Sean Kirkpatrick

“And so you can't conclude one way or the other.”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said that without sufficient raw data investigators cannot reach a definitive conclusion.

“There's a lot of people that like to point to folks as being credible witnesses and therefore their testimony must be taken at face value,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said the FBI backgrounds of witnesses alone are not enough to validate what they reported seeing.

“There are thousands of these reports,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick noted there are thousands of historical UFO reports.

“It's statistically invalid to believe that's not going to be the case, but the probability of them being here is just as statistically unrealistic,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said the probability of intelligent life elsewhere is high but the probability of them being on Earth is statistically unrealistic.

“I mean, there's nothing new,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said looking at the latest records he saw little that changed his assessment.

“Pentagon leadership had told AARO to remove all of the resolution language and put these cases out as unresolved,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said Pentagon leadership directed AARO to remove resolution language before cases were released publicly.

“Many of these cases, we did resolve, and I even briefed several of them to Congress with the answers and what they were and what they were likely to be,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said some cases released publicly as unresolved had previously been resolved by AARO.

“And so even if there were alien visitations to Earth, there are not thousands of them.”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick argued that thousands of reports do not mean thousands of alien visitations.

“Letting, and I quote, ‘the people make up their own mind,’ which is the absolute worst thing that you could do because all you've done is continue to just feed the flames of conspiracy with a whole bunch of nonsense.”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick criticized allowing the public to make up its own mind as feeding conspiracy theories.

“Some of this is just, ‘hey, I saw something, I don't know what it is,’”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said the lack of photographs or other supporting evidence makes sightings difficult to determine.

“None of the data that we saw and reviewed and analyzed matches an alien hypothesis theory,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick stated that none of the data AARO reviewed matched an alien hypothesis theory.

“You've got 3 very distinct buckets,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick described three broad categories AARO used to examine UAP reports.

“When you get data from an observation, actual data, not just a story, you compare that data to those signatures,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick explained that investigators compare observation data against known signatures for each possibility.

“Unidentified generally means we can see and characterize an object and we have data to support that characterization, but we don't know what it is,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick distinguished the term unidentified from unresolved in UAP records.

“People sometimes have a tendency to fill that gap with very extreme beliefs that have time and again proven to be inaccurate and fallible.”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick said people sometimes fill gaps in understanding with extreme beliefs that prove inaccurate.

“And that is a classic case of authority bias.”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick characterized relying on witness credentials alone as a classic case of authority bias.

“When we say a case is unresolved, it generally means there is no data or there is insufficient data to actually analyze it,”

Sean Kirkpatrick · said date not stated · reported 2026-11-01

Kirkpatrick cautioned that unresolved in government UAP records means there is no or insufficient data to analyze.