greenwald is a guy that’s got, you may have heard of him, the Black Vault. He does lots of FOIA on a regular basis. I’m sure they know him very well. I’m sure he’s a pain in their arse. But he’s constantly requesting things to try and get information out. And at one point they were sort of hiding the acronym ATIP, and it wasn’t coming out. And it was only much, much, much later that it was released. And it didn’t seem like any legitimate reason to do it. But that kind of would have seemed like it would contradict a previous statement that was perhaps made by the Pentagon. So it’s almost like that was to prevent that being found out. Embarrassment? Embarrassment, yeah. Something like that. It’s very much, it was very much an embarrassment. So look, you know, the ATIP-OSAP issue was ultimately an embarrassment because it demonstrated lack of oversight of officers and the expenditures of funds. And when it became evident, right, they shut everything down, they cleaned it all up, they briefed it out to Congress, and they stopped. But you have to look at it as the, you know, look, somebody failed to do their job in oversight. Because somebody was able to misappropriate funds for an investigation into paranormal activities that had absolutely nothing to do with the original intent. The original intent was a legitimate issue, okay? I want to investigate foreign adversary aerospace technologies. What are they doing? Where are they going? How are they getting there? What is the research they’re doing? And somebody was able to reappropriate those funds for other purposes without the proper oversight to catch them. We have a very hierarchical and a lot of people say very bureaucratic process by which we execute programs and funding, and there’s a reason for that, so that things like that don’t happen. And so, yeah, I’m sure somebody tried to not release it as much as they could until it became self-evident that that was not just going to go away, right? And they had to. It’s the same thing is going to be true with this whole issue with Yankee Blue, right? I mean, that was an embarrassing thing to find out. The Secretary of the Air Force was very upset. Senators were very upset because this was clearly something that had been going on for decades and affecting young officers’ mindsets. They were doing a full-up investigation to find out what else was there, who else was doing it. Those are the kinds of things that do that. But let me speak a little bit about conspiracy. You’ve touched on this a couple of times, and I think it’s an important delineation. People have heard me, if they’ve paid attention, say this a couple of times. So, let’s talk about the difference between intelligent life in the universe and conspiracy. There is a delineation. I’m also a physicist, and as a scientist, most of the scientific community will agree that it is highly likely that there’s other life in the universe and probably other intelligent life in the universe. The universe is big. Most people can’t even comprehend how big it is. And it’s also big in time. So, there’s billions of years between one end of the universe and the other. The way physics works, the way signals travel, the way anything travels takes time, and evolution takes time. So, it’s not just finding where in space life exists. It’s also, when did it exist? NASA has a very large budget, over a billion dollars, and one of its main missions—sorry, it’s a billion dollars for this mission—is to look for life in the universe. That’s what they do. The European Space Agency has a mission to do that. As long as we have that conversation through the lens of NASA or ESA and it’s out in the universe, it’s a very rational discussion. People talk about signatures that they’re measuring, satellites that are looking for probabilities, the physics of it, the chemistry of it. It’s a very academic and scientifically based discussion. As you bring that discussion closer and closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it starts to cross into a little bit of science fiction. We get the Martian, we get the red planet, we get a lot of things that talk of Europa, 2010, 2001, space odysseys, all those great, great science fiction stories that allow us to envision what life might look like. Still touched with science, but it’s now starting to enter into a little bit of science fiction. And then somewhere when we cross into the ionosphere of Earth, we suddenly walk into a very different realm where we’re talking about government cover-ups that have persisted for 80 years. We have a story, a baseline story that crops up into the public eye about every 10 to 15 years and then dies off and then comes back up. It all has to do with essentially the same storyline, which is we have some dozen or so of these ships that have showed up in Earth. Depending on which story and variant you’re listening to, they’ve all crashed in the last mile in the United States, and we’re covering that up. And perhaps there’s a couple of versions where one or two of them are in China or one or two of them are in Russia, but just close enough, right? There is no longer any science behind that. It is a story that has propped up in popular culture and it’s in the minds of the public and it will stay there. There is nothing that is going to change people’s belief because it is a belief. And that is important to understand, that no matter what evidence is placed in front of people, you cannot change a belief. I would have as much success trying to convince Christians that God doesn’t exist