Former Pentagon UFO boss claims government gagged him over alien secrets

The former Pentagon boss charged with investigating UFOs has claimed senior officials stopped him from releasing top secret findings.

Dr Sean Kirkpatrick also wanted to share more details about the government’s investigations into unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), but was gagged.

He stepped down from office in December, days after admitting there could be some truth in a whistleblower’s shocking claims that the US government is hiding evidence of aliens.

The claims, by former intelligence officer David Grusch, led to a congressional hearing on the issue, at which he gave further evidence – and said people had been ‘harmed or injured’ in an effort to cover up the information. 

At the time, a personal memo from Dr Kirkpatrick said his department, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), had no evidence to back up the claims, and branded them ‘insulting’.

However, speaking to Politico, it seems the department knows much more than it is letting on – and did not want him sharing the intel.

‘There was a very strong concern to engage in the public discourse as often as I thought we needed to,’ said Dr Kirkpatrick.

‘The fact that they [Pentagon leadership] can’t figure out how to get at that message without concern for spillage into other areas has always been a frustrating point.’

The former director said he was concerned that by not speaking up about what the government knew, it would encourage conspiracy theorists to use their silence as evidence of a cover-up and promote their own agendas.

‘If there is a void in the information space, it will be filled with the imagination of the public right and the conspiracies and these accusations,’ he said, adding the purpose of AARO was to investigate any threats UAP may pose, not to find aliens.

He said attempts to engage with the media repeatedly met with internal resistance. During his time in office between July 2022 and the end of 2023, Dr Kirkpatrick did only two on-camera interviews, two print interviews, and two off-camera media briefings. 

But writing in Scientific American last month, he said: ‘I can assure you as its former director that AARO is unwaveringly committed to harnessing science and technology to bring unprecedented clarity to these fascinating, important, and stubborn mysteries and to do so with maximum transparency. 

‘Its talented staff and team of supporting scientists are at this very moment striving in collaboration with the armed forces, intelligence community, government agencies, national laboratories, scientific community, academic community – and soon the general public – to collect and analyse hard, measurable data – i.e., extraordinary evidence – in this heretofore eyewitness-rich but data-poor field.’

In August, AARO unveiled a new website, sharing declassified data on UAP from over the decades. It showed UFO hotspots over the US, Middle East, and Japan, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the US dropped atomic bombs in August 1945.

Dr Kirkpatrick also disagreed with a recent report suggesting the US was unprepared for an alien invasion, noting the report only considered up to a time before AARO was formed.

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