Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, says a newly released account of a black triangular object seen by FBI personnel does not include enough evidence to establish what they witnessed.
The report describes a dark, nonreflective object with no visible engines or exhaust. The witnesses said it rose above a mountain ridge, hovered briefly, then appeared to speed away and vanish into a canyon.
Kirkpatrick, who spent nearly three decades in defense and intelligence roles, cautioned against treating the witnesses’ professional backgrounds as proof that their account is accurate. Credibility, he said, does not replace evidence.
“People sometimes assume that because a witness is seen as credible, their account should be accepted as fact,” Kirkpatrick said, describing that reasoning as authority bias.
Without photographs or other supporting data, he said, investigators have little basis for deciding what the witnesses saw. People may report an unfamiliar sighting honestly, he added, but can then fill in what they do not know with explanations that are far more dramatic than the evidence supports.
One possible explanation for some triangular-object reports is advanced aircraft technology, Kirkpatrick said. He compared the accounts to sightings of the F-117 stealth aircraft before the plane was publicly known.
During his time at AARO, investigators considered three broad explanations for reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena: technology belonging to a foreign adversary, ordinary objects or sensor effects that had been misinterpreted, and extraterrestrial origins.
Each possibility, Kirkpatrick said, has characteristics that can be checked against reliable information gathered during an observation. He added that none of the data his office examined supported an alien explanation.
Most cases AARO reviewed involved ordinary objects or events that sensors were not designed to identify. A smaller number raised the possibility of foreign adversary activity and were referred to national security officials.
Kirkpatrick also cautioned that a case labeled “unresolved” is not necessarily inexplicable. Often, he said, the term means investigators had no data or too little information to reach a conclusion.
In some cases, investigators may have had a likely explanation based on similar reports, but lacked the raw data needed to confirm it. Kirkpatrick said AARO had resolved some cases that later appeared publicly as unresolved.
He alleged that Pentagon leadership instructed AARO to remove explanations from some records before they were released. The cases were then presented as unresolved so the public could draw its own conclusions, he said. Kirkpatrick did not identify when the instruction was given or which officials were involved.
A War Department official said the department would not assess the newly released records, saying it wanted the public to make up its own mind. The department also confirmed that images included with the FBI report were illustrations, not photographs of the object.
Kirkpatrick said “unidentified” and “unresolved” are sometimes used as if they mean the same thing, though they have different meanings. An unidentified object, he explained, may be visible and sufficiently documented for investigators to describe it, even if they do not know what it is.
He cited objects shot down over North America in 2023, after the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon, as examples: they were initially unidentified but were later assessed to be balloons.
Some of the newly released records go back decades, including reports of unusual objects near California’s Santa Catalina Island in the 1950s. Kirkpatrick said accounts from earlier periods should be considered in light of the technology available at the time. Early high-altitude balloon programs, for example, could help explain some reports of bright objects in the sky.
There are thousands of reports, Kirkpatrick said, but that volume does not mean there have been thousands of alien visits. The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, he added, is separate from evidence that extraterrestrial beings have come to Earth.
Reviewing the latest records, Kirkpatrick said he saw little that changed his view. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
