Why is the Pentagon’s UFO office so clueless about UFOs?

AARO’s landmark, congressionally-mandated historical review of government involvement with UFOs contains a multitude of errors and omissions, astoundingly poor analytic tradecraft and, in at least one instance, an egregious falsehood.

On July 11, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) reintroduced the most extraordinary legislation in American history. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act alleges that shadowy elements of the U.S. government have surreptitiously operated “legacy programs” that retrieve and seek to reverse-engineer UFOs of “unknown” or “non-human” origin.

As a remedy, the Disclosure Act would establish a blue-ribbon review board to gradually and strategically release long-withheld UFO-related records publicly via a “controlled disclosure campaign.”

Schumer and Rounds’s reintroduction of the legislation is particularly notable because it was largely gutted, at the request of the Pentagon’s UFO office, by House lawmakers last December. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — established in 2022 — also issued repeated categorical denials of the stunning UFO-related activities alleged in the Disclosure Act.

In a lengthy, error-laden report released in March, for example, the office stated that it “found no empirical evidence that the [U.S. government] and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.”

The reintroduction of the Disclosure Act, in full, is thus a stunning double rebuke of AARO. Notably, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who led the charge to establish the office, is a cosponsor of the legislation.

Moreover, the Senate Intelligence Committee appears set to require the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative watchdog, to conduct a review of AARO. In other words, key members of Congress — including the senator who established it — appear to have little confidence in the Pentagon’s UFO office.

This should come as no surprise. AARO’s landmark, congressionally-mandated historical review of government involvement with UFOs contains a multitude of errors and omissions, astoundingly poor analytic tradecraft and, in at least one instance, an egregious falsehood.

At the same time, as I learned recently in a lengthy discussion with AARO’s former director, the Pentagon appears clueless about the most recognizable, widely publicized UFO footage. This is particularly remarkable, since the videos spurred significant congressional interest, leading ultimately to the establishment of the office.

For example, Sean Kirkpatrick, who retired as AARO’s director in December, told me that the well-known “Gimbal” video — which a stunned Navy aircrew recorded hundreds of miles off the Florida coast in early 2015 — was likely a balloon drifting in the wind. According to Kirkpatrick, the object’s highly anomalous infrared signature was due to a reflection from the sun.

But the government’s former top UFO analyst is demonstrably wrong about the most recognizable UFO footage of all time. The “Gimbal” incident, as the naval aviator who recorded the video confirmed in a congressional briefing, occurred at night, eliminating sun-glare as a plausible source for the UFO’s bizarre heat signature.

Moreover, the aircrew are heard remarking in surprise that the “Gimbal” object, along with a “fleet” of accompanying UFOs, are “all going against the wind, the wind’s 120 knots from west.”

Balloons, of course, do not move “against” Category 4 hurricane-force winds. Nor have sophisticated three-dimensional recreations of the incident found a convincing balloon trajectory for the “Gimbal” UFO.

Notably, this is the second time that Kirkpatrick suggested these false “explanations” for the “Gimbal” video to me, with the first occurring following a public event in November.

Interestingly, in a March interview, Kirkpatrick stated that the “Gimbal” object was “probably a jet.” Not only does this fly in the face of publicly-available empirical evidence, it has been roundly disputed by fighter pilots intimately familiar with the sensor system that recorded the video.

At the same time, Mick West, a prominent UFO skeptic, characterized Kirkpatrick’s “explanation” for the “Gimbal” object’s anomalous stepped rotation as “nonsense” and “obviously wrong.”

As Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, aptly noted, Kirkpatrick’s lack of basic knowledge about the most recognizable publicly available UFO footage raises an array of questions about the quality and rigor of AARO’s analyses. This is especially the case following its absurd explanation for a highly anomalous UFO incident that Air Force personnel felt obligated to report to Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) office.

“GoFast,” another UFO video that spurred significant congressional interest that ultimately led to the creation of AARO, was filmed just 10 minutes prior to “Gimbal” by the same Navy aircrew.

In March, Kirkpatrick endorsed a deeply flawed NASA analysis of the “GoFast” video. But after I pointed out a critical error in NASA’s calculations to him, Kirkpatrick contradicted himself, telling me “I haven’t looked at NASA’s analysis.” A remarkable flip-flop, to say the least.

One must thus wonder how many members of Congress Kirkpatrick may have misled, intentionally or not, with such false “explanations” for the most notable UFO incidents.

Moreover, just as with “Gimbal,” Kirkpatrick seemed unaware that sophisticated geometrical recreations corroborate aircrew and radar operator accounts of the 2004 “Tic Tac” incident, widely considered the best-documented contemporary UFO encounter.

Any objective scientific analysis of the best-known multi-witness UFO incidents should, at the very least, assess whether the available data confirms or contradicts high-confidence accounts by highly trained military witnesses.

AARO, clearly, conducted no such analysis, preferring instead to force easily falsifiable and unscientific “explanations” upon credible, highly perplexing incidents.

Over 50 years ago, the late atmospheric physicist James McDonald warned his fellow scientists and members of Congress about the Pentagon’s profoundly unscientific approach to UFOs. The Air Force’s long-time scientific consultant on UFOs, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, agreed, emerging as a fierce proponent of rigorous, unbiased study of the phenomenon.

AARO’s disingenuous analysis and false “explanations” for intriguing UFO incidents strongly suggest that history is repeating itself. Congress’s apparent skepticism of the Pentagon’s UFO office is well-founded.

Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense.