Former Pentagon UFO hunter talks COVID-19, Haitian animals and pseudoscience in general

Sean M. Kirkpatrick, a trained physicist, spent most of his career in government. Intelligence and technology expert for several Pentagon agencies.culminating in 18 months as the government’s chief investigator on UFOs.

It was in that latter role, as the first director of the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, that Kirkpatrick faced a wave of misinformation that roiled American public debate over scientific issues.

Kirkpatrick, “After carefully assembling a group of talented and motivated individuals to develop a rational, systematic, scientifically based strategy for investigating these phenomena” wrote in the magazine “Scientific American” In January, shortly after his retirement from AARO in December, he and his team became embroiled in “a flurry of tall tales, fabrications, and second or third versions of them,” prompting “a media frenzy and a flurry of Congressional and executive action.” time and energy devoted to investigating these alleged claims.

Kirkpatrick’s observations will be familiar to scientists studying the origins of COVID, where the overwhelming weight of evidence undermines a partisan theory that the leak came from a Chinese lab; or a rise in anti-vaccine demands; or even those studying the Trump/Vance campaign’s false claims about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets.

All the same elements are there: the whirlwind of gossip, the social media frenzy, the distracting effects on Congress and the White House, not to mention the complicity of the media. “The modern media cycle pushes stories faster than solid research, science and peer-review pipelines can support them,” Kirkpatrick wrote.

“As for me,” Kirkpatrick told me a few days ago, “I was accused of lying to the American people.”

He further revealed to The Guardian that he had experienced UFOs with true believers.threaten my wife and daughterand trying to log into our online accounts, much more than when I was vice president of Intelligence (of US Strategic Command). I didn’t want China and Russia to touch me like these people.”

It will also be familiar to other scientists on the front lines of such investigations – scientists whose work has confirmed the theory that the virus that causes COVID-19 was transmitted to humans through the wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. presented to a House committee only to be booed by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) and accused of taking bribes and, yes, lying to the public. Vaccination advocates have been physically challenged and even attacked by anti-vaxxers.

Kirkpatrick was not involved in the debates over these issues, but he sees them as representative of the same kind of suspicion and conspiracy he encountered on his home turf. So let’s first review his experience as director of AARO.

Office 2022 was created to investigate past reports and reports of UFOs, or in official terms, unidentified phenomena or UAPs.

Kirkpatrick says he decided early on to conduct extensive empirical research: “We were looking for any information that would substantiate any claims that were being made to Congress or on social media.”

This involved not only reports from pilots about objects exhibiting unusual aeronautical behavior, but also a number of reports in the press, online, and among UFO believers about alleged secret government programs to collect, examine, and even attempt to reverse engineer technology supposedly derived from sunken extraterrestrial UAPs.

Kirkpatrick says AARO has “no evidence of anything amiss.” The office would not comment on the reports, saying it “did not have enough data to even make an assessment.” When AARO interviewed pilots, he says, “nine times out of 10,” data from their planes did not confirm their recollections, often caused by optical illusions or common sensor anomalies.

The agency has found evidence that some sightings are not related to aliens but to foreign surveillance activities, including by China, which Kirkpatrick says has technological capabilities. can match or even surpass the US. It is clearly a matter of national security, as he testified before a Senate subcommittee in April 2023, but not an interstellar matter.

As for secret state programs, according to AARO unclassified report in MarchThe agency is investigating all claims in the press and on social media: about CIA experiments, “leaked” government documents, technological tests supposedly witnessed by “extraterrestrials,” physical examinations of alien spacecraft, collections of extraterrestrial material in the possession of private companies, and so on.

AARO discovered that all of these were the product of overheard conversations, forged documents, and misinterpretations of anomalous materials produced on Earth as extraterrestrial artifacts. None of the people who made these allegations and were interviewed by AARO were known to have any knowledge of these programs or incidents, but were repeating what they had heard from others.

“Summary results of all (US government) investigations to date,” the report says, “have not found a single case of UAP depicting extraterrestrial technology.”

However, these accusations have been part of the news for years, even by their own people. some of the most august news organizations. They have been presented as witnesses before congressional committees, although, as Kirkpatrick noted in Scientific American, “none of the conspiracy ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye have chosen to come to AARO to present their ‘evidence’ and statements for filing on the record, despite numerous invitations.”

The source of the story is a small group of people associated with Las Vegas industrialist Robert Bigelow, who funded research into UAPs — and paranormal phenomena as well — through a private organization he dissolved in 2004. Reed (D-Nev.) asked the Pentagon to set up a program to protect foreign material the government has allegedly withheld. (The Department of Defense refused.)

Bigelow continued to believe that aliens had visited Earth from space after 2004, even during 2017 interview on “60 Minutes”. He did not respond to my request for comment, which I sent through his company, Bigelow Aerospace.

As with the UAPs, the same names appear in the debate on the origin of COVID. The list of promoters has hardly changed since the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, many of whom were wrongly cited as experts. News articles promoting lab leak theories that are invariably (and embarrassingly) baseless.

There are some differences between how the UAP debates have emerged and those about the origin of COVID and the safety and efficacy of vaccines. It seems that proponents of the lab leak theory about the origin of COVID do not actually have much financial backing, e.g. But at the heart of this theory and the anti-vaccine movement are vested interests that feed off the beliefs of others.

“Some are naive, some like to influence power and legislation, some do it for money, some for fame, some may even be true believers,” Kirkpatrick says. They rarely admit they are wrong because “they have made it central to their life purpose.” They inject their beliefs into policy and the legislative process “through access to higher authorities” to get the Defense Department and intelligence community “to work and spend money.”

He says people calling on the government to “investigate some of these things thoroughly and put some facts on the table and show what is right and what is wrong” are not doing anything. “The problem is that there is constant bombardment until they get the answer they like, even though everything revealed so far suggests otherwise.”

This points to a “broader problem of public opinion about scientific research – science via social media and science via the scientific method,” she says. “There is a decline in critical and rational thinking skills when looking at what is happening in the world.”

When scientific data confounds received beliefs, he says, “people cry ‘conspiracy’ or ‘the data is wrong’ or ‘the scientists are making it up. ’” Well, some of these scientists have been around for 30 or 40 years. “If you don’t believe that they know what they’re doing, what are you going to base your decisions on in the future? Just pure belief and speculation?”

Kirkpatrick is working on another article on the topic of disinformation. “I see what I’ve been doing on UAP and disinformation as a microcosm of many other issues challenging America today. That is, the divide along belief lines where the evidence points to an opposing belief system or one’s own political system.”

These conflicts can be exploited by foreign adversaries or domestic actors seeking political gain or personal wealth. “It’s a common and growing trend that is concerning from a management perspective,” Kirkpatrick says, impassionedly. “How do you manage when these gaps and fissures are not only exacerbated and exploited, but also magnified through social media and the media by influencing the political powers in the United States?”

Having dedicated his career to national security, he is concerned and terrified by this trend. “The public needs to understand how science works and if it contradicts their beliefs, it is not a conspiracy,” he says.

“They need to understand that their beliefs are being used by people in the United States or in other countries for profit. If the American public fully understands that they are being used, they will react differently. Because Americans do not like to be taken advantage of.