UFO sightings: Any evidence to support theories? Former Pentagon official says..

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As per Kirkpatrick, there are two types of people, those who “legitimately» have something to share and those who prefer to go public but not go to the authorities with detailed information. He mentioned that, even though some people had come up with eyewitness accounts of something, it turned out to be something else.

“I had to get a lot of the information that those other people were sharing through second and third parties, because it all comes down to the same group of individuals, you know, recirculating this story, and the story has been around for decades,» he told Scientific American.

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His team checked both recent sightings by military personnel and historical records dating back to 1945. The aim was to uncover any hidden government programs related to UAPs. Despite thorough investigations, including access to classified archives, they found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or spacecraft.

“Everything that people have pointed to, we went and investigated and found no evidence to support that. Again, a lot of these things are real R&D or real state-of-the-art programmes, not extraterrestrial, but it is completely understandable why someone who did not know that would draw that conclusion,» he said.

Extraterrestrial assumption

Kirkpatrick criticised the tendency to leap to extraterrestrial explanations for unidentified objects. The US government, according to him, spends a lot of time and effort developing advanced technology for a variety of reasons.

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“Some of this is just people having observed things or seen things or got access to things that they shouldn’t have—that they don’t understand. And just because they don’t understand it, they seem to leap to “it must be extraterrestrial’,» he added.

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Published: 15 Feb 2024, 12:22 PM IST