Below is an interesting 30-minute interview that New York Post columnist Steven Greenstreet conducted with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
In it, Kirkpatrick once again stands by the official vol. 1 report published by AARO shortly after he resigned from the government, which failed to find any evidence that could validate the non-ordinary nature of some UFO reports, or the rumors of reverse engineering programs dealing with advanced exotic technologies —“Sorry, no aliens.”
Greenstreet began his involvement with the UFO topic firmly on the ‘believer’ camp, but as time went on he became disenchanted with the claims made by the loudest proponents of the ‘Disclosure movement’, and now he clearly has an axe to grind. Regardless, I pretty much agree with his conclusions —also validated by Kirkpatrick’s— that most of the pro-UFO narrative we’ve been swarmed in since 2017 has been promoted and cultivated by a small group of “true believers” as he calls them, some of whom have been involved in all sorts of paranormal research (official and privatized) since the 1970s.
Kirkpatrick’s testimony goes in stark opposition of the Disclosure narrative, by pointing out that AAWSAP/AATIP (the secret UFO project Lue Elizondo was supposedly in charge of according to the 2017 NYT article written by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal) was never an official government program, and that it ended up misappropriating public funds in order to conduct investigations into the alleged paranormal activity plaguing the infamous Skinwalker ranch in Utah, which was previously owned by real estate mogul Robert Bigelow before it was sold to Brandon Fugal, its current owner. Curiously enough, though, Kirkpatrick claims in this interview he doesn’t know whether there was ever an official criminal investigation launched to seek out the culprits of the ‘misappropriation’…
Inevitably the role of “UFO whistleblower” Dave Grusch’s involvement in this confusing saga was brought up. Kirkpatrick emphatically says Grusch was invited up to five different times to present his evidence and testimony to AARO —the government office with all the official authority necessary to look into allegations of UFO crashed retrievals and alien back-engineering ‘black’ programs— but never did. This is confirmed by official documents independently obtained by John Greenwald Jr. at the Black Vault, which put into serious questioning Grusch’s claims.
Watching the interview, I for one would have liked if Greenstreet had called Kirkpatrick to task on the many errors and historical inaccuracies found in AARO’s report. In fact, the only time Greenstreet mentioned problems with the report, was with regards to the brief two paragraphs in it detailing the work of the short-lived UAP Task Force, which was created in 2020 and ended up enrolling people who had been part of the (unofficial?) AAWSAP/AATIP program. Here I again share Greenstreet’s befuddlement to the fact that the Pentagon was (according to Kirkpatrick) not aware of the ‘woo woo’ activities conducted by AAWSAP/AATIP at Skinwalker ranch —hence when they did find out they were so embarrassed by it they quickly shut down the program— but then they kept calling on some of the same people who were part of AAWSAP/AATIP to work on the UAP Task Force?
Another conflicting part in the interview was when Greenstreet mentioned a briefing report on Skinwalker ranch given by Brandon Fugal at Washington D.C. on April 19th, 2018. Fugal had told Greenstreet on another interview that one of the attendees to this ‘official’ briefing was none other than… Sean Kirkpatrick(!) who was in fact (according to Fugal) “leading the whole thing.” Not only that, but Fugal claims Kirkpatrick told him that all the people present (many of them part of the Bigelow-AAWSAP/AATIP “UFO activist” group, as Greenstreet calls them) were “already aware of the UFO reality.” Kirkpatrick emphatically denies ever saying this, or ever meeting Fugal for that matter(?). He claims did attend a briefing at the invitation of staffers who requested his assistance as an independent, 3rd-party scientific observer, but that the briefing was focused on AAWSAP/AATIP activities in general and not about Skinwalker ranch in particular —to make matters even more confusing, Kirkpatrick further said to Greenstreet on a follow-up email he believes the meeting he attended took place in 2017, not 2018 as Fugal had said —If John Keel was still alive, perhaps he would call this an example of an MIB ‘doppelganger’! That, or someone is clearly lying.
Watching Kirkpatrick’s body language throughout this interview is interesting: he seldom looks directly at the camera when answering questions, and his whole demeanor clearly states he’s totally fed up with his controversial albeit-brief involvement with the UFO topic; a subject he claims he was never particularly interested in before he was appointed to AARO. He says he still receives harassment and threats via email from ‘true believers’, and at one point a person stalking his home was arrested by the FBI; which sounds similar to the abuse received by some members of NASA’s independent study group on UFOs. Perhaps that is the reason why Kirkpatrick is now saying on the record that people within the government who have deeply held beliefs in UFOs (which he unabashedly equates with religious dogma) and who instinctively reject scientific explanations contradicting these beliefs, represent a potential threat to national security; particularly if they are in key positions of authority.
I think that is disturbing. And should be a flag for the National Security community. Because how can you then trust those people, if they are not objective enough to understand evidentiary -based assertions like that […] How can you trust them with our national secrets?
Here Kirkpatrick is referring to what is informally called in Washington D.C. the “UAP Caucaus” —Members of Congress who have actively championed the ‘NHI’ (non human intelligence) interpretation of the UFO phenomena, and are responsible for changes in legislation related to UAPs aside from organizing public hearings on the topic.
Personally, I think Kirkpatrick is going a bit too far with his ‘flagging’ of the UFO topic as a potential threat within government, and should therefore widen the discussion for the sake of fairness about how personal beliefs affect a person’s understanding of scientific evidence. If you cannot trust a legislator who believes in UFOs to be objective in their duties on national security policy, then what about fundamentalist Christians working on legislation related to women’s reproductive rights, or climate change deniers that are members of environmental committees? Seems to me UFOs are only the most recent tip of bigger iceberg related to scientific illiteracy permitted among lawmakers whose decisions guide the future of entire nations…
Another personal opinion, as an student of the phenomenon and an independent observer of modern UFO-related history, is that it is very interesting how in 2017 we jumped from unidentified ‘Tic-Tacs’ that represented a pressing mystery (due to the testimony of military witnesses who helped bring legitimacy to a neglected subject) to wild unconfirmed accounts of crashed saucers and pickled alien bodies jealously guarded by unchecked shady corporations in less than ten years. Now it seems that it’s all come crashing down (again) and whatever meager stigma was lifted from UFOs for a little while will be doubled or tripled, until a new head-scratching report pops up, or somebody comes up with another stupid acronym to replace the one that is already burned out —o UAP we hardly knew ye…
Maybe that was part of the plan all along?
Whatever your personal opinion of Sean Kirkpatrick may be —hero or villain, red tape bureaucrat or useful idiot— at the end of the day he embodies the core paradox of Disclosure: people will only accept the government’s conclusions on UFOs as long as they confirm their previous beliefs.
UPDATE
In a surprising twist, Brandon Fugal shared on his Twitter (X) account a photograph which indisputably proves Sean Kirkpatrick was there at the briefing on Skinwalker ranch he and his team gave in Washington, D.C. in 2018.
Closeup of the first image. It looks as is ‘Kit’ Green (another prominent member of the Bigelow UFO cabal) is the white-haired man in front of Kirkpatrick
As usual, this revelation dropped like a bomb and divided opinions among UFOTwitter —”See?? the man is a liar and working for the coverup!” VS “This proves nothing! How could anyone possibly remember all the meetings they attended to for the last six years??”
In any case, Kirkpatrick can no longer deny that he was present during a briefing about Skinwalker ranch. Whether he was “leading” the event or not, or whether he actually said to Fugal he was “aware of the reality of UFOs” is another matter entirely.
