Pentagon UFO investigator: Extraterrestrial 'technical surprise' is top concern | ABCNL

unidentified flying objects have been an obsession for decades spawning speculation in Wild conspiracy theories but are any of these mysterious UFO sightings proof of life beyond Earth tonight after generations of investigation and theories the government is pulling back the curtain trying to separate fact from fiction and in our Prime Focus we have an exclusive first look inside the pentagon's new effort to find answers and the first TV interview with the man tasked with running it all our Devin Dwyer reports oh my gosh dude wow [Applause] after Decades of mysterious sightings the pentagon's top UFO investigator speaking exclusively to ABC News what surprised you most since you took over a number of things that surprised me government probe covering hundreds of unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP like this Declassified U.S Navy video the unusual object flying quickly through restricted airspace off the east coast in 2015. some phenomena shocking everyday Americans too I swear to God this is not a joke a Las Vegas family last month called 911 Adam an extraterrestrial creatures had landed in their backyard they're like nine foot purple top they look like aliens to us these are retrieving non-human origin uh technical Vehicles one whistleblower is so convinced he says the government has pieces of alien spacecraft under lock and key yeah they're sophisticatedly engineered certainly not by humans and Hollywood is feeding the fascination so do aliens exist and are those unidentified aerial phenomena evidence they visited Earth to separate fact from fiction we went to the man leading a search for answers from inside the Pentagon I'm a long-term intelligence officer scientist and military officer Dr Sean Kirkpatrick in his first television interview after a year on the job told us everything is on the table what keeps you up at night technical surprise and that could be adversary technical surprise or extraterrestrial technical surprise Kirkpatrick leads the all domain anomaly resolution office or Arrow created by Congress last year to detect identify and attribute mysterious objects of interest in the air in outer space and even underwater it's a big job yes the top priorities he says are mitigating threats to the safety of military personnel and dispelling myths what's the most common misconception people have of uaps or of the work you're doing that they're all the same thing and they're all extraterrestrial and neither of those are true his office is investigating more than 800 cases of potential uaps reported by military pilots and service members things like this video from 2019 Navy sailors recording glowing triangles above them now believed to be ordinary drones distorted by night vision goggles many reports involve unusual metallic spheres seen floating in the sky but most have been later identified as weather or spy balloons we have to go through the the rigor of taking each one matching it against our known objects and known catalogs and then reviewing that peer reviewing that making sure that everybody's in agreement but there's not an explanation for everything most notably the so-called Tic Tac incident off the California coast in 2004. I can tell you I I think it was not from this world David fraver is a retired Navy F-18 pilot who spotted the object seeming to move at impossible speeds he spoke with ABC News in 2017. we get a call from USS Princeton he gives us a bearing range and altitude report he's calling a contact force that they want us to investigate so as we start driving out there I said what are we looking for and he said we don't know he said we've seen these objects and they hang out at twenty thousand then it goes straight back up above 80 000 and disappear there's two people in each jet so four heads eight eyeballs and we start looking around and right about that time I was like dude do you see that I go what is that so we're looking down and there's a disturbance in the water right next to it was this little white object that looks like a Tic Tac and it's just above the surface of the water and it's moving around Left Right forward back just random no controlled thing there is no rotor wash there is no jet wash I say hey I'm gonna go down and check it out we start coming down so now we're in a clockwise flow going from 12 to 3 and it starts going from six to nine and it's coming up and we're going down we start to cut across it rapidly accelerates climbs past our altitude and disappears that's the last we saw of it what's your best guess of what happened there it's really hard to guess on this and I don't like to guess so have you hit a dead end with this woman the more things that I see that resemble a Tic Tac then I can get more and more information about what that is Kirkpatrick says between 95 and 98 percent of cases reviewed by his office are readily explainable large birds balloons debris or drones but a small number remain a mystery so that two to five percent which are anomalous incidents which you're still looking into could potentially be extraterrestrial activity so we are going to follow our data and our investigations wherever it goes right so I I have a full range of hypotheses so you can't rule it out I can't rule it out but I don't have any evidence that says that yet most Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond Earth and a majority say uaps under investigation are likely proof of contact some former Pentagon insiders claim the government has more evidence than it's publicly acknowledged Kirkpatrick says he's seen nothing to back up those claims you can say categorically you've seen no convincing confirmable evidence it's intact spacecraft kept by the US government no I have seen nothing that leads me to that conclusion is it possible there is some secret program that you're just not aware of I don't think so I have access to anything and everything I need why do you think these whistleblowers are coming forward well one I think the recent law which extended whistleblower protections to them and and named Arrow as the authorized disclosure Authority uh opens the door for them to to come and tell us exactly what they think they they saw or know about you believe them I believe that they believe what they're telling me and I my job is not to it's not a question of belief right it's a question of what can I go research investigating uaps has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill my priority is that we understand the full range of threats posed by our adversaries in all domains multiple congressional committees have held hearings there is something there measurable my multiple instruments and yet it seems to move in directions that are inconsistent with what we know of physics or science more broadly and even the White House Now weighing in we're not saying what they are what they're not we're saying that there's something our Pilots are seeing we're saying it has had an effect on some of our training operations and so we want to get to the bottom of it top Democrats and Republicans have called for greater transparency proposing legislation this month that would force the government to publicly release records and uaps within 25 years of when they were created so a lot of these allegations crop up again and again over history do you think extraterrestrial life is out there I think it's statistically unrealistic to think it isn't I mean given given the vastness of the universe are you going to find it on your watch well wouldn't that be fun and that would be probably the best outcome of this job hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching

Channel: ABC News

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Keywords: Dr., Kirkpatrick, Sean, abc, abcnl, aerial, in, investigation, life, news, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-101537097, pentagon, phenomena, prime, space, ufo, unidentified

Id: ifpLXP0poug

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023