The above image (the idea for which came to me in a flash yesterday,)was created to encapsulate the state of popular UFOlogy for the past few weeks. Sean Kirkpatrick (pictured right) was the former head of AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) and after stepping down from his position in the Pentagon by the end of 2023, he’s now written a few op-eds and conducted a few incendiary interviews, in which he has basically ascribed the current interest in UFOs among Washington politicians to a small group of influential individuals trying to convince these lawmakers that UFOs are not only evidence of otherworldly visitation and technology which transcends our current understanding of physics; but also that there are deep black government projects trying to replicate the technology of these alien craft, of which they have managed to retrieve several and keep them hidden away from official scrutiny. Such was the sworn testimony delivered by whistleblower Dave Grusch (pictured left in the background) before the US Congress in July of last year.\
“It is basically a religion, a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought,” he said in an interview for The Guardian.
As you can imagine, this has not been well received by the UFO community. Especially among those positioned to reap the benefits of the modern public interest, who have responded to this controversy in their usual way…
You might be thinking after seeing my cartoon that I’m firmly on the side of ‘Team Kirkpatrick’, but you would actually be wrong. I don’t judge kindly his brief tenure at AARO, and a cursory visit to the website created under his orders for public use shows how little he cared about helping civilians to understand the reality of the reports investigated by the agency. The website is woefully lacking in any useful information which could allow citizen scientists team up to try and help solve the cases.
For example: the ‘Cases’ section of the site has only this to say about the enigmatic “Mosul orb” video which Kirkpatrick himself showed before the Senate Subcommittee back in 2023:
This clip was taken by an MQ-9 in the Middle East, and while AARO assesses the object in the clip is not exhibiting anomalous behavior, the object remains unidentified.
Taken WHEN, WHERE AND BY WHOM? How long was the object tracked? What were the atmospheric conditions? Was there any reaction from the people in site? AARO apparently finds that information superfluous…
Oh, and let’s not forget the big SNAFUs of early 2023, when the US government spent thousands of dollars shooting down anomalous objects which in all likelihood were (aside from one or two Chinese surveillance platforms) common balloons, including a science project from a hobbyists club. Why wasn’t the onus on Kirkpatrick for not being able to give the Pentagon a good assessment on how to properly respond to those situations?
So, between the big ‘weaponizers’ of unsubstantiated claims and shady videos —which are quickly debunked not after they are ‘leaked’— and the “nothing to see here” attitude of former Pentagon officials, the public interested in UFOs is facing one hell of a cognitive dissonance.
Which is probably what someone behind the curtain was planning all along…
