The “chief of skeet” in the Pentagon named those responsible for creating myths about UFOs

Conspiracy theorists working for and within the US government perpetuate UFO myths that then cost millions of taxpayer dollars to study, according to the former chief unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) investigator at the Pentagon.

According to The Guardian, Sean Kirkpatrick made the announcement on a podcast last week after resigning last month as the first director of the Department of Defense’s Public Anomaly Resolution Office (Aaro). It was created in 2022 to collect military reports of sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena and provide greater transparency about what the government knows.

Kirkpatrick says Aaro’s first comprehensive historical report, which was submitted to Congress and is due to be released later this year, contains no evidence of alien life or any government cover-up.

But many lawmakers, he insists, are only too happy to accept unsubstantiated stories spread by a “core group of experts” about secret government UFO research programs. These include astonishing claims by former US intelligence official and whistleblower David Grush last year about intact alien vehicles and non-human “biospecimens,” or biological matter, being stored at a remote facility.

“These are the same people who worked behind the scenes with Congress to write the legislation,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview with the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.”

“These are the same people who worked with a US company and the US Army to investigate a piece of material that they claim was an unidentified anomalous phenomenon and is actually part of a rocket body from the 1950s,” Kirkpatrick continues. “These are the same people who influenced some of these whistleblowers who came forward to say, ‘Hey, I don’t have any first-hand evidence, but all these people are telling me this.'”

Sean Kirkpatrick declined to name the people, but agreed with Peter Bergen’s observation that “the real conspiracy is being carried out by a group of true believers themselves to involve the government in an investigation into the activities of aliens.”

“It’s like an ice cream cone that licks itself,” Kirkpatrick said. – The best thing that could happen in this work is that I found aliens, and I could show them, but they are not there. There is no evidence of the existence of aliens. There is no evidence of aliens, and there is no evidence of a government conspiracy.”

Kirkpatrick said in a resignation essay published by Scientific American last week that he fears lawmakers have succumbed to “conspiracy-driven decision-making” and sensationalism in their quest to “unravel the cover-up.”

“The willingness of some to make judgments and take action on these stories without seeing or even asking for supporting evidence is troubling, an omission that becomes even more problematic when the claims are so extraordinary,” he wrote.

“Some members of Congress prefer to express opinions about aliens to the press rather than receive fact-based briefing on the issue. Members of Congress have a responsibility to exercise critical thinking skills and not seek to be the center of attention,” states Kirkpatrick.

His disappointment was evident in his conversation with Bergen, The Guardian notes. Kirkpatrick said his department’s mission to use a “rigorous scientific framework and data-driven approach” to collect and evaluate reports of UFOs and sightings over the past decades has been hampered by distortions, half-truths and other pieces of misinformation from unreliable sources.

“You have people talking to people who are coming to tell the story, or reporting to the media, and other people coming, but it turns out that none of them have any first-hand evidence or knowledge,” Kirkpatrick said. “They are all telling stories they have heard from other people.” And if you trace back to how all these people know each other, it all goes back to the same core group of experts.”

Kirkpatrick said his team was able to conclude that at least 90% of reported UFO sightings, including some military footage declassified by the Pentagon in recent years, have a completely logical explanation.

“When you go deep into these kinds of observations, and we’ve had hundreds of them, you go back and you work with the pilot, you work with the sensor, and you reconstruct the whole interaction, nine times out of 10 or more it turns into an optical illusion, which we we call it parallax,” he said. “Most of the time when we can’t come up with an explanation, it’s because we don’t have enough data, and by that I mean consistent, reliable, recorded data that you can put into a computer and do an analysis.”

However, Kirkpatrick said, there are those who are unlikely to ever accept scientific explanations.

“I am not going to do, say or provide evidence of absolutely anything that would convert true believers,” he said. “It is essentially a religion, a religious belief that goes beyond critical thinking and rational thinking.”