it’s just not going to happen. So if you have that understanding, then you can start to figure out where are the gaps in our knowledge that perhaps we can try to fill in with science and critical thinking and rational thought and everything that I have been trained to do for the last 50 some odd years of my life. I’m not going to tell you how old I am, everybody can find out. Okay, can I push back slightly? I think the ET hypothesis is one of many and I think, let me ask you a question that might help me understand a little bit as to whether or not you’d even considered or perhaps kind of explored the more out there theories. Because one of the biggest and longest sort of surviving theory is this contactability, that people are able to have contact with whatever is out there. And so they will attempt CE5, you’ve probably heard of Stephen Greer, he’s got a protocol, there are other versions and variations. As part of your work, and I appreciate your work was in relation to things that were within the US government, within the intelligence community, but actually exploring some of these subjects, would you have looked at something, I don’t know, let’s say attempting a contact, CE5 for example, would that be something or would that be, I’m a man of science, I’m not even going to go there. Or would it be, well look, we’ll put this into our toolbox of potentials and then we’ll start taking all of them out one by one until we get to none and we’ve covered them all. Where do you stand on that? So let me tell you how we approach this, because I think this is important for everyone to to try to get in their heads. One, this was an evidentiary-based approach. There has to be data and we would follow that data wherever it goes. Period and dot. If there’s no evidence and there’s no data, you can hypothesize all you want. But the data has to match. So now let’s talk about how do we do that? What is the scientific method as you apply it to this? You have a range of hypotheses that start on one end, which is advanced adversary technology, to the other end, which is the ET hypothesis or the interdimensional hypothesis or the time traveler hypothesis or whatever hypothesis that you want to put in there. And in the middle you have all these known things and we can come back to that in a minute. So in this range though of hypotheses, you have to know what it is that you’re comparing to. What signatures would you see for each one of these bins? Now we have a pretty good physics-based understanding of the universe, but we don’t have a good engineering base of the universe. I can’t engineer a warp drive, but I know how one would work. I know what a wormhole would do. Can’t make one, can’t control one. It’s theoretical because we can’t even find one, but we know what it would look like and what it would do. And we know from that what are the signatures that would come off of that. So what kind of gravitational waves? What kind of magnetic waves? What kind of energy densities would be required to manifest some of these things that are theoretical? In the known category, the known objects, our problem there is that we have a wide range of sensors that are designed for one thing and one thing only. Find and track very big, fast-moving, heavy objects and put a weapon on them. They are not designed for small, semi-transparent, or slow-moving objects. They filter out things like birds and geese. There are lots of things that these sensors are not designed to do that they sometimes will see. And so the way you have to get at that, to get at the scientific method, is I now have to go measure all of that. So I have to take a cross-section of all of these known objects from drones to balloons to balloons with payloads, without payloads, blah, blah, blah. And I go measure all that in all of these sensors. And I get empirical data that I know what this looks like. And then on the adversary side, we know where the adversaries are researching. We know where they’re going. We know what they’re trying to achieve, everything from propulsion to flight dynamics to whatnot. Okay, so now I go to the intelligence community and I go, hey, if they were to have a leap ahead, a breakthrough, and where we think they’re going to get 20 years from now, they are actually doing today, what would that look like? Give me those signatures. So now I have signatures associated with all of these hypotheses. And anybody that comes in with data or evidence, we compare to those sets of data and evidence and signatures and go, which one does it match? Okay, and I can tell you there’s been no signature that has showed up that matches extraterrestrials, interdimensional, time travel. Those are great, great hypotheses. But you got to have data to support it. And all the data for everything that we have come across has been one of these other categories. Yeah. So is it fair to say that’s a long way of saying, no, you haven’t tried CE-5? Not if there’s any data that’s not associated with it. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Are you aware of Skywatcher, Jake Barber and those guys that say that they’ve got data and they’re able to summon and they’ve got a dog whistle and all that sort of stuff? Have you had any contact with those guys? I’ve heard about that. Yep. We’ve talked to them. Absolutely. I found absolutely nothing credible about it. Okay. They weren’t able to produce any evidence. They weren’t able to produce any pictures, documents, video, data, anything, right? Yeah. I’m sure there’s only so much that you can say, but you’d made a comment, I think, in Politica a few years ago, and I’ve got it here because I thought it was really interesting. I remember at the time, I think it was near the time that you first came in, and I was really intrigued by it because it sort of contradicted itself within the same article. It said, I’ll read it out to you if that’s okay. It says, the chief said that the best, the chief as in you, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, said that the best thing that could come out of this, his job, is to prove that there are aliens. He then said, if we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of people doing stuff in our backyard, and that’s not good. But then later on in the article, it said, Kirkpatrick has also said that none of the hundreds of military UFO reports recently analysed by his office have positively attributed to foreign activities. It kind of sounds like we’re saying that there’s stuff going on in the backyard, but it’s not foreign adversaries, and it’s not aliens. No, that’s not what that says. Let me re-emphasize, the best thing that could have happened out of that job was to find aliens or evidence of. None of the data supported that. If it’s not that, there are, the signatures of data or the data that we get, right, fall into really those other two categories, all those known things or adversaries doing something in our backyard. If it was something that was truly anomalous and had some signatures associated with adversaries, that would be very concerning, right? Remember, it said nothing is positively attributed to that. We had some indications that there were, and I think I even testified about this later, we had some indications that some of the things we were seeing were foreign adversaries, but we didn’t get to 100%. We didn’t even get to 70% level of confidence. It was, this could be, but we have to go run it down. There were some things that we thought might have been adversary, and after you dig into it for another, you know, six months of an analysis at the bit level, and that’s a very important thing, is that you have to actually be able to get to the raw data and analyze the raw data and not compress video from the internet. Then what we found was what we thought was an adversary may have turned out to be a sensor anomaly, something we didn’t know the sensor would do, and let me give you an example of that. Radars are wonderful sensors, but they are noisy and they are full of all kinds of crap, to be blunt. The simple way that they operate is they send a pulse of energy out in a repetitive motion, and then they look for the pulse as it reflects back and it comes back, and then they measure the time of flight for the pulses, and then maybe they measure the amount that’s scattered back, and so they can get an estimate of the size and speed of objects. We have advanced our radars so much now that we’re into the, you know, we’re into the fully digital world, and so we have these exquisite algorithms on the back end, these fusion engines on the back end that take all this data, all the different types of pulses that go out, and it analyzes it, and it comes up with the answer of, hey, there’s an object, and it looks like it’s an aircraft, and it’s moving at this speed, at this trajectory, and, you know, high confidence, got that. Well, what we have found over and over again is that if a radar is going after an object that it’s not designed to go after, let’s say a semi-transparent weather balloon, some of these mid-range balloons, a lot of them actually have metal ribs and the metal wires in them to keep the integrity at different altitudes, especially the mid to lower altitude ones. Well, you know, those things rotate, and depending on the density of those wire ribs, a radar pulse may get reflected back, or it may go through it, or it may only partially reflect, and so the fusion engine on the back end of that radar is trying to interpret incomplete data, and when it does that, let’s say it misses a pulse, it didn’t get a pulse back when it thought it should have, and it gets the next pulse, but it’s now a little rotated over this way, it tries to interpolate what it missed, and it will miss, it will mess up, it will overestimate, overcorrect, it’ll give you a wrong answer, so it’s garbage in, garbage out, right? You won’t know that from a video of the HUD display. You have to actually pull the individual logs of each radar pulse, take a look at that, bring it back, run it through the algorithm, simulate what happens when you miss pulses, and get your outputs, and that’s why you end up with, okay, it takes us six months to get into this. It’s not quick, but if you want an answer with high degree of confidence, here’s what we have to do. Now we’ve got the sensor model, and we’ve got the algorithm, and we can show that that’s what this thing actually saw, and why it gave you the wrong answer. By the time we do all that, though, social media has gone off with the, you know, no, we’ve already, you know, identified that it’s an, you know, it’s an alien going at Mach 2. No, I understand, I appreciate that, and I think my perspective comes more from humans, from human physical experiences, and the eyeballs, and I think when you’ve got the issue with sensors, that sensors can have all sorts of issues, and have problems, and you need to confirm something beyond all reasonable doubt that it’s not the sensor, and it’s actually there, and you’re actually seeing it, then that becomes quite difficult, but I think it’s very different from somebody like a Commander David Fravor, corroborated by Alex Dietrich, or, you know, Kevin Day, who’s seen. It’s not different at all, because humans are just as fallible. In fact, humans can be more fallible, because they don’t like to admit that they’re fallible, and so what you end up with is incomplete information, or information that is not, while it is perceived to be something, they are still subject to optical illusions. I can’t tell you how many pilots we’ve had to sit down and go, here is what you said in your report that you saw, but here’s what your instruments said when we pulled all of your data, and let me recreate this whole thing for you, and what you suffered was an optical illusion, because you’re over a particular airspace, it has no points of reference, you get disoriented quickly, or my personal favorite, do you know how some pilots estimate speed and range? Especially when their sensors aren’t registering anything, which should be your first flag, if it’s not registering anything. They will do the thumb thing, where they hold it up, and they occult the object, and they count how long it takes to go from one end of the thumb to the other, and then they calculate how fast it was, and they write that down. That’s not terribly scientific, especially if your instruments don’t support that. So, when people tell me, oh, you know, these are trained aviators, and they don’t make mistakes, they do make mistakes, and I’ll tell you, the difference is between the Navy and the Air Force. I don’t have any Air Force pilots that are insisting that they don’t make mistakes. I have a lot of Navy ones that do. I have sat down with trained aviators that fly the F-35, the most advanced aircraft we have in our inventory, after they have insisted that they have collected on and seen this thing, and it took us six months to dive into the data, and then we get them back into the office and go, here’s what your data actually says, and they want to learn what it was was wrong, so that they don’t do it again. So, people are still humans. They still make those errors, and they make mistakes, and whether or not they want to admit it is a different topic. Now, Alex is unique in this in that she was super helpful as we were sitting down and going through some of the phenomenologies that I asked her about that nobody else had, and she was helpful in trying to understand, for example, which direction did the water go? Was it up or down? Because that makes a big difference on if something is propulsing down or did something come out of the water, and in this case, it came out of the water. There are other things that could come out of the water that are more viable explanations than it’s an alien craft. So, having that kind of discourse and having that kind of discussion is very helpful, but another thing people need to recognize about this is the farther back in time you go on these cases or these stories, the less likely you’re ever going to get resolution, and the reason is because there’s no data. Nobody was required to save any of the data from the Nimitz. Nobody was required to save any data from anything going back before Arrow stood up. That was one of the first things I did was issued orders to the entire department through the joint staff of everything that they had to save from a data perspective and the time that they had to get that data over to Arrow so that we could start actually preserving real data, not only from, say, an aircraft, but from any of the supporting ground systems that were in operation at the time. It wasn’t until we did that and standardized the reporting process that we started getting actual data. So, I hate to disappoint everybody, and I told Congress this as well. I’m like, you’re likely never going to get an answer about the Nimitz. There is not any data that anybody is going to be able to support, and human reporting is just the first step in the investigation. It is not the end. Yeah, I’m conscious of the time. One thing that does stick out with me, and hopefully this will be a last question, really, if that’s okay. The new director of Arrow, Dr. John Kozlowski, has said that there are cases that with my physics and engineering background and time in the intelligence community I do not understand, and I do not know anybody else who understands them either. That seems to contradict quite a bit with your experience. He seems to be saying there is some stuff that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve seen some of the things that he’s referring to, and I would just disagree. He’s not the only physicist that’s out there. There’s a lot of people that know a lot of different things about everything from plasma physics to lightning to all kinds of other interesting electromagnetic types of phenomenology. I think that’s playing a little bit up to the sensationalism of the department these days. He did say, I can’t brush my hair or I can’t sweep my hair back or something without the permission of someone above me. That seemed as if it had been very carefully curated, not saying things publicly that he couldn’t say. I don’t know. That was just my impression. I thought I’d ask you. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I don’t think anybody else has, or will perhaps have, the opportunity that’s in my position. Us weirdo podcasters that are talking about UFOs are probably not your first priority, so I do appreciate you making some time for me. You’re welcome. Thanks for having an interesting conversation. No worries. All right.