AARO's Unexpected Twist: Caught in Their Own Game
This Friday, March 8, 2023, the AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) published its report on UAP
The report has been eagerly awaited by the public, following various congressional hearings over the past year with the likes of whistleblower and former intelligence officer David Grusch. But reading the report, transparency seems a stranger concept to the Pentagon than extraterrestrial life itself.
Beneath the AARO logo that adorns the report, one can read this Latin quotation: "universum mutao est", literally "the universe is changing" - an assumption that Sean Kirkpatrick (the former AARO director who oversaw this publication) doesn't seem to share.
The introduction vaguely traces the history of the various institutions that have researched UAP, while accusing popular culture, films and books of skewing public opinion. It is stated that AARO intends to provide scientific insight; yet the very definition of UAP (unidentified anomalous/aerial phenomenon) does not seem to be taken into account, as we shall see later.
AARO claims to have found no evidence of extraterrestrial life. A concept that differs from the less restrictive expression "non-human intelligence" used by whistleblower David Grusch and legislators alike - a choice perhaps not without significance. Indeed, other possibilities for the non-human origins of the UAP phenomenon have been evoked by researchers, such as a dimensional plane not accessible to the human eye, or an unexplored area of our planet (the majority of the ocean floor is still unexplored), or even artificial intelligence left over from an ancient civilization not belonging to the hominid genus. The Silurian hypothesis, based on the work of Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was even mentioned.
Further on, we read: "AARO found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology." Strangely, however, in their document “AARO Mission Brief_DOPSR Reviewed July 2023” published a few months ago, one could read that such UAP reverse engineering programs were being considered… by AARO itself.
Biased techniques
Advancing in the text, the report targets, without naming him, David Grusch:
UAP Nondisclosure Agreements (NDA): AARO has found no evidence of any authentic UAP-related NDA or other evidence threatening death or violence for disclosing UAP information.
In other words, AARO accuses Grusch of lying when he filed his complaint in May 2022. A surprising bias, which contrasts with the impartiality displayed by the agency. A closer look at AARO's modus operandi reveals biased techniques. For example, when 5 witnesses accuse a former CIA officer of working on a program to experiment with otherworldly technology, AARO is content getting the officer in question to sign a denial...
The rest of the summary is written in the same spirit:
AARO assesses that all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist; are misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to an unwarranted and disestablished program.
In other words: if UAP are not of extraterrestrial origin, the public won't know about them.
If we assume that the recovered devices are of terrestrial origin and belong to a foreign power such as China, the United States obviously reserves the right to steal the technology in the greatest secrecy. This would not be a first for the superpower, since, as numerous declassified reports have shown, at the end of the Second World War, Operation Paper Clip was carried out to recover scientists and technologies developed by the National Socialist Party - in other words, the Third Reich. Although it has to be admitted that this kind of plundering is commonplace in world geopolitics, the Americans are not the only ones to use these techniques.
Further:
AARO assesses that some portion of sightings since the 1940s have represented misidentification of never-before-seen experimental and operational space, rocket, and air systems, including stealth technologies and the proliferation of drone platforms.
It's hard to imagine such drones in 1940, even if engineer Archibald Lowi did attempt to develop a wireless telegraphic target aircraft in England called the "Aerial Target" in 1916, whose performance was a far cry from that of the famous "Tic-Tac" seen in 2004 by Navy pilot David Fravor. It should also be pointed out that the "Tic-Tac" is not mentioned once in this report.
Section 3 of the report, entitled "SECTION III: Scope & Assumptions" is mainly legalese and explains that the report will be in two parts. The first covers events from 1945 to October 2023, and the second from November 1, 2023 to April 15, 2024.
The fourth section consists of a historical list of the various U.S. UAP study programs. It starts with Project Saucer (1946-1948), then Project SIGN (1948-1949), and so on. Each project is summarized in a few sentences, briefly describing the organizations involved, and the purpose of the program, in a presentation that ends with more or less the same conclusion: this project has found no convincing evidence of UAP of exotic origin and does not require further study. It's interesting to note that even program names are not error-free.
The short time devoted to Project Blue Book and 65,778 digital documents is surprising since they have been summarized in 40 lines in a generous font. Some will regret the absence of direct links to the historical reports available in the various public archives, making it more difficult for observers to engage in further analysis and fact-checking.
Witnesses dismissed
The fifth section, entitled "SECTION V: Assessment of Interviewee Claims of USG Involvement in Hidden UAP Programs", consists of a summary of the interviews conducted by AARO, divided into three classes :
As of September 17, 2023, AARO interviewed approximately 30 individuals. AARO categorized these individuals into three tiers:
Tier 1 interviewees are those who have spoken with congressional staff or Members of Congress and have been subsequently referred to AARO;
Tier 2 interviewees are those who have been referred to AARO by Tier 1 interviewees;
Tier 3 interviewees are AARO-generated interviewees that have a corroborating touchpoint to the principal integrated narrative of reports from Tier 1 and Tier 2 interviewees.
Priority is given to those interviewees who claimed firsthand knowledge of government programs, events, or details about any resulting material. Interviewees relaying second or third hand knowledge are lower in priority, but AARO has and will continue to schedule interviews with them, nonetheless.
Contrasting somewhat with the Senate's encouragement to testify before AARO, the latter emphasizes:
Whoever (…) communicates (…) information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death (…)
A peculiar reminder, echoing the threats claimed by David Grusch - threats dismissed outright by AARO.
The personnel of the U.S. military is portrayed as lacking discernment, as they could mistake an alien spacecraft for an F-117 Nighthawk:
An interviewee stated that a former military member, who was also an interviewee, had stated that he had touched an off-world aircraft.
AARO contacted and interviewed the former military member who denied any knowledge of off-world technology in possession of the USG, a private contractor, or any other foreign or domestic entity.
The former military member attested that he could not remember if this encounter with the original interviewee had ever occurred, but opined that if it had happened, the only situation that he might have conveyed was the time when he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter at a facility. The former military member signed an MFR attesting to the truthfulness of his account.
As far as Section 6 is concerned, there's nothing really noteworthy, except that it could be inferred that the Pentagon has shown foresight in spinning disinformation around Kona Blue, paving the way for the AARO report. Kona Blue refers to a program proposed in 2010 to the Department of Homeland Security to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial spacecraft. In other words, AARO seems to be rejecting or manipulating witness statements.
Section 7 is devoted to a review of the historical context of UAP investigations since 1945. To summarize AARO's position, as we have already seen, popular culture is to blame.
In section 8, AARO states that UAP demonstrating capabilities that do not allow them to be equated with meteorological events or other prosaic explanations, are... American secret weapons.
The famous Roswell case is presented in a 1997 Air Force report as the result of the crash of a secret balloon developed as part of Project Mogul. The Avrocar project, too, has in the past been accused of being responsible for UFO sightings - even though this prototype (in the shape of a flying saucer, admittedly) was never able to rise more than a few centimeters.
The report concludes:
To date, AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress.
Investigative efforts determined that most sightings were the result of misidentification of ordinary objects and phenomena. Although many UAP reports remain unsolved, AARO assesses that if additional, quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena.
Many had anticipated the tone of the AARO report, given the recent public pronouncements of the man behind its writing, the organization's former director, Sean Kirkpatrick. From this point of view, volume 1 of this landmark report does not disappoint.
It remains to be seen whether the second part, supervised by another director, will be of the same caliber. It should be noted that investigative journalist Ross Coulthart indicates that he will soon reveal the names of the members of a secret committee advising Kirkpatrick, some of whom are said to have been involved in secret UFO programs, and one of whom is said to have sat on the National Security Council with Dick Cheney under Bush... The implication is that this affair is far from over, and that this report has undoubtedly done more harm than good in terms of the American people's distrust of the federal government.
