"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 38

Episode 38: Is The Pentagon Really Hiding Crashed Alien Spaceships?

Sean Kirkpatrick is one of the best guys on earth to answer that question. He set up the Pentagon’s new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. But he rarely gives interviews. Until now. You’ll hear what his investigators found out about sightings going back to Roswell, and what he thinks is the biggest UFO conspiracy of all.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Sean Kirkpatrick: The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens and I could have rolled them out.

That's the voice of a scientist named Sean Kirkpatrick. If you're an American taxpayer, he worked for you until pretty recently. His job ... was hunting UFOs for the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped him to run the wonderfully named All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office—or "AARO." And remember that acronym … because you’ll be hearing a lot about it in this episode. AARO is a new office charged with investigating UFO sightings by US military personnel.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, created by Congress last year to detect, identify, and attribute mysterious objects of interest in the air, in outer space, and even underwater.

Kirkpatrick and his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who say they have inside knowledge about encounters with UFOs. Or, "UAP" as they're now known. That's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Because it seems like the Pentagon loves upgrading names by making them sound more boring.

Anyway, as people sat down for interviews with the new UFO office, Kirkpatrick said he and his team kept hearing versions of the same outlandish story:

Sean Kirkpatrick: And the story goes something like this, the U.S. government has been hiding as many as 12 UFOs, possibly going back to the mid-sixties and maybe even the forties, if you include Roswell, and the U.S. government's been trying to reverse engineer these to no avail, have failed, and as a consequence, they abandoned the effort, to industry who wanted to continue to look at this.

Yeah. You're hearing that right. He's saying people told him and his team stories about crashed alien spaceships. These spaceships were supposedly kept under wraps by the US government for decades, as part of a failed project to dismantle the craft and study them. These spaceships, or parts of them, were then secretly handed over to private companies who were looking to reverse engineer them and possibly profit from the results of what they learned. And then comes the next chapter of the story Kirkpatrick kept hearing. Some people in the government wanted the spaceships, or pieces of the spaceships, back.

Sean Kirkpatrick: And then somewhere around, earlier this turn of the century, there was a push to bring that material back into government oversight because the allegation goes that Congress had no knowledge of any of this, and this was all a hidden program.

Some aspects of this story, and a Pentagon program associated with it, recently became a lot less hidden.

ARCHIVAL ChrisHayes: The remarkable admission by the Pentagon came as a result of reporting by the New York Times

ARCHIVAL Good Morning America: But the fact that a secret department in the Pentagon thought they were worth millions of dollars of investigation has many wondering if the truth is out there.

And more recently, a former Pentagon official got a lot of a press coverage when he testified about crashed alien spacecraft to a Congressional committee:

ARCHIVAL David Grusch Congressional testimony: I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. I made the decision to report this information to my superiors and multiple inspectors general, and in effect becoming a whistleblower.

So what are you supposed to make of stories like these? Is there exotic tech flying in the skies, or crashing to Earth, that you should be worried about? Has the US government been hiding evidence of aliens? How close has the Pentagon gotten to finally sorting all this out?

There may be few people here on Earth better positioned to answer those questions than Sean Kirkpatrick -- he’s the guy the Pentagon hired to literally sort this stuff out. He doesn't particularly like talking to the press ...and he doesn't do it often. But since he recently retired from government service, I got him in the room for the most in-depth media interview he's given to date.

You'll hear Kirkpatrick talk you through the report he just handed to the US Congress, which investigates every American government UFO sighting, going back to the 1940s. You'll hear him explain what his investigators found out about Roswell. You'll hear whether he believes in aliens… how he got his nickname, Dr. Evil… and why he thinks the biggest UFO conspiracy actually originates in part with true believers inside the U.S. government.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is "In the Room."

(Theme music)

Sean Kirkpatrick has had a long career in national security. After getting a physics PHD, he started out researching lasers for the US military and ended up holding a number of highly secret, tech-focused roles in the intelligence community.

Just before taking on the UFO job, he served as Chief Scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. Even before we spoke, I got the sense that talking to journalists doesn't come easy for him. In his first TV interview with ABC News, for example, this was about as breezy as things ever got:

ARCHIVAL ABC News reporter: "Do you think extraterrestrial life is out there?"

Kirkpatrick: "I think it's statistically unrealistic to think it isn't"

ABC reporter: "Are you going to find it on your watch?"

Kirkpatrick: "Well, wouldn't that be fun."

Peter Bergen: Your background is kind of amazing in terms of all the different things that you've done within the national security apparatus, and I'm sure, all those jobs that you did, required almost no interaction with the media and very little public attention.

Sean Kirkpatrick: None.

Peter Bergen: And then here you are running this office, which was the subject of intense public and media attention and Congressional attention. How was that for you personally?

Sean Kirkpatrick: That's a wonderful question. When I first sat down with my public affairs officer on the very first meeting, I looked at her, and I said, ‘Look, I've just spent the last 25 years of my career being told that if I ever ended up on TV, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with your mission. And now, the first thing I've got to do is go meet the media and start talking about stuff. That is a very uncomfortable place for me.

Kirkpatrick wears wire-rimmed glasses. He favors dark suits. And he's got a closely trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee. For a smart, serious, secret laser scientist who came up working for the U.S. military ... he looks and talks just about how you'd expect. There's not much arm-waving with him or joking around. Although you can get him to crack a smile about the movie Austin Powers. Kirkpatrick’s love of lasers inspired the US Air Force to give him the call sign Dr. Evil, after the movie’s laser-loving villain.

ARCHIVAL Austin Powers:

Politician: Mr. Evil-l…

Dr. Evil: DOCTOR Evil! I didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called “mister,” thank you very much.

Sean Kirkpatrick: That is my call sign. I even have a flight suit that has it on there. Cause I did do some testing, out of some Black Hawk helicopters with lasers strapped into the side, leaning out. It was fun.

ARCHIVAL Austin Powers: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

Sean Kirkpatrick: I will say one of my going away presents as I was leaving the National Reconnaissance Office, one of my close colleagues gave me a shark with a laser pointer strapped to its head. So I do have that still.

The UFO job wasn't something that Kirkpatrick sought out. It's more like something he got dragooned into doing on his way out of the Pentagon.

Sean Kirkpatrick: I was getting ready to retire and the acting deputy undersecretary called and twisted my arm to come stand up AARO.

Peter Bergen: How did that call go down? Was this, ‘Sean, I've got some good news for you and also some bad news. We're going to put you in charge of the office in the Pentagon that's looking for UFOs?’

Sean Kirkpatrick: It wasn't quite that bad, but it was close.

Peter Bergen: Well, tell us.

Sean Kirkpatrick: The call was, you know, “Hey, Sean, have you read the National Defense Authorization Act and I said no, I don't generally read those unless I have nothing else better to do.”

Peter Bergen: Because it's like a thousand pages, right?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Right, right.

Sean Kirkpatrick: All right. I'm like no, I I haven't. He goes, well have you heard about this? This office that we're being legislated to stand up and I said, well, I have heard a little bit about that, yeah. And he goes “Look, we have a problem. We’ve got to get this stood up. The undersecretary and I put together, you know, a short list of people that we think could do it. You're at the top of the list because you have stood up all these other organizations, you have a technical background, you're an intelligence officer.”

He spent a lot of time blowing sunshine. And then said, “Look, we really want you to come do this.” And I said, “Well, I got to talk to my wife and family and get back to you.” Next thing I know, he calls back a couple of days later and he goes, “Yeah, we already told Congress you were the one coming.”

Peter Bergen: Were you volun-told, then, to run the office?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Yeah, basically.

Peter Bergen: So, only in Washington could we have an office called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Did you come up with that name, or did Congress help, or how did it come about?

Sean Kirkpatrick: As I was, being asked to stand this up, there was an absolutely horrendous name that was being used.

It was going to be called AOIMSG.

Sean Kirkpatrick: That does not roll off the tongue. I can't even remember what it all stood for. And its goal is ultimately to resolve anomalies.

Peter Bergen: And what kind of anomalies are we talking about?

Sean Kirkpatrick: You know an anomaly as defined there is any observation, event, or object that a person or a sensor can't immediately make sense of, and may or may not be doing something odd that you don't understand fully as you look at it.

Peter Bergen: So give me an example.

Sean Kirkpatrick: A simple example is a pilot flying over the ocean on a cloudless day, looks down and sees a round object, which to his eye appears to be moving very rapidly in a direction that might be different than the aircraft is moving. In addition, that aircraft's radar may or may not pick up a signal, you know, a reflection off of that object. Neither the sensor nor the pilot knows what it is that they're looking at. And it appears to be moving erratically.

When you dig into those kinds of observations, and we had hundreds of those kinds of observations, nine times out of 10 – or more – that turns into an optical illusion that we call parallax.

For a simple example, hold your thumb up in front of your face. And then alternately wink one eye and then the other. Your thumb isn't actually moving, but it appears to jump back and forth relative to the background. That's parallax.

Sean Kirkpatrick: So about two to five percent of all the reports that we have, all the cases that we have are what we would call truly anomalous. There's things that we need to investigate, we have enough data to investigate and we can go pull on that case or that event to see if we can figure that out. Most of the times when we can't give an explanation, it is because there is a lack of data.

And by that, I mean consistent, solid, recorded data that you can put into a computer and you can do analysis on, and you can try to figure out, okay what did that radar actually see? What did that infrared sensor actually see? And what is it measuring?

He's saying that some anomalies are unresolved and worth pursuing because witnesses preserved enough data to dig into and investigate. But other anomalies have too little data to ever yield a definitive answer. And one pretty famous anomaly falls into this second category: The bizarre, Tic-Tac-shaped object that several US Navy pilots spotted when they were flying off the coast of California back in 2004.

The New York Times ran a big story about that incident—and it mentioned a number of other sightings by US Navy pilots who captured them with their planes' imaging systems. You may remember the videos along with the pilots’ shocked reactions, showing up on the news, or online:

ARCHIVAL Unnamed Pilots: Oh my gosh, dude. Wow. What is that, man? Look at that fly.

ARCHIVAL Unnamed Pilots: My Gosh. They're all going against the wind, the wind's a hundred and twenty knots to the west. Look at that thing, dude.

The 2004 California incident was especially interesting to many UFO lovers because the pilots reported seeing the strange object with their naked eyes. Besides aliens, that 2004 sighting might've been a test of advanced US technology. It might've been a weird new aircraft from a foreign rival that was spying on US forces. And it might've been an errant balloon.

Kirkpatrick says none of these possibilities can be ruled out, but the US Navy didn't keep an archive of raw sensor data from that encounter for the Pentagon’s UFO investigators to investigate.

And so far, no foreign country – or alien visitor – has come forward to claim that the Tic-Tac was theirs. So Kirkpatrick says … we’ll probably never get a good answer.

Sean Kirkpatrick: The challenge with the data is – up until AARO was established – There was no guidance to the department, to the force, to the operators on saving all of that data.

A while back, I interviewed one of the US Navy pilots who witnessed the Tic Tac incident. Her name’s Alex Dietrich. And you may just need to let her have the last word on the encounter.

INTERVIEW W/ ALEX DIETRICH UFOS 1 EPISODE: I don't know what we saw that day. You know, the fact that we had four aircrew who had a visual tally on it, I don't think that we were talking about a balloon. But I don't know what it was.

Kirkpatrick says AARO has two main missions. The first mission is to study NEW sightings -- interview UFO witnesses in the military and review any video or radar returns or other data that they've got to back up their story. And the office also directs witnesses to save data from any system in the air or on earth that recorded a UFO encounter and hand it over to AARO. Kirkpatrick describes this as an ongoing OPERATIONAL mission.

Sean Kirkpatrick: The bulk of my office’s team and resources and time was spent on that operational mission, which is to get data to find whatever is being observed and reported by, pilots in particular and other sensors. And then there's this historical mission.

This second, HISTORICAL mission has been a little more tricky. Kirkpatrick's team had to look into US military UFO sightings going back as far as the 1940s, dig up whatever files there might be about those cases, and interview people who claimed to know about them.

Sean Kirkpatrick: To bring in all of these people, these whistleblowers who have claims of knowledge of the government cover up and conspiracy, the bulk of my time and a handful of my officers and researchers, you know, was spent on that historical missionbecause of the strong feelings on either side of that issue, and it would color other people's views of exactly what was going on in the office.

Peter Bergen: Did the strong feelings on either side of the issue come home in a personal way for you? Were you ever subjected to harassment?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. That came home, a number of times, not only to me, but to other people associated with the office, in the form of harassment and threatening letters. I even had some guy show up at my house. It makes it very difficult to do this job.

Peter Bergen: When you say a guy showed up at your house, what was that about?

Sean Kirkpatrick: That was early on, right after I got announced and the FBI did a great job of swinging into action, tracked this guy down. I was told, because I never had to confront him, that he was an emotionally disturbed person that had showed up on my property and had stayed there overnight and was just waiting. And unfortunately, my wife came across him. So that was a bit unnerving, but they got him and arrested him. (28)

Peter Bergen: And how was it for your staff?

Sean Kirkpatrick: This is a point of contention with the public and with Congress that, um, I have refused all the way up to my last days, to provide names of people working on my team, in my staff to anyone outside of the Department.

Sean Kirkpatrick: And the reasons for that are safety and security and privacy, right? That has added fuel to the conspiracy fire. We got letters at the Pentagon all the time. We get emails all the time. And of course, in social media, you know, I get beat up often.

Peter Bergen: Because there's a narrative out there that the Pentagon really has secret information that it's not revealing. Is that the principal complaint?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Yeah, it's that. And then, they further then accuse me as being the spokesperson that's lying for the government and hiding all of this information and all the material. And the fact of the matter is the research and the evidence and the data that we have uncovered has all been compiled into this historical report, volume one, which I had, finished up before I retired and is being delivered to Congress and to the public. And it goes through everything to a very high level of detail.

Kirkpatrick says a lot of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs gets spawned by people catching glimpses of highly secret US aircraft or programs and wanting answers. And when the government doesn't provide any answers, the public imagination takes over.

Sean Kirkpatrick: There’s a lot of observations of real, advanced U.S. programs, but none of that is extraterrestrial in nature.

Instead, they were programs the US government wanted to keep secret. That’s what Kirkpatrick says happened with the Roswell incident.

If you’re not familiar, the Roswell story began back in 1947 with a US military news release about a flying saucer that had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. The military later retracted the story and said it was a weather balloon. But the incident spawned rumors about alien bodies being recovered from the wreckage … conspiracy theories about a US government cover-up … and a whole bunch of books and sci-fi movies and X-Files episodes, and three seasons of a TV show about millennial alien teenagers:

ARCHIVAL Roswell show:

Liz: You’re not an alien, I mean...are you?”

Max: “I prefer the term not of this earth.”

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into Roswell—and you need to understand that back in the late 40’s and 50’s there were a lot of strange things happening near the Roswell Airfield.

There was a top-secret spy program called Mogul which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic spy balloons into the air.

At the same time, the US military was conducting tests with other high altitude balloons that were carrying human dummies. And there was at least one military plane crash with 11 fatalities.

Kirkpatrick and his team at AARO concluded that crashed Mogul balloons … the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies … and glimpses of the aftermath of that real plane crash … likely combined into a single narrative. A narrative matching the mood of the country at that moment.

Sean Kirkpatrick: You have new aviation; for the people that have never seen an aircraft before. What does that mean? What's it doing? But there was also this fear coming out of World War II. And, you know, everybody's still raw from the war. And there's lots of technological issues that people are trying to wrap their minds around. And that affected a lot of what people saw and how they reported. I think the same thing is true today.

And Kirkpatrick thinks that new technology taking flight in our especially anxious times can help explain a lot of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s on.

He says these things could be advanced technology that the US government needs to keep secret … Or aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the US …Or maybe even benign civilian drones or balloons. And he says all of this is a national security concern—even the balloons.

Sean Kirkpatrick: The biggest risk is stuff that is in the air that we don't know is there. And why don't we know it's there? Because it's not something we would track. Balloons are one of the biggest hazards right now, and it's growing. There's something like 10,000 balloons launched daily. Everything from weather balloons to just party balloons that have escaped.

One of my favorite things is there's this company in Florida, They make these backyard lighting balloons. Some of them are round. Some of them are tic tac shaped and they're black on the top and inside they havelights, and they're helium filled. And they're strapped down in people's backyards for backyard parties, and they get away. When we talked to the company, they're like, ‘yeah, we lose 'em. And we sometimes find them again, but generally not.’

Sean Kirkpatrick: Well, you know, that's a really weird-looking thing. Lit from the bottom, not lit on the top, big tic-tac thing, flying around. Well, what is that? That kind of stuff is a flight hazard. So on the one hand, I've got military pilots that are flying at greater than Mach 1. If they run into a balloon with a tether on it, it's going to rip a wing off. That's a problem. But on the other hand, if I'm a commercial airline. You get one of those sucked into an engine and that's not going to be good.

Peter Bergen: When you were in the office a huge news story was the Chinese balloon story, which brought to the public that clearly there's a national security interest in the United States understanding what might be flying around that we haven't identified.

Sean Kirkpatrick: That's right. The office's mission is not to prove the existence of extraterrestrials. The office's mission is to minimize technical and intelligence surprise - that is the primary mission.

ARCHIVAL Seth Meyers: The Pentagon this week described the unidentified objects shot down over Canada on Saturday as a quote, small, metallic balloon. So it was either a dire national security threat or a wasted 25 cents at a county fair.

The Chinese balloon story is an example of the U.S. government's new posture towards UFO's working as it should. Since 2020, the Pentagon has worked to standardize, de-stigmatize and increase the volume of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. This work has involved calibrating sensors and improving the quality of data that those sensors collect. That's how Chinese spy balloons got spotted in the first place. And while balloons are low tech examples of UFO's… AARO is especially concerned with keeping an eye out for more high-tech stuff.

Sean Kirkpatrick: I'll give you an example. There's a large number of people, pilots, who you know have said, hey, I saw this giant sphere. It had a cube in it. I don't understand it. It must be an alien. Well, actually, no, the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical drones.

And one of them is—they've taken a, about a two meter size, inflatable, and they put a cube inside of it. And everywhere the corner of the cube touches the sphere, they fused it, cut it out, and put little thrusters in. With eight thrusters in a cube configuration, I can maneuver this drone around very accurately. And they've tried these all over the place.

So far, most of what Kirkpatrick says about the report he just handed over to the US Congress… isn't super new. That explanation about Roswell, for example, echoes the conclusions of several US government investigations carried out in the 1990’s.

But I think Kirkpatrick does break some new ground by suggesting a new origin story for modern allegations that the US government has been hiding crashed alien spaceships. He says these allegations largely come from just a small group of people inside the US government or with close ties to it.

Sean Kirkpatrick: True believers are not just outside of government. Many of them are inside government. Many of them are in places of authority and decision-making. And you don't know who they are until they come into the office and have a discussion about this.

Peter Bergen: Fascinating. And you recall the New York Times in 2017 released the videos of the famous Tic Tac and that story attracted a lot of attention.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The US Navy has finally acknowledged that videos appearing to show UFOs flying through the air are real.

ARCHIVAL ChrisHayes: They released video including a 2004 encounter when two fighter jets chased an oval-shaped white object near San Diego.

Peter Bergen: The Times story itself was certainly generated with people who had information that came from inside the government. So, has there been a sort of self-reinforcing loop in your view that produces pressure from Congress to investigate what the hell's going on. Then that becomes an office. That office is the office that you then ran.

Sean Kirkpatrick: Correct.

Peter Bergen: I don't know what kind of cycle that is. Is it a virtuous cycle, an unvirtuous cycle, or how would you describe it?

Sean Kirkpatrick: The way I look at it is, if you follow the information that we've laid out in the historical report. You've got people that talk to people who come in to tell the story or tell the media but it turns out none of them have any firsthand evidence or knowledge. They're all relaying stories that they've heard from other people. And if you track where all those people know each other, it all goes back to the same core set of people.

Kirkpatrick says his report doesn’t name any of the names in this core group. But there are two people at the group’s center whose names and involvement have been pretty widely documented elsewhere: The late Senator Harry Reid and his longtime friend Robert Bigelow, a Nevada billionaire, and the owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace. Both of these guys shared a long-running interest in UFOs.

Sean Kirkpatrick: Senator Harry Reid was a True Believer and thought that, ‘Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.’

And in 2007, Senator Reid got funding for a Defense Intelligence Agency program that paid $22 million to his buddy Bigelow’s aerospace company—money the company spent on investigations into paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow's team looked into sightings of UFOs by US military personnel and proposed setting up laboratories to study the purported physical remains of off-world spacecraft.

One of the main scoops in that New York Times story that touched off so much of the recent UFO hype a few years back was the fact that this Pentagon program existed at all in the first place. Senator Reid and others later proposed setting up other secret programs with similar missions.

Sean Kirkpatrick: None of that actually manifested in any evidence, but it did cause a number of things that people could point to and go, ‘Hey, see, there's a compartment over there that's supposed to be holding, you know, extraterrestrial material,’ but none of it had anything in it. It's all, window dressing, if you will. No substance.

But he says the stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished, and got the occasional boost from service members who’d heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft. And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of Top Secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people.

Sean Kirkpatrick: They're some of the same people that worked for Robert Bigelow under the DIA program. They're some of the same people that have been working behind the scenes with Congress to write legislation. They’re the same people that worked with a U. S. company and the United States Army to explore a piece of material that they claim was a UAP and it really is a piece of missile casing from the 1950’s. They're the same people that have been influencing some of these whistleblowers who have come forward to say, Hey, I don't have any firsthand evidence, but all these people are telling me this. Here's what I know.

The most public of these whistleblowers is the former Pentagon official whose voice you heard at the beginning of the show, testifying about crashed alien spacecraft before a US Congressional committee.

ARCHIVAL David Grusch Congressional testimony:

Mr. GRUSCH: I was informed of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.

Ms. MACE: If you believe we have crashed craft as stated earlier do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?

Mr. GRUSCH: Biologics came with some of these recoveries. Yeah.

Ms. MACE. Were they, I guess, human or nonhuman biologics?

Mr. GRUSCH. Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.

Sean Kirkpatrick: So he's one of the individuals that I think this kind of core group of people that have influenced him, have told him this information. He may have misinterpreted things that people have said, or he may have just fallen to the influence of what these folks have been telling him. In either event, at the time I left, he had not come in to speak to AARO, soI can't say with 100 percent what he has to say, only what he's put out into the media and what others have come to tell us. So you see what I'm saying? There's, there's this commonality.

What he’s saying is actually quite ironic. Because the true believer about UFOs thinks that there’s a government conspiracy to hide real evidence of aliens. What Kirkpatrick is saying is the actual conspiracy is being carried out by a group of UFO true believers to get the government involved in the business of investigating aliens.

Peter Bergen: I was searching for the right metaphor, but I think this is known as a self-licking ice cream cone.

Sean Kirkpatrick: That is a self-licking ice cream cone. Exactly.

The self-licking ice cream cone is a Pentagon term of art for a program that exists only to perpetuate itself. Now, you’ve heard lots of good reasons why an office like AARO should exist, and should be keeping track of unknown, non-alien objects in the skies. It keeps Americans safer, whether they’re flying fighter jets or sitting in coach. But that’s definitely more boring than perpetuating stories about aliens. Which suggests that the UFO office has another, unstated mission.

Sean Kirkpatrick: Yes. I mean, a lot of this is—look uh, desensationalize this problem. It's to put objective, fact based, reporting and analysis and disclosure of that information into a routinized manner to normalize the discussion so that it's not sensationalized and so that it's normal and, and eventually boring. That would be the way to go.

This mission to make UFOs boring might be succeeding. Even Joe Rogan’s podcast—which loves a good alien story—seems to be getting a little frustrated by how un-fun Pentagon types have recently turned out to be when it comes to disclosing what they know about UFOs.

ARCHIVAL Joe Rogan Podcast: When we talked about disclosure in the old days, no one thought it would be this, like slow drip. Bureaucratic Right. Slow fucking drip. It's so frustrating. I don't pay attention to it anymore… They made the most exciting thing boring. They fucking ruined it.

(Slight pause for a couple of beats)

Peter Bergen: I wanted to give you the opportunity to exclusively tell us on this podcast that you have found evidence of extraterrestrials.

Sean Kirkpatrick: The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens and I could have rolled them out, but there's none. There is no evidence of extraterrestrials. There is no evidence of aliens and there's no evidence of a government conspiracy.

Sadly for all the UFO lovers out there, that's probably the biggest takeaway from the report that Kirkpatrick and his team just delivered to the US Congress.

Plenty of outsiders have speculated about whether the Pentagon’s alien-focused programs were coming up empty, and perhaps were suspiciously self-perpetuating.

The significance of what Kirkpatrick is saying now, and what the AARO report is laying out, is that people inside the Pentagon—with really high-security clearances—are finally saying, ‘We looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.’

So, given that, what to make of that small stubborn percentage of UFO reports that don't have any easy explanations? And this is where believers and debunkers tend to differ. And Kirkpatrick makes it pretty clear that his office thinks that the truth behind that small unexplained percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth.

Sean Kirkpatrick: Occam's Razor is a valid axiom. If you are faced with a set of data, and it may fit two different, theoretical, hypothetical, explanations. The one that's more simple is usually the right one.

What is more likely: that an adversary has come up with a new technology or we have extraterrestrials? Or even simpler than that, what's more likely, the fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that's being commercialized down in Florida that you didn't know about?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Or we have extraterrestrials? That makes me scratch my head sometimes when people do that. And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them, here's the company in Florida that builds exactly what you've described. And their response is, ‘Well, no, no, no, it's gotta be extraterrestrials and you're covering it up”

Peter Bergen: Do you think by setting up this office, paradoxically, you just increase the media interest? Is this sort of fueling the fire of these kinds of people who think there probably are aliens out there or—?

Sean Kirkpatrick: That’s a really good question. We've actually debated that on many, many occasions of, you know, are we, are we adding more fuel to this fire or not? You are absolutely correct that there is absolutely nothing that I'm going to do, say, or produce evidentiary that is going to make the true believers convert, if you will. It’s almost like a religion. It is basically a religion. So that group of people you're never going to convince.

If you’re interested in the issues and stories in this episode, we recommend the relatively new book, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There, by Garrett Graff. It’s available on Audible.

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Erik German, with help from Holly DeMuth.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

And our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Laura Tillman, Luke Cregan, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson

Theme music is by Joel Pickard

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.