The U.S. Department of Defense will investigate 650 incidents of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAFs) – or UFOs, as they are most widely known – marking a a huge increase from the 350 cases mentioned in an unclassified intelligence report earlier this year.
In his testimony before a Senate Armed Services panel on Wednesday, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), stated that the Department has prioritized “about half of [the cases] to be of anomalous interesting value, and now we have to go through those and go, ‘How much of those do I have actual data for?'”
During the session, the Pentagon also declassified previously unseen videos of UFOs.
One of them shows a a weird orb hovering over the Middle East. In another one, an obscure object was captured with a MQ-9 forward-looking infrared video sensor in South Asia. According to the AARO, however, the latter was most likely a commercial aircraft.
“I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous.’ The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources,” Kirkpatrick told the Senate hearing on Wednesday – seemingly disproving that these are traces of extraterrestrial life.
The AARO’s scientists are trying to enhance UAP data collecting, scientific intelligence analysis of UAP, and internal reporting requirements standardization.
New declassified UFO video just dropped. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, walks senators through a sighting of a "spherical UAP" in the Middle East from last year pic.twitter.com/ep6aujggmY
— Dave Brown (@dave_brown24) April 19, 2023
