“Nothing New. Pointless.” AARO’s 2023 UAP Report and Congress gets DODIG in a SCIF

AARO released the 2023 UAP report, which feels like a student turning in a last-minute term paper without having done any research. It only covers eight months, and doesn’t mention Grusch or any other big UFO news. Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee got the DOD Inspector General into a SCIF, where he told them absolutely nothing. Oh, and the former director of a Pentagon UFO program released a new book where he says the US gained access to the inside of a UAP with no engine or way to fly, but won’t give any more details. And finally, this episode marks our one-year anniversary!

2023 AARO Report

Aw yiss, it’s the most anticipated release of the year, from the head of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, we finally got the Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. [air horn sounds]
- It covers 291 UAP reports received between September 2022 and April 2023.
  - 15 pages total. Seven pages of actual content, one of which is the executive summary.
  - Two of the longest paragraphs in the executive summary are repeated verbatim later in the report.
  - Two pages of graphs. One of the graphs is a half-page pie chart labeled “Reported Lights” with only two segments: Lights, 21%, No Lights, 79%. Completely pointless.
  - Include only a single UAP report that they were able to debunk as commercial air traffic.
- Kelly Chase, of the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast said “This whole report is like the ‘Hail Mary’ paper you write in high school the night before it's due when you didn't actually do the assignment, but you're hoping if you put enough b.s. word salad down on the page that you'll somehow eek out the C- you need to pass.”
“Most reports still reflect a bias towards restricted military airspace, a result of reporting from military personnel and sensors present in such areas. This bias has been lessened by reporting from commercial pilots showing a more diverse geographic distribution of UAP sightings across the United States. However, these reports mostly cover observations over U.S. airspace and littoral waters, and therefore, as these reports continue to come in, a U.S.-centric collection bias will grow significantly relative to the rest of the world.”
“AARO received no reports indicating UAP sightings have been associated with any adverse health effects. However, many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability.”
“While the mere presence of UAP in the airspace represents a potential hazard to flight safety, none of these reports suggest the UAP maneuvered to an unsafe proximity to civil or military aircraft, positioned themselves in flight paths, or otherwise posed a direct threat to the flight safety of the observing aircraft.”
“Although none of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities, these cases continue to be investigated.”
“The continued volume and unidentified nature of most UAP is a direct consequence of gaps in domain awareness. These gaps are the direct result of insufficient data secured by radar, electro- optical/infrared sensors; the presence of sensor artifacts, such as IR flare; and optical effects, such as parallax, that can cause observational misperceptions. Based on the ability to resolve cases to date, with an increase in the quality of data secured, the unidentified and purported anomalous nature of most UAP will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena and significantly reduce the amount of UAP case submissions.”
“AARO's analytic efforts are confirming that only [2-4%] of UAP reports display interesting signatures, such as high-speed travel and unknown morphologies. The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources, while a large number of cases in AARO's holdings remain technically unresolved because of lack of data. Without sufficient data these cases cannot be resolved. For the few objects that do demonstrate characteristics of interest, AARO is approaching these cases with objectivity and analytic rigor.”

Community Reactions

As you can imagine, community reaction to the report has been summarized by that clip of Hercules yelling “DISAPPOINT,” including several funny ones that I can’t repeat here. That said, there were two insightful reactions I wanted to share.
American for Safe Aerospace, Ryan Graves’ nonprofit, tweeted: “The American people do not trust the government to be honest about UAP, and this report will not help.”
- “We are concerned that the Pentagon acknowledges again this year that there continue to be UAP incidents that remain genuinely anomalous, are not ours, and have not been confirmed to be foreign either. We share the concern of AARO's Director that some are adversarial and may be hiding in the noise.”
- “AARO’s newest report only raises more questions. Why is it acceptable for the US government to allow objects in friendly airspace to go unidentified? Does AARO have access to the data and sensors it needs to do its job? We believe it does not.”
Chris #UFODaddy Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, posted a list of takeaways and questions. I won’t go into the questions, because they’re weirdly technical and feel designed to point Congress in the right direction, but a couple of his takeaways match two things that I do think are worth noting about the report.
- “The report mentions 274 new reports in the last 8 months, suggesting a rate of over 30 reports per month / 360+ reports per year.”
- “The report states that none of the 291 cases considered were “positively attributable” to foreign adversaries. This is rather stunning. …This consistent lack of evidence connecting any UAP cases to foreign nations strengthens the ET hypothesis for the small number of unsolved cases involving extreme velocities and/or morphologies.”

HOC DOD IG Briefing

On Thursday, October 26, the DOD Inspector General gave a members-only, classified briefing to the House Oversight Committee on UAPs and the UFO disclosure material David Grusch presented to the IG. There will be another meeting in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) with the ICIG on November 16.
When the representatives emerged, Matt Lazlo of Ask a Pol and several other reporters were waiting, and asked “What’d you learn in there?”
- Rep Anna-Paulina Luna: “Nothing new. Pointless.”
- Rep Tim Burchett: “Absolutely nothing.”
- Rep Stephen Lynch: “I did not find it productive.”
- Rep Nancy Mace: “One of the most worthless classified briefings I’ve ever attended.”
Rep Burchett: “We got people on both sides of the aisle. My buddy Jared Moskowitz, AOC was in there, Luna on our side, General Perry, everybody was in there. It was the right people to be in there. They all left frustrated.”
Rep Scott Perry: “If they have information, they’re not going to tell us. They either don’t know, or the process by which the information could be made available is so complicated it’s not going to be made available. We can’t even find out who is allowed to know. We can’t find out if members of Congress are allowed to know, what it takes to let them know, what citizens are allowed to know, we can’t even find out that, let alone the information that might or might not be available or known to anyone.”
Rep Eric Burlison: “Tim and I might disagree on what it is, but people are seeing something. What is it, how much money are we spending on this technology? And what concerns me is that, what it appears to be, is that somebody has discovered something, some advanced form of propulsion or technology that might actually change all of our lives, make it for the better. But clearly it’s in an experimental phase or we are experimenting with it and I wanna know to what extent and how much we’re spending.”
- “My worldview of what we’re seeing, what we’re experiencing, is that it’s likely U.S. experimental, whether it’s from the private sector or being done through a black operation within the Department of Defense or Energy.”

Lacatski

Dr James Lacatski, a Defense Intelligence Agency rocket scientist, and the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), was interviewed on George Knapp’s podcast Weaponized about their new book: Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, and shared this choice quote that has the UFO community very excited:
“At the conclusion of a 2011 meeting in the Capitol building with a U.S. Senator and an agency Under Secretary, Lacatski, the only one of this book’s authors present, posed a question. He stated that the United States was in possession of a craft of unknown origin and had successfully gained access to its interior.”
“This craft had a streamlined configuration suitable for aerodynamic flight but no intakes, exhaust, wings, or control surfaces. In fact, it appeared not to have an engine, fuel tanks, or fuel. Lacatski asked: What was the purpose of this craft? Was it a life-support craft useful only for atmospheric reentry or what? If it was a spacecraft, then how did it operate?”
It’s worth noting that this book was approved via DOPSR, and just like Grusch, that doesn’t mean it’s true, but it means the Pentagon said it doesn’t violate national security.
Frustratingly, Lacatski won’t expand on this at all, saying he won’t say more than his DOPSR allows. The only thing he said is “What's in the book is an exact statement of the event that occurred in the congressional facility.”

One Very Exciting Year

Initial pitch text exchange:
- Scott: “Hey, I had an idea I can't stop thinking about, so I'm gonna put it out here while I ponder details. Would you be interested in doing a podcast with me where I talk to you about UFO and paranormal news and famous cases? I've pondered the idea of doing a podcast with you before, but never had a topic I thought other people would enjoy. I learn best by teaching, and I'm currently absorbing vast quantities of info in this vein, and I think it'd be a fun exercise to try to condense things down to explain topics that we chat about.”
- Chuck: “Hell yeah, let’s do it!”
Next day:
- Scott: “This idea is burning bright in my head and I’m excited to see if we can make it fun and worth doing… In this dynamic it's less about being entertaining and more about letting me tell you a story and having honest reactions. Questions, curiosity, tangents, would all be welcome. Your job is to keep this from being ‘Scott reads a research paper for 30min.’”
- Scott: Continuing on: “Annie asked a really insightful question the other night: ‘Do you really wanna be the UFO guy’”
- Chuck: “Hahah that's a great question. I'm absolutely ready to be that ufo guys buddy. What'd you say?”
- Scott: “After thinking about it, I laughed and said, ‘Actually.. yes!’ Because the whole point of this is that the UFO field has been turned on its head in the last few years and I think most people don't understand that it's gone from something unrespectable to something that is acknowledged by the US government, and being debated in Congress in very real terms. Once you get ‘UFOs are undeniably real (though we don't know what they are yet)’ then it means you look back and the whole vast field of Ufology and go, well, shit - if they're real, how much of this other stuff is too? The line must exist somewhere, and right now no one knows. It's a very exciting time!”
Chuck: So what do you think? Are we still on point for what we originally planned to do?

References

AARO’s 2023 UAP Report
CNN: US is receiving dozens of UFO reports a month, senior Pentagon official tells CNN
Liberation Times: US Air Force Reports Mysterious Gulf of Mexico Incident to Pentagon’s UFO Office
Mike Colangelo: “Like it was written in a timeline where Grusch never happened.”
Kelly Chase: “Feels like a ‘hail mary’ paper in high school, hoping for a C-.”
Americans for Safe Aerospace: “This report will not help.”
Chris Mellon: Takeaways & Questions Regarding the October 2023 AARO/DNI UAP Report
Rep Luna: “Nothing new. Pointless.”
Rep Burchett: “Absolutely nothing.”
Rep Lynch: “I did not find it productive.”
Rep Mace: “One of the most worthless classified briefings…”
NewsNation: ‘I didn’t learn anything:’ Burchett on classified UFO briefing
Rep Burlison: “…it’s likely US experimental.”
Rep Burlison: “…some advanced form of propulsion.”
Liberation Times: Former Head of U.S. Government UFO Program Confirms Government Possesses Advanced Craft of Unknown Origin

Episode 31, posted on October 31, 2023