Furthermore, according to Defense Scoop magazine, the Department of Defense is developing the capability to help personnel collect real-time UAP data in the field using automated detection units. (DOD developing 'Gremlin' capability to help personnel collect real-time UAP data | DefenseScoop).
According to a tweet from Robert Powell, one of the authors of UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, it seems that AARO considers that the press can be multifaceted. Indeed, we learn that the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico received the report 48 hours before anyone else. This delay obviously did not allow these big names in the press to make a proper, in-depth analysis of the report. What's more, it also raises ethical questions about the equal treatment of information in the American press.
According to Powell, the sourcing of the AARO report also presents a number of problems, with references often being broken links - in other words, AARO is unable to copy a simple url correctly.
There was also confusion over the dates of Kenneth Arnold's sighting, one of the most historic cases of the phenomenon's beginnings. The AARO journal gave the date of the sighting as June 23, 1947. The exact date is June 24. This shows a certain amateurism, especially for a document dealing with history.
There are also transcription errors in Arnold's testimony, with the AARO referring to circular objects when, according to the audio recordings of the testimony, they were objects with a curved front that narrowed into a triangular shape at the rear.
There were also errors in one of the Air Force's most important evaluations of UAP, carried out by the Battelle Memorial Institute. This project was called Project STORK. AARO called it Project BEAR. The name Project BEAR was an intentional misnomer used by Edward Ruppelt in his book so as not to reveal the real name of the project. In addition, the date of this project appears on the front of the file in the project's blue book: May 5, 1955. The AARO document indicates that the project was launched at the end of 1954.
Not what Congress asked for
Again according to Robert Powell, the staff who wrote this report have only the vaguest knowledge of the history of the UAP, and allow themselves to make assertions unsupported by any evidence of their assertions. We can also point to what could be described as difficulties in understanding instructions by AARO. The document rightly cites, on page 11, the Congressional mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023. In it, Congress requests a historical compilation of UAP since 1945.
Yet, at the beginning of the document, AARO states that the purpose of the report is "to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the USG and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material." This is not what Congress asked for.
Also noteworthy is the omission of the Foo Fighters reported during the conflicts of World War II, as well as numerous other cases. Like those in 1975, multiple incursions by unknown craft have taken place in the vicinity of U.S. air bases equipped with nuclear weapons such as Loring AFB, Wurtsmith AFB, Malmstrom AFB, Minot AFB and Falconbridge AFB in Canada. Nothing was mentioned by AARO.
The report shows a strange fascination with the Manhattan Project. It seems to be used by AARO to construct a fallacious argument claiming that the Manhattan Project and other national laboratories have probably contributed to the increase in the number of reported UAP.
Regarding the Condon Report, AARO noted its conclusion that "further in-depth study of UFOs probably cannot be justified". But AARO failed to mention that the project's lead administrator, Robert Low, was fired because of a memo. In this memo, he explains that the trick was to focus “on witness psychology rather than UFOs so that the scientific community would get the message”, according to Powell.
He was fired not for this unscientific idea, but because he was caught saying it. Two other scientists on the Condon project were fired for leaking his memo to the press. Furthermore, the Air Force had indicated to Condon the type of conclusion that they were looking for before the project had even started. All of this information was left out in the AARO paper. One could likely conclude that was intentional.
One wonders whether the obvious shortcomings that have resulted in the creation of this report will not in fact have the opposite effect to its apparent objective. Rather than discrediting the subject, many voices are being heard from across the political spectrum, from civil society as well as from within the ranks of AARO itself. All are calling for the subject to be taken seriously, and with Dr. Kirkpatrick having resigned from his post, perhaps there is hope that the forces of the Defense Department seeking to protect their country against catastrophic technological overtaking by rival nations can manage to do their job without being hindered or instrumentalized.
Translated from French by Kate and Guillaume Fournier Airaud
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0