U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Gives UFO and Aliens Update

Have you been wondering what the U.S. Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has been doing since it opened up for business in July 2022 — welcome to the club … we have all been waiting for an update on its promised investigations into unidentified objects in air, underwater, in space and any place else they may be lurking. Well, just in time for the new year, the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security gave a report and a press conference on the progress of AARO so far. A number of revelations were made in his presentation. Were any of them about aliens or revere-engineered flying saucers? Let’s find out.

“I’m Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. It’s a pleasure to be here today to provide an update on the department’s efforts to address unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. In May of this year, I appeared before Congress for the first open hearing on UAP in 50 years. In my testimony, I underscored that the Department of Defense takes UAP reports seriously. You may have caught that I just said unidentified anomalous phenomena, whereas in the past the department has used the term unidentified aerial phenomena. This new terminology expands the scope of UAP to include submerged and trans-medium objects.  Unidentified phenomena in all domains, whether in the air, ground, sea or space, pose potential threats to personnel security and operations security, and they require our urgent attention.”

Right off the bat, Under Secretary Ronald Moultrie revealed that the Pentagon has officially expanded the scope of the AARO and created yet another replacement for unidentified flying objects or UFOs (when we were just getting used to writing ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’) – unidentified anomalous objects. That name now covers the trans-medium Tic Tac UAPs reported by US Navy pilots off the coast of California and in other instances. Moultrie brought along Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, to give details on what has been found so far.

“Our team knows that the public interest in UAP is high. We are developing a plan to provide regular updates and progress reporting to the public on our work. While we’re committed to declassifying and sharing information related to UAP to the greatest extent possible, we must, of course, balance the desire for transparency with the need to protect classified information, sources and methods in the interest of national security.”

It is never a good sign when the stated purpose of an update is to announce plans to provide updates. That also goes for making sure to mention “classified information” and “national security” right up front. Moultrie and Kirkpatrick immediately opened the floor for questions. In response to a query on whether the AARO is just looking at the 144 incidents of unidentified phenomena announced last year in a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Kirkpatrick said that they have already looked at “several hundreds” more which are both newer and older. That questioner also asked about the name change – has the AARO uncovered any new cross-domain objects going “from water to air to space.” Moultrie answered that one.

“We have not, to the best of my knowledge, had any credible reporting, that we’ve been able to analyze of trans-medium activity or trans-medium objects.  We are still going through the data. And so, I would say that it’s early on in the process. So, I don’t want to be definitive to say that there’s nothing that is there.”

That’s disappointing, and the fact that AARO is still new isn’t much of an excuse. In a follow-up on whether improved “sensors” has helped the AARO resolve any of the 144 old cases or any of the new ones, with the implication that some UAPs are probably drones, they both used the “it’s still early” response. At that point, a question got to what we all want to know: “Is there any evidence that you have affirmative evidence that you have collected that shows any one of these anomalies is a space alien?” Dr. Kirkpatrick had a one-word answer which Moultrie felt obligated to elaborate on.

“At this time, the answer’s no, we have nothing. We’re committed — and I have to say this because I — I talked with the Secretary and I talked with the Deputy Secretary about this, about openness and objectivity, and transparency that we have committed to — to the Congress, the American people, to you in the press corps. We have not seen anything that would — but we — we’re certainly very early on — that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin, if you will.  If we are — if we find something like that, we will look at it and analyze it and take the appropriate actions.”

So … no aliens that they are willing or able to talk about. That includes underwater aliens as Moultrie reemphasized that AARO now looks “under the surface of the water.” Getting nowhere with the line of questioning about what, if anything , has been found in either the 144 known unknown UAPs and the new unknown UAPs, one reporter decided to ask about the promise AARO has made about digging into historical UFO sightings as well … and we know which one they mean when they ask about “going back 75 years, trying to detail maybe what we used to know, what we don’t know anymore, or, you know, other cases that might have come across or reports, etc.”

“So, we’ve — we’ve started to give it some thought, I don’t want to talk too much about it until they actually sign it. But that — that is going to be quite a research project, if you will, into the archives and going backwards in time.”

Kirkpatrick dodged again, saying the department must wait until President Biden signs the new NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and approves the $847 billion budget. The reporters tried one more time:

“But does the Defense Department have any evidence from previous incidents including crashed craft, or living or deceased beings from another planet or dimension that indicate that the U.S. that – excuse me — that the Earth has been visited by another form of life?”

Here, in part, is Moultrie’s response:

“So, I’m gonna to discount meteorites and things like that, that might have microbes on it and those types of things, and just talk about things that may be intelligent life that may have crashed landed on our planet or that may have the — in somehow visited our planet. In terms of holdings that I have seen and holdings, that that we have gone through — and we are being very thorough about this, and we are going back and trying to understand all the compartmented programs that this department has had, understand all the relationships that we may have had with any other organizations and all the predecessor organizations that were established before we were officially a Department of Defense. We’ve looked at all that; I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash, or anything like that.”

Kirkpatrick agrees, then Moultrie answered a follow-up question about what he meant by “holdings”:

“Holdings, I’m talking about documentation, things that people may have said, interviews that people may have had, or memos that somebody may have written. And remember, there’s a lot of documents that are written by people, there’s things that people scratch on pieces of paper or whatever. And there’s posters that people put in the hallway, sometimes it’s a, “this is the alien room.” So, you have to go through all of those. And you have to see, OK, what’s behind the door? It’s great work.”

Yes, he said: “And there’s posters that people put in the hallway, sometimes it’s a, “this is the alien room.”” Is he implying that Agent Fox Mulder was based on a real person with a poster on his wall and there really are “X files” that he can’t talk about but … ‘wink, wink’? From this press conference, it appears that searching for data on UFOs in the Pentagon is “great work ” and a lot of fun, but UAP disclosures of the ‘anomalous’ or ‘aerial’ kind are going to continue to be treated as a cat-and-mouse game with little or no data of real consequence being revealed voluntarily. That leaves disclosure of the involuntary kind. Keep your phones charged and your eyes on the sky.