Pentagon's UFO chief separates science from fiction | Nightline

For decades, mysterious sightings like these have captured our collective imagination. Unidentified aerial phenomena like this object captured on video by U.S. Navy pilots flying through restricted airspace in 2015. These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles. So do aliens exist? And are those close encounters evidence they visited Earth? To separate fact from fiction, we went to the man leading a search for answers from inside the Pentagon. I'm a long-term intelligence officer, scientist, and military officer. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, in his first television interview after a year on the job, told us everything is on the table. What keeps you up at night? Technical surprise. And that could be adversary technical surprise or extraterrestrial technical surprise. Kirkpatrick leads the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or ARO, created by Congress last year to detect, identify, and attribute mysterious objects of interest in the air, in outer space, and even underwater. What's the most common misconception people have of UAPs or of the work you're doing? That they're all the same thing and they're all extraterrestrial. And neither of those are true. His office is investigating more than 800 cases of potential UAPs reported by military pilots and service members, things like this video from 2019, Navy sailors recording glowing triangles above them, now believed to be ordinary drones distorted by night vision goggles. Many reports involve unusual metallic spheres seen floating in the sky, but most have been later identified as weather or spy balloons. We have to go through the rigor of taking each one, matching it against our known objects and known catalogs, and then reviewing that, peer reviewing that, making sure that everybody's in agreement. But there's not an explanation for everything, most notably the so-called Tic Tac incident off the California coast in 2004. I can tell you, I think it was not from this world. David Fravor is a retired Navy F-18 pilot who spotted the object seeming to move at impossible speeds. He spoke with ABC News in 2017. We get a call from USS Princeton. He gives us a bearing range and altitude report. He's calling a contact force that they want us to investigate. So as we start driving out there, I said, what are we looking for? And he said, we don't know. He said, we've seen these objects and they hang out at 20,000, then they go straight back up above 80,000 and disappear. There's two people in each jet, so four heads, eight eyeballs, and we start looking around. And right about that time, I was like, dude, do you see that? I go, what is that? So we're looking down and there's a disturbance in the water. Right next to it was this little white object that looks like a Tic Tac, and it's just above the surface of the water. And it's moving around left, right, forward, back, just random, no controlled thing. There is no rotor wash. There is no jet wash. I say, hey, I'm going to go down and check it out. We start coming down. So now we're in a clockwise flow going from 12 to 3, and it starts going from 6 to 9. And it's coming up, and we're going down. We start to cut across. It rapidly accelerates, climbs past our altitude, and disappears. That's the last we saw of it. What's your best guess of what happened there? It's really hard to guess on this, and I don't like to guess. The mystery of UFOs has inspired generations to wonder if we are not alone in the universe. From Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, which infamously fooled millions of listeners into believing an alien invasion was imminent. Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside of Buffalo, one in Chicago. To close encounters of the third kind, bringing UFOs firmly into the zeitgeist. And men in black envisioning a covert government operation that monitors the aliens already living among us. I knew it. This is an alien, and you guys are from some government agency trying to keep it under wraps. But it's not just Hollywood. The possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth has long been the subject of high-profile scrutiny, even the White House weighing in. We're saying that there's something our pilots are seeing. We're saying it has had an effect on some of our training operations, and so we want to get to the bottom of it. And with Congress now taking a closer look. For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained, and it