A Senate hearing of the Anomaly Resolution Office at the Department of Defense featured a video from the Middle East of an orb flying through the air observed by a US drone.
Dr Sean Kirkpatrick from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Wednesday that hundreds of instances of oddly shaped objects seen by US pilots are still being investigated.
Most of the hundreds of cases being followed by the Pentagon are based on “readily explainable” data, he said.
“In our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” Dr Kirkpatrick said, according to CNN.
Dr Kirkpatrick serves as the director of the office which was established last year to look into the sightings. The US government is tracking more than 650 cases of what’s referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomenon”.
“Of those over 650, we’ve prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value, and now we have to go through those and go ‘How much of those do I have actual data for?’” he said.
Dr Kirkpatrick told the senators that his office is aiding the Defense Department and the intelligence community in identifying emerging foreign tech, such as working with the rest of the government to identify the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina in February.
He shared video footage from two declassified cases, one resolved and one unresolved.
The first video shows a small flying orb filmed by a US drone in the Middle East last year.
“It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that, just based off of that video,” he said.
The second instance included footage gathered in South Asia from previously this year as an object flew past two MQ-9 drones, one of which was able to capture what appeared to be a propulsion trail behind the object. Dr Kirkpatrick said that initially, it was thought to be “truly anomalous”.
But he added that after they looked at the video frame by frame, they found that it was a “shadow image”.
“This is in the infrared, this is the heat signature off the engines in a commuter aircraft that happened to be flying in the vicinity of where those two MQ9s were at,” he told the panel.
Senators asked about the possible technology coming from Russia and China.
Dr Kirkpatrick said that in a few cases, he’s worried that the episodes may be showing advancement in tech. Such instances are forwarded to the intelligence community.
“They are less risk averse at technical advancement than we are. They are just willing to try things and see if it works,” he told the subcommittee. “Are there capabilities that could be employed against us in both ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] and a weapons fashion? Absolutely. Do I have evidence they’re doing it in these cases? No, but I have concerning indicators.”
