When the Pentagon‘s chief UFO investigator announced he would step down from the role next month, he hinted at just how distressing his findings regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) have been.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the outgoing director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said he believes “the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens,” according to POLITICO.
“If we don’t prove it’s aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard,” he added. “And that’s not good.”
What Kirkpatrick appeared to be alluding to was the national security implications of the hundreds of UAP incidents AARO has been looking into since the office was set up in the summer of 2022.
Just last month, Kirkpatrick reportedly emphasized to CNN that most sightings involve benign objects, such as balloons or drones, while others may be more nefarious in nature.
“There are some indicators that are concerning that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard,” he said at the time.
There has long been rampant speculation about what certain UAP may be, particularly those that appear to defy the laws of physics, leading some to suspect there may be extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth, or something else.
Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence and military official who claims the government is covering up a UFO retrieval program, stoked that sense of wonder with congressional testimony over the summer in which he talked about there being non-human “biologics” in some of the recoveries.
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Kirkpatrick, who said the congressional UAP hearing was “insulting” to members of his team, insisted in a press briefing that his office has “no evidence of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial UAP program.”
The report from POLITICO, published on Tuesday evening, revealed that Kirkpatrick plans to leave his role in December. “I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do,” he said.
Kirkpatrick also reportedly said he has a few tasks yet to finish up and that once he steps down, his deputy Tim Phillips will take command of AARO in an acting capacity until a full-time director is selected by the Pentagon.