Ex-Pentagon UFO investigator slams Congress for believing conspiracy theories

An ex-Pentagon UFO investigator has hit out at Congress for believing baseless conspiracy theories in a farewell letter after stepping down.

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick left his role leading the US government backed team that looked into claims of unidentified anomalous phenomena in December. In a scathing letter printed in Scientific American, he has now addressed his reasons for quitting, citing congressional leaders believing in conspiracy theories with absolutely no substantial proof.

“Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative,” Kirkpatrick wrote.

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Kirkpatrick’s department, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was established following the furore created by a research group, who published videos of UFOs purportedly taken by U.S. Navy pilots.

Years after the 2017 revelation, the The New York Times reported on the footage and the Pentagon declassified the videos.

The videos were legit, but it wasn’t obvious that they depicted extra-terrestrials.

Since its inception the AARO have routinely debunked the idea that the Earth has had visits from outer space.

“AARO discovered a few things, and none were about aliens,” Kirkpatrick said in Scientific American.

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Kirkpatrick claims that what the AARO did discover was a network of government officials who embraced strange conspiracy theories and were ready to allocate public funds for them.

“The U.S. has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UAP/UFOs from as early as the 1960s and perhaps earlier,” he said.

“This great cover-up and conspiracy failed to produce any salient results, and consequently the effort was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors to continue the work.

«Sometime later, the story continues, those private sector contractors wanted to bring the whole program back under U.S. government (USG) auspices. Apparently, the CIA stopped this supposed transfer back to the USG.”

Kirkpatrick said that the AARO did investigate this tale. “No record exists of any president or living DOD or intelligence community leader knowing about this alleged program, nor any congressional committee having such knowledge,” he said.

Even though the AARO has shared multiple reports about its knowledge, the conspiracies persist.

This eventually led to a Congressional Hearing where David Grusch, a self-proclaimed UFO «whistleblower,» took centre stage and spoke extensively about spacecraft, extraterrestrials, and threats on his life.

Kirkpatrick has repeatedly said, in public, that Grusch would not talk to him or the AARO, despite attempts to engage from his former organisation.

“As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’ and statement for the record despite numerous invitations,” he said in Scientific American.

He added: “Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter.»

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