UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDTESTIMONY RECORD
UNDER OATH CONGRESSIONAL HEARING · APRIL 19, 2023The 2023 Senate AARO Hearing
Witnesses: Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, Director, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)
The hearing was the first public testimony by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which the Pentagon established in July 2022 after Congress wrote it into law. Its formal subject was ‘the mission, activities, oversight, and budget’ of the office. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand chaired, with Sen. Joni Ernst as ranking member. The open session followed a closed session held earlier the same day.
AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick was the only witness. He told senators that ‘only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous’, and that most reports show ‘mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources’. He said AARO had found ‘no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics’.
Kirkpatrick said AARO was tracking ‘a total of 650 cases’, about half of which it had prioritized for closer study. He presented trend data showing that about 52 percent of reported objects were round or spherical, typically one to four meters across and seen at 10,000 to 30,000 feet, and stressed a heavy ‘collection bias’: reports cluster where military sensors and training ranges are.
He showed two declassified videos. In the first, an MQ-9 drone in the Middle East records an apparently spherical object; Kirkpatrick said it would be ‘virtually impossible to fully identify’ from that footage, and it remained unresolved. In the second, from South Asia, an apparent trail behind a fast object turned out to be a sensor artifact, and AARO identified the object as a commuter aircraft.
Kirkpatrick invited people with alternative theories to submit their research to ‘credible peer-reviewed’ journals. Three months later, a House Oversight subcommittee heard sworn claims from former intelligence officer David Grusch that the government ran a secret crash-retrieval program, which the Pentagon denied. AARO’s first historical report, in March 2024, said it found no empirical evidence that the government had reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology.