Kirkpatrick Retires, Speculative History of UFO Reverse Engineering
In this episode we cover some QuickHits of news, including a Congressional bill to restore Grusch’s security clearance, the HOC getting to read Grusch’s DOD IG complaint, AARO adding a reporting form to their website (that’s only for military and won’t accept classified info), and Dr Sean Kirkpatrick is retiring in December. Then we dive into a speculative history of the UFO reverse engineering program, as imagined by an aerospace engineer, which explores how a Manhattan Project-style program could have ended up in the hands of private aerospace companies, and how that might be tied to the February shoot-downs and Senator Schumer’s disclosure bill.
This was one of those times where it felt like a lot was happening, but once I sat down to pull together the show notes, it all kinda boiled down to nothing. So I’ve got some QuickHits™ for us today, and then we’re gonna dive into something fun.
QuickHits
- Quick followup: AARO has released 3 reports so far:
- First report (technically produced by the UAPTF) covered 17 years, Nov 2004 to Mar 2021, released three months later in June.
- AARO founded in July 2022
- Second report covered 18 months, Mar 2021 through Aug 2022, released five months later in January.
- Third report covered eight months, Sep 2022 through Apr 2023, released six months later in October.
- Rep Burlison introduced an amendment to the financial services appropriations bill to restore Grusch’s security clearance
- Rep Burlison confirmed that the House Oversight Committee would have a second SCIF briefing with the DODIG, but this time they would be allowed to read the complaint Grusch submitted to the IG.
- AARO finally added a secure reporting form to their website!
- The reporting form is not for the general public.
- The reporting form is for US military personnel “with direct knowledge of US Government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945.”
- The reporting form has a warning: “Please do NOT submit any information that is potentially CLASSIFIED, or unclassified information that is not publicly releasable.”
- The Debrief: “One has to wonder what the purpose of creating the secure reporting mechanism would be at all, especially if AARO isn’t accepting any classified information or details that otherwise aren’t already “publicly releasable.” Logic would seem to dictate that if such programs had ever existed and involved information that was deemed to be publicly releasable, then we probably would have already known about them by now.”
- Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, held an off-camera media roundtable on Halloween. This was frustrating because he contradicts himself and says things that we know from other sources aren’t true.
- He says “I currently have no evidence of any program having ever existed to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial UAP program.” But then later says “We're investigating each and every one of [Grusch’s claims and leads]. There are some bits of information that are turning out to be things and events that really happened. A lot of it is still under review, and we're putting all that together into our historical report.”
- He said he hasn’t spoken to Grush in five years, and that they’ve invited him to speak to AARO repeatedly, but Grush turned them down. Grusch responded “I have zero emails or calls from them. That is a lie.”
- He said the Nimitz incident was just a single video with nothing to investigate, but we know from multiple other sources that there are also radar tracks.
- The DoD announced that Sean will be retiring in December.
- Kirkpatrick: “I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.”
- They also announced that they finally hired a deputy director (after posting a job listing in April), Tim Phillips, a former marine, who has been working in the intelligence community for the NGA (National Geo-Spacial Intelligence Agency) and the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), who will serve as interim director until the Pentagon hires a permanent replacement for Kirkpatrick.
A Conceptual View of a UAP Reverse Engineering Program
- We’ve heard from Condorman before. He’s an anonymous aerospace engineer who’s given some insight into how they are reacting to claims of UAP stuff being hidden in aerospace companies. He launched a newsletter and his first post is pretty incredible:
- “The purpose of this article is to provide insight into how a hypothetical UAP recovery and reverse engineering program that began in the late 1940’s would have evolved over the last 75 years. I will use history and my knowledge of the aerospace industry and its biggest customer, the Department of Defense, to infer and inform the progression of such a program over time. What different evolutions would it have gone through and why? How would it operate today? Could reverse engineered technology be flying now? That’s the speculative journey this article will attempt to undertake. Please note that the article is a blend of speculation and historical events. It is meant to be fictional and used as an example of how such a program could have evolved. The project names are imagined and the companies and technologies mentioned are educated guesses and examples based on historical events.”
- Origins: After WWII, The US recovered several crashed vehicles (Roswell, Magenta), and there were concerns in the Truman administration that these could lead to mass panic. They were moved to Wright Field (where recovered German places were already kept) to be studied as part of the Manhattan Project, which had existing secrecy protocols and bandwidth now that the war was over.
- The program was pulled out of the Manhattan Project after it was learned that the program had been compromised and atomic secrets sold to the Russians.
- He imagines a new name, Project Whorl, and says the new program brought over a number of scientists and engineers with new NDAs.
- A new board of trustees was made up of 12 senior leaders in the defense and intelligence community. They had lifetime appointments, reported only to President Truman, and were allowed to limit their briefings to avoid leaks from the White House. They also worked with the Truman administration to hide the funding through shell companies and other tricks.
- They classified anything related to the program using the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear clearances, along with extreme compartmentalization, with very few top scientists having access to more than one aspect of the program.
- Fifties:
- Project Whorl was organized into three directorates: Hardware, Organics, and Intelligence.
- The Hardware Directorate was responsible for all physical parts of the craft. All intact craft were kept first at Wright Field for attempts at flight testing, and then later moved to Area 51 when the Atomic Energy Commision acquired the land. Partial or damaged craft were disassembled and components sent to special access programs to deal with specific technologies. These were housed at the big national laboratories like Los Alamos and Sandia, as well as some private industry.
- Research into power, propulsion, and material technology was painfully slow, with efforts eventually shifting away from reverse engineering to building new tech inspired by the craft. Anti gravity research in particular got a lot of attention.
- Nearly all electronic components were passed to Bell Labs, who were tasked with reverse engineering for military and civilian applications. They had a lot of success, and he goes on to imply that Bell’s work with miniaturized transistors, lasers, and other things came from this research.
- The Organics Directorate was responsible for all biological components, including organic remains and also organic systems and materials from the vehicles. These were also studied in special access programs at the national labs. They made little to no progress as studying DNA was still in its infancy.
- The Intelligence Directorate was responsible for both intelligence and counterintelligence duties. They worked with the IC to collect and analyze UAP sightings and find crashed vehicles, but also doing counterintelligence to suppress information from the public, working with Project Blue Book and the Condon Committee, which was extremely successful at building stigma around the topic.
- Sixties:
- Following persistent rumors that JFK was assassinated because he was attempting to end the cold war by sharing Project Whorl’s existence with the Soviets and offering to work together with them.
- These rumors led to Congressional investigations into UFOs, with whistleblowers telling Congress how the project was funded. They responded by passing the Mansfield amendments, which required all DoD financing to have military application, and that the Gang of Eight be briefed on all projects the DoD funded.
- In reaction, the Board of Trustees transferred all assets to private industry, which could still get DoD contracts, but didn’t have to be briefed to the Gang of Eight. (There’s a lengthy story here about how the assets were transferred under the cover of a bailout for Lockheed, which was facing bankruptcy.)
- The Intel and Organics Directorates were folded into a new organization.
- The Hardware directorate was disbanded, with all assets moving to Lockheed in a new project named Project Athena.
- Seventies:
- Lockheed formed a new subdivision of Skunkworks called Shadow Works to oversee Project Athena, and channel its results back to Skunkworks for their projects. Their efforts mostly focused on materials for stealth tech like reduced radar signatures. Lockheed proceeded to win a 1975 competition for low-radar plane, based on materials from Project Athena.
- “The biggest concern that top DoD officials and the Trustees had about transferring the hardware assets to Lockheed had just been realized. Unless something was done, Lockheed was going to have an advantage on every future contract that required stealth. And once the propulsion system was cracked, Lockheed would be untouchable. It was time to break up the monopoly.”
- So they instructed Lockheed to share all the Athena materials data with the Air Force Research Lab, who was instructed to share it with Northrop and a few other companies as if it had been developed by the Air Force. Those materials led to the Lockheed F-117, and Northrup B-2.
- Eighties:
- In 1980, a UAP crashed in the woods near Rendlesham AFB in the UK. The craft was recovered, and it had split open, allowing access to the interior, which greatly accelerated research.
- There is a lengthy section here about how they were able to extract a material from the ship that could negate gravity. Then with that knowledge, they were able to extract more from the other crashed and damaged vehicles, and started working on new vehicles that would make use of this.
- He goes on to describe various types of vehicles, triangle and diamond shaped, which were all basically airships that used a small amount of the new material to become nearly weightless and gain extreme performance even with simple ducted fans for propulsion.
- Nineties:
- He describes how the stealth craft built by the program were continuing to evolve and perform well, but they were limited by the small amount of the antigravity material extracted from the UFOs, so they started planning to bring down a UAP.
- “They settled on bringing down a sphere. Until the mid-1990’s, the sphere UAP had always flown in close proximity to a disk-shaped mothership, but during the Balkan wars in the mid 1990’s the behavior changed. The spheres began to fly far from the disks at regular flight patterns, in a manner that appeared to resemble systematic surveillance paths. The patterns became predictable enough to attempt a capture. Two C-130s were equipped with giant nets and flew in front of one of the predictable sphere’s flight patterns. The sphere simply stopped, turned, and flew around them with ease.”
- “The next attempt was to use a prototype EMP projection device developed by Sandia National Laboratory. They set the device below the predicted flight path and detonated it as the sphere flew by. It worked as planned and the sphere was recovered…”
- Unfortunately the sphere contained none of the material, instead being powered by superconductors, and they abandoned plans to bring down a larger UAP for fear of starting a conflict.
- “There were a couple of attempts to expose the program in the mid to late 1990’s. One was from an inspector general who was conducting an audit, and the second was by Admiral Thomas Wilson, deputy director of the DIA in 1997. His attempt and rebuff by the trustees are well documented by Dr. Eric Davis in the Wilson-Davis memo. After these close calls the Trustees made the decision to stop briefing presidential administrations. George H. W. Bush’s administration was the last to be briefed.”
- 2000s:
- He opens the section on the 2000s by talking about the Nimitz encounter.
- “The incident terrified the Trustees. The Tic-Tac had shown knowledge of the F-18’s military tactics, and was monitoring their communication, or hacking their computers, to know where the CAP point was. Their greatest fear had always been that the anomalous intelligence was preparing an invasion, and these new vehicles with their jaw-dropping performance seemed to be far more threatening than ones from the past. …The Tic-Tac was a full-blown performance machine, more like a true military fighter craft than any of the others.”
- They pivoted their research to smaller, more agile craft, dismantling older craft to recover the antigravity material, but progress was slow, and held back by processing power needed to control the craft. Morale was falling through the floor.
- “The non-human intelligence had also become bolder, encroaching on military training spaces on an almost daily basis as if daring the DoD to do something about it. This much visibility led to the Trustees’ greatest fear, whistleblowers.”
- “Dozens of whistleblowers came forward to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community with details of recovered craft and reverse engineering programs. And one of the final blows to the program came on February 10, 2023, during the frenzy of the Chinese spy balloon, as an F-22 intercepted and brought down a cylindrical silver object that was traveling at 35-40 knots at an altitude of 40,000 feet over Alaska. This turned out to be the newest generation Project Athena craft.
- The Biden Administration was not aware of the program, and realized how much in the dark they were after they recovered the craft’s remnants. President Biden immediately appointed a UAP Task Force chaired by Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, to uncover what was going on and act accordingly.
- “As of the time of this writing, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, in partnership with Jake Sullivan, was attempting to pass legislation to lift the veil from Project Athena and return all recovered craft, materials, and intellectual property to the US Government. While I fully expect the vast majority of the program to remain classified, the existence of recovered technology and organic materials from non-human intelligence will be impossible to deny.”
References
- Rep Burlison: HOC will get to read Grusch’s DODIG complaint
- Rep Burlison introduced an amendment to renew Grusch’s clearence
- The Debrief: The Pentagon’s AARO Rolls Out Its New Secure Reporting Mechanism for UAP… Sort Of
- DoD: AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick Holds an Off-Camera Media Roundtable
- Reddit: Three blatantly untrue things Kirkpatrick said today at the AARO press briefing that are worth reading in full
- Joe Murgia discussing other evidence for the Nimitz encounter
- The Debrief: Pentagon Confirms Retirement of AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick, as New Deputy Director is Named
- Politico: Pentagon UFO boss to step down next month
- Condorman: A Conceptual View of a UAP Reverse Engineering Program
Episode 32, posted on