The Pentagon thinks these UFOs filmed from a military range were just airliners

While the head of the Pentagon’s effort to investigate aerial anomalies recently co-authored an academic paper proposing that some recent objects could be alien probes from a mothership, he had a more down-to-earth explanation for a recently released video of unidentified flying objects: they’re likely commercial aircraft.

Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, shared the below 8:30-minute video during a May 31 public meeting of NASA’s Independent Study Team on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. (What used to be called UFOs.) The footage shows three objects recorded on infrared video in 2021 from a military range “in the western United States” according to a caption on the Pentagon’s video and photo repository DVIDShub.net.

AARO analyzed the full-motion video and commercial flight data in the region, assessing that the objects were three separate commercial aircraft flying far from the infrared sensor. “The radar tracks for commercial aircraft aligned with the objects, which were only seen as small dots due to their significant distance from the sensor,” the Defense Media Activity caption explains.

Update: On the heels of news that a “military whistleblower” has claimed that the U.S. government has recovered “craft of nonhuman origin,” Twitter user James Harris Jr. posted a thread outlining the reasons for skepticism about that claim (and thereby others attributing UAP to alien life).

2/ you must believe that 1) Multiple alien spacecraft have visited Earth, 2) A surprising number crashed here, 3) we managed to keep it secret for most of a century, and 4) we have somehow not used that wreckage to expand our own tech noticeably. First things first:

— jimeharrisjr.bsky.social (@jimeharrisjr) June 8, 2023

But even before this summer’s widely reported shoot-down of a Chinese spy balloon and other objects, the topic of unidentified flying objects was gaining widespread legitimacy, as Congress sought answers from the Pentagon about the aerial phenomenon and both the Defense Department and independent investigators revealed videos and documents on the matter.

In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in June that said the military could not explain over 140 cases of airborne phenomena sighted since 2004, including some that exhibited unusual flight characteristics. A few months later, the Pentagon announced a new group would be responsible for coordinating investigations into UFO sightings.

The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security asked Kirkpatrick, known as “Dr. K” to his team, to stand-up and lead AARO in early 2022. He’s got a physics Ph.D. related to nonlinear and nonequilibrium photon dynamics of rare earth doped fluoride crystals from the University of Georgia and over two decades of experience in science and technical intelligence, according to a Pentagon biography. He specializes in space/counterspace mission areas and has worked at the National Reconnaissance Office and CIA.

Kirkpatrick’s AARO is made up of more than three-dozen experts that has been working to improve data collection, standardize how UAP are reported, and implement a framework for analysis, he told Congress in April testimony.

Politico’s Lara Seligman reported in April that Kirkpatrick and Harvard professor Avi Loeb wrote a draft paper dated March 7 in which they suggest that an artificial interstellar object could be a “parent craft” that releases “many small probes” while passing close to Earth. The pair cited as inspiration for this notion the orbital parameters of the interstellar Near Earth Object ‘Oumuamua, flagged as unusual during a Pan-STARR telescope sky survey on October 19, 2017, and the meter-size interstellar meteor IM2 that collided with Earth six months before ‘Oumuamua’s closest approach to the planet.

“The academic interest in UAP stems from their potential non-human technological origin,” the authors write. “Extraterrestrial equipment could arrive in two forms: space trash, similar to the way our own interstellar probes (Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 & 11 and New Horizons) will appear in a billion years, or functional equipment such as autonomous devices equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI).”

The Pentagon’s interest in UAPs is to “minimize technical and intelligence surprise,” Kirkpatrick told Congress in April.

“Unidentified objects in any domain pose potential risks to safety and security, particularly for military personnel and capabilities,” he said in written testimony. “Congress and DoD agree that UAP cannot remain unexamined or unaddressed.”