CNN's national security analyst interviewed physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, a US intelligence officer who worked on a newly released defense report debunking UFO sightings. He told CNN that “about 2 to 5 percent” of UFO reports are “really unusual.”
But CNN added, “He thinks an explanation for that small percentage could probably be found here on Earth…”
This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays an important role in UFO lore. That's because in 1947, a U.S. military news release announced that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico. The next day, the Army recanted the story and announced that the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran first headlines, followed by official debunking, and interest in the case all but evaporated. By 1980, two UFO researchers published a book claiming that alien remains had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had suppressed the evidence.
Kirkpatrick said his office has looked deeply into the Roswell incident and discovered that there was a lot going on near Roswell Field in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There was a spy program called Project Mogul that launched long lines of strangely shaped metal balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were top secret. At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting other high-altitude balloon tests carrying human test dummies equipped with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags to protect them from the elements. And at least one military plane crashed nearby, killing 11 people.
Reflecting on previous government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team have uncovered a crashed Mogul balloon, a recovery effort to recover a crashed test dummy, and a glimpse of the charred remains of an actual plane crash. , concluded that they were likely combined into a single false story about a crashed alien spaceship…
Since 2020, the Department of Defense has standardized, debiased, and increased the amount of reporting on UFOs by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's why the closely reported and widely ridiculed Chinese reconnaissance balloon was first spotted last year. This incident shows that the U.S. government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.
The pattern keeps repeating. Kirkpatrick said his research has shown that most UFO sightings are due to advanced technology that the U.S. government must keep secret, aircraft used by rival countries to spy on the U.S. (“Which is more likely?'' asked Kirkpatrick. “It turns out that cutting-edge technology that you didn't know about… Is it the fact that it's being commercialized in Florida, or the fact that there's extraterrestrial life?”
But the greatest irony is that “stories about these secret programs spread within the Pentagon and were occasionally dramatized by military personnel who had heard rumors about or glimpsed seemingly science fiction technologies and aircraft.” In the end, investigators traced the top-secret telephone game to less than a dozen people, Kirkpatrick said. [F]For decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there is a conspiracy by the U.S. government to cover up evidence of aliens. But if Kirkpatrick is to be believed, the more mundane truth is that these stories are being fueled by groups of UFO believers inside and outside of government. ”
