The past few months have seen the release of reports on UFOs from both NASA and the Pentagon, in addition to whistleblower testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee in July. The gist of the situation, according to the whistleblowers, is that UFOs are real, they are numerous and they represent a threat to national security.
One of these whistleblowers, David Grusch, a former Air Force pilot and U.S. intelligence official, went even further, accusing the U.S. government of being in possession of crashed craft, complete with the "non-human biologic" bodies of their pilots.
Another whistleblower, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, urged the government to take UFOs more seriously, saying: "If everyone could see the sensory and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change."
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In the midst of these claims, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has maintained that there is "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."
AARO said in an October report that the bulk of UFO sightings it is currently studying would likely "resolve to ordinary phenomena" with an increase in the quality of data, an area that both AARO and NASA are working on enhancing.
Still, the head of the office, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, recently told Politico that discovering evidence of alien activity would be better than the alternative.
"The best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens," Kirkpatrick said. "If we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard. And that’s not good.”
Kirkpatrick announced last week that, after 18 months in the position, he will be leaving AARO by the end of the year.
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In answer to the question "Are aliens real?" Kirkpatrick said that the level of the public conversation around a possible alien reality needs to change.
From a scientific perspective, he said, the community would agree that it is "statistically invalid to believe that there is not life out in the universe, as vast as the universe is."
"The probability, however, that that life is intelligent and that it has found Earth and that it has come to Earth and that it has repeatedly crashed in the United States is not very probable," he added.
Kirkpatrick said that the process of looking for signs of life in the wider universe begins very objectively, with sound scientific discourse. As that search moves into the solar system, the conversation, he said, turns into one of science fiction.
"And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory," he said.
The public conversation, Kirkpatrick said, needs to move away from unfounded claims of government conspiracies and cover-ups and toward a place of scientific proof and scientific benchmarks.
"You have to have a hypothesis," he said. "You have to have measurables with that hypothesis, and then your data has to meet it. And you have to lay that out in a peer-reviewed journal so that you have something to pin it against."
Kirkpatrick said his office has investigated more than 30 whistleblower claims so far. But he noted that Grusch has "refused" to speak with AARO.
"If he has evidence," Kirkpatrick said, "I need to know what that is."
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