AARO's First Senate Hearing: The April 19, 2023 Transcript

The hearing lasted exactly one hour, from 11:08 a.m. to 12:08 p.m. It ended with members of the public walking up to the dais with videos and a book, which neatly illustrates the problem the new office had been set up to handle.

What this record is

This is the court reporter’s stenographic transcript of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing “to receive testimony on the mission, activities, oversight, and budget of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,” held on Wednesday, 19 April 2023, in Room SR-232A of the Russell Senate Office Building. It runs to 50 pages. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand chaired, with Senators Joni Ernst and Jacky Rosen present, and the only witness was Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO’s first director. AARO filed it as case 330UAP000022, and its review stamps date its release in full to February 2025. The slides Kirkpatrick showed are a separate item in the same series (NAID 499915962).

What it says

In her opening statement, Gillibrand recalled that 2017 press reports had exposed activities begun years earlier by the late Senator Harry Reid, and she said military pilots had been meeting unknown objects in controlled airspace for at least eight years. She quoted former Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist’s remark that if the objects had been labeled “made in China” there would have been an uproar. She called the response “irresponsibly anemic and slow” because of stigma. She complained that the President’s budget requests for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 funded little beyond AARO’s operating costs, and she said it took a letter from her, Senator Rubio and 14 other senators to secure temporary relief. She set out her agenda: AARO’s role in the February 2023 shootdowns over North America, its direct reporting line to the Deputy Secretary, sensor filters, and the witness-disclosure channel Congress had ordered. Ernst kept her remarks short and focused on Chinese and Russian capabilities, and on making sure AARO did not duplicate other agencies.

Kirkpatrick said AARO had more than three dozen staff in four areas: operations, scientific research, integrated analysis, and strategic communications. He stressed that “only a very small percentage” of reports looked anomalous. Most cases stayed unresolved, he said, for lack of data, and he would not close a case whose conclusion he could not defend. He described the office’s mission as turning UAP into “SEP, somebody else’s problem,” and he stated that AARO had “found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” He urged people with other theories to publish in peer-reviewed journals, “not by blog or social media.”

His trend chart showed most sightings between 15,000 and 25,000 feet, which he put down to where military aircraft fly, and a strong geographic collection bias. About 52 percent of reported objects were round or spherical. The typical report described an object one to four meters across, white, silver, translucent or metallic, at 10,000 to 30,000 feet, with apparent speeds from stationary to Mach 2 and no thermal exhaust. He then showed two declassified videos. The first, from an MQ-9 drone over the Middle East, showed an apparently spherical object, and he said it remained unresolved because the brief video was all the data there was. The second, from an MQ-9 over South Asia, showed a fast object with what looked like a propulsion trail. He said frame-by-frame analysis showed the trail was a sensor readout artifact that followed the camera’s motion, and that the object resolved into the engine heat of a commuter aircraft. The site covers both clips as the Middle East MQ-9 sphere and the South Asia MQ-9 case.

When questioned, Kirkpatrick said AARO was tracking about 650 cases, up from the 366 in the January report, and that about half had been prioritized as potentially of anomalous interest. He said roughly 20 to 30 were partway through analysis and “a handful” had completed peer review. He explained the office’s competing intelligence and science-and-technology teams, followed by a senior outside peer-review group. He told Ernst that of the small share of cases showing advanced signatures, he had “concerning indicators” of foreign links but no evidence. Rosen asked about aviator safety at Nellis and Fallon, cited the Navy’s 11 reported near misses between 2004 and 2021, and asked whether AARO needed new authorities. Kirkpatrick said it operated under Title 10 and would welcome authorities for collection tasking and counterintelligence, and Gillibrand asked him to help draft the legislative language. He said AARO had interviewed nearly two dozen witnesses referred by Congress, that the public reporting website had been awaiting approval since before Christmas, and that during the North American shootdowns he gave the Joint Staff only initial advice.

Context

This hearing came three months after ODNI’s January 2023 annual report, which carried the 366 new cases Gillibrand cited and built on the 2021 preliminary assessment. It also came about ten weeks after the Chinese balloon and the Lake Huron shootdown, and about three months before David Grusch’s House testimony changed the tone of the debate. Kirkpatrick’s figures here are a snapshot, and later annual reports superseded them. The closing exchange, in which audience members described footage of lights over Sandia and Kirtland and speculated about propulsion fields, is recorded in the transcript but has no evidentiary value.

Status

This is a historical record of testimony, not a finding. The one case it resolves (South Asia) rests on AARO’s frame-by-frame analysis as described orally. The Middle East sphere was still unresolved as of this hearing.

Sources

• NARA catalog: Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Emerging Threats and Capabilities Briefing 2023 (NAID 499915954)
• File: 022_SASC_Transcript_2023.pdf
• NARA catalog: related briefing slides (NAID 499915962)
• Series: Records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (NAID 493468580)