The Pentagon’s new UFO program has a serious contender
INTERESTING CLAIMS ARE EMERGING from researcher Douglas Johnson who has reported that an intelligence officer by the name of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick has been appointed as the new leader of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) – the Pentagon’s effort to investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) issue.
This position was made available following the removal of Garry Reid from his oversight role that came earlier in the year. AOIMSG was established as a counter measure to Congress and was positioned in the Office of the Under Secretary for Defense Intelligence (OUSDI) in the November of 2021. The potential move to appoint Kirkpatrick as a replacement - which is yet to be confirmed by the Pentagon - is considered a positive move by those close to the UAP initiative behind the scenes. The decision to appoint a physicist associated to the intelligence community, and associated to Space Force, has already been heralded as a move orientated towards genuine transparency.
“A 2021 document referred to Dr. Kirkpatrick as Deputy Director of Intelligence, J2 Intelligence Directorate, for U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM), and also SPACECOM’s representative to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).”
The appointment is also considered a positive step from the perspective of timing, given that the Department of Defense (DoD) is now in process of having a rather large fire lit under them and is seemingly trying to appease Congress prior to them taking more significant action. The recent news comes a week before a major breakthrough in the UAP saga. For the first time in over 50 years the American Congress is holding hearings on UAP (UFOs). The session was scheduled in for Tuesday 17th of May, 2022 at 3pm GMT, and would be authorised and held before the House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee. The hearings come five months after the National Defense Authorization Act demanded in legislation that the United States military established a permanent UAP office. Keen and Blumenthal write in the Times that scheduled witnesses for the DoD included Scott W. Bray - Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence and Ronald S. Moultrie - Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
What was the most interesting part was just how serious members of the House were taking the issues. Congressman Tim Burchett, who has a history of being outspoken about the UAP ‘cover-up’, appeared on News Nation’s On Balance with Leland Vittert, and again referred to the issue was being handled by the Pentagon as a “bogus cover-up”. What exactly is the Congressman referring to? - we cannot be sure how much is his personal belief and how much has come through official briefings.
Historically, the United States Airforce (USAF) was always seen as the obfuscators, particularly with the alleged withholding of ‘significant information’ from Project Bluebook which was closed in 1969 as a result of the whitewash Edward Condon report. With regard to the claims of more recent times, it has been the individuals from the OUSDI who have come under scrutiny. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the data to verify who has done what, when, how or why.
What we do know is that the DoD has had five months to fully enact the legislation from the UAP Gillibrand Amendment that was passed into law via the National Defense Authorisation Act in January 2022. The DoD have seemingly done little in that time - with some sources even going as far as to suggest that briefings were trying to dampen down the significance of UAP. Others behind the scenes have suggested that there has been a lack of effort from leadership to fully address the outstanding issues of government accountability.
What about the UASF’s lack of movement and interest– that is - if we take the word of Christopher Mellon in his article on why the USAF have failed to take the issue seriously. Some UAP analysts have even said that the origin(s) of the anomalous technological vehicles are not being investigated in an appropriate way by the Pentagon. Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, who has been forcing the issue of UAP transparency in recent months, has labelled the serious nature of the issue upon national security. Gillibrand has stated how “burying our heads in the sand is neither a strategy nor an acceptable approach” and has even pushed the new Inspector General to make himself aware of the UAP significance.
Bryan Bender reported in POLITICO that a number of Congressional lawmakers were becoming frustrated that the Pentagon is still not taking the topic seriously - despite legal frameworks which are now in place. Arguably, this feet-dragging and slow walking has pushed the Congress to quickly take action. And some action does seem to have been taken recently.
The unpleasantness around the removal of the Director of Defense - Garry Reid - in April’s ground-breaking The Debrief article, came following the Inspector General investigation submitted the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). It was claimed that Reid (and others) had sought to discredit Luis Elizondo in a target campaign following Elizondo’s resignation in 2017 in protest of UAP not being taken seriously by DoD.
Whilst the results of the Inspector General investigation are still not for open consumption, we can therefore only speculate at what might be occurring behind the scenes. The removal of Reid and the potential replacement by favoured Kirkpatrick could be a sign that DoD are willing to reassess their position. This is no more evident by the upcoming hearings, some which have occurred behind closed doors and off the record this past week, and those which are occurring openly next week.
This all comes from Congress. It is their sheer will to have this be acted upon which is driving the progress being made on UAP. And despite the wild internet conspiracies that lawmakers have been ‘tricked into believing’ in UFOs, in reality however the truth is more rational – that there is a threat to national security which needs to be addressed. And to give credit to representatives Burchett, Carson and Schiff, they have been open and transparent with their constituents in addressing this issue promptly.
Adam Schiff was quoted by The New York Times as saying that UFOs represented “one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”
In the end we might expect to see Congress hold firm and continue to apply pressure as they have done, pushing DoD to be accountable whilst enabling a process for the right people to be in the right positions of this important issue. Ultimately, we don’t know if and when Kirkpatrick will take over at AOIMSG, but given who has gone before we can’t expect it to get any worse. We look forward to the upcoming events with optimism and interest.
