Mystery Orbs Should Make Us More Humble

 The US Department of Defense now has an office dedicated to investigating reports of UFOs (or UAP, variously defined as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). The office is officially called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. Sean Kirkpatrick led the office in 2022 and 2023, but resigned around the end of 2023. Sean has written an article that recently appeared in Scientific American, one entitled "Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter."  PC users will find the article blocked by some annoying popup that demands your email address. I read the article on my I-Pad without having to give my email address, and I will summarize the contents. 

I can start by noting the egotistical-sounding article title.  Sean was the leader of an office with quite a few people, but he has described himself as "the" US government's UFO hunter, as if it was a one-man show. Sean then denounces "today's world of misinformation, conspiracy driven decision-making and sensationalist-dominated governance," and claims that "evidence-based critical thinking is eroding." He claims to "have experienced this erosion up close and personal," and that this was "one factor in my decision to step down from my position." Wow, that sounds quite "holier than thou." But it doesn't really make sense. If there are some people around you not thinking very clearly, why not help things out by staying around and standing up for clear, rational thinking? 

Sean then states, "AARO discovered a few things, and none were about aliens." No, actually, AARO encountered quite a few reports of mysterious anomalies, and we do not understand the cause of such anomalies.  Visiting extraterrestrials is one of the main theories to explain such anomalies. Such a theory has not been ruled out by anything AARO has done. 

Next, Sean makes a strange reference to the AATIP program (an acronym which stands for Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), a program that is also called the  Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Application Program (AAWSAP).  Sean seemingly tries to make the program sound like something that was about "paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah." He says "taxpayer money was inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah." The truth is that the AATIP program seems to have had no more than a slight involvement in Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. The AATIP program mainly produced reports on a wide variety of futuristic topics. You can see a list of the reports it produced at the "Black Vault" link here. Here are the reports it produced

1.  Metallic Glasses – Status and Prospects for Aerospace Applications [30 Pages, 1.74MB]
2.  Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter [20 Pages, 1.34MB]
3.  Pulsed High-Power Microwave Source Technology [37 Pages, 2.55MB]
4.  Biomaterials [32 Pages, 1.75MB]
5.  Materials for Advanced Aerospace Platforms [27 Pages, 1.96MB]
6.  Space Access – Where We’ve Been and Where We Could Go [57 Pages, 3.27MB]
7.  Invisibility Cloaking – Theory and Experiments [29 Pages, 1.62MB]
8.  Positron Aerospace Propulsion [35 Pages, 1.89MB]
9.  Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion [72 Pages, 4.35MB]
10.  Metallic Spintronics [27 Pages, 1.77MB]
11.  Advanced Nuclear Propulsion For Manned Deep Space Missions [37 Pages, 2.12MB]
12.  Technological Approaches to Controlling External Devices [36 Pages, 2.5MB]
13.  Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions [33 Pages, 2.13MB]
14.  The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research [16 Pages, 1.33MB]
15.  Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineer [17 Pages, 1.2MB]
16.  The Space Communication Implications of Quantum Entanglement and Nonlocality [32 Pages, 2.03MB]
17.  Maverick Inventor Versus Corporate Inventor – Where Will the Next Major Innovations Arise? [19 Pages, 1.37MB]
18.  Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy [42 Pages, 2.66MB]
19.  Antigravity for Aerospace Applications [44 Pages, 2.78MB]
20.  Biosensors and BioMEMS – A Survey of the Present Field [45 Pages, 2.84MB]
21.  High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Communications [57 Pages, 4.38MB]
22.  Metamaterials for Aerospace Applications [27 Pages, 1.74MB]
23.  State of the Art and Evolution of High-Energy Laser Weapons [31 Pages, 1.77MB]
24.  Concepts for Extracting Energy From the Quantum Vacuum [57 Pages, 3.61MB]
25.  An Introduction to the Statistical Drake Equation [55 Pages, 2.83MB]
26.  Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues [38 Pages, 2.17MB]
27.  Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites [77 Pages, 3.8MB]
28.  Cockpits in the Era of Breakthrough Flight [57 Pages, 3.26MB]
29.  Negative Mass Propulsion [43 Pages, 3.26MB]
30.  Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion [49 Pages, 2.35MB]
31.  Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities [46 Pages, 2.19MB]
32.  Ultracapacitors as Energy and Power Storage Devices [34 Pages, 2.02MB]
33.  MHD Air Breathing Propulsion and Power for Aerospace Applications [32 Pages, 2.14MB]
34.  Cognitive Limits on Simultaneous Control of Multiple Unmanned Spacecraft [30 Pages, 1.92MB]
35.  Quantum Computing and Utilizing Organic Molecules in Automation Technology [54 Pages, 3.12MB]
36.  Quantum Tomography of Negative Energy States in the Vacuum [51 Pages, 2.12MB]
37.  Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion II [36 Pages, 1.88MB]

There's nothing in this list about Skinwalker Ranch. So why has Sean attempted to belittle this program by claiming that "taxpayer money was inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah"? And why would money be inappropriately spent if someone was researching the paranormal at such a location, reputed to be a hotspot for UFO sightings? For the former head of a US UFO office to be thinking that it is inappropriate to investigate the paranormal sounds very strange indeed. Diligent scholars of UFO reports are well aware than such reports have long been entangled with various types of paranormal phenomena such as ESP.  And dramatic UFO reports are typically themselves reports of the paranormal. 

Most of the topics mentioned above are no more outrageous or fringe than many types of research that receive abundant government funding, such as research on the never-observed hypothetical realities called dark energy and dark matter.  Trying to belittle some claim he doesn't believe, Sean strangely tells us "the key purveyors of this narrative have known one another for decades," as if such a claim was important. Sean then tries to create bad impressions about the AATIP program by saying that it worked on "fringe studies."  The word "fringe" is a long-used term of disparagement that no director of a UFO office has any business using. The topics in the list above (and also the topic of UFOs) are no more "fringe" than many research topics the US government lavishly funds, such as the search for dark matter, dark energy, and primordial cosmic inflation.  

Later, Sean makes this statement: "Simply put, 'unidentified' is unacceptable." To the contrary, man's knowledge of nature is fragmentary, and many types of unidentified phenomena have always been an important part of human experience. Any idea that "unidentified" is unacceptable would seem to involve vast overconfidence about the state of human understanding. Later, Sean strangely claims that UFO research is "data poor." To the contrary, organizations such as MUFON have tons of data about UFO sightings.   

For example, one of the documents above (" Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues") has the following interesting data-rich table in an appendix, listing effects reported in UFO encounters:

Sean's article is centered around his grievances against some people he seems very annoyed by, and he seems more interested in talking about his grievances against such people than shedding light on the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena. Sean's article has a  "UFO researchers should not taint themselves" ring to it, with the idea perhaps being that there must be no mingling with things that NASA materialists might disapprove of.  That does not make sense, because UFO reports are thoroughly entangled with psychic phenomena,  as I discuss in my posts here and here. A good attitude for the leader of some government office having the task of investigating UFO reports would be: fearlessly collect and analyze observations, and make whatever conclusions are justified by them, no matter how much that may offend the easily-offended ears of today's experts. 

Here are quotes that Sean made in a public hearing:

"Sean Kirkpatrick: "The vast majority of what has been reported and what we have data on, a little less than half now, are orbs, round spheres."

"Sean Kirkpatrick:  "This is a spherical orb metallic in the Middle East 2022 by an MQ-9. I will come back to the sensor question that David raised here in a moment. This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of. We see these all over the world and we see these in making very interesting apparent maneuvers."

Such puzzling anomalies should teach us great humility, but I think Sean failed to learn the lesson. "Unidentified is unacceptable" is not something suggesting humility before the countless mysteries of reality. 

Strangely, the link that previously took you to NASA's report on UFOs (a low-effort affair, as I discuss here) is now a dead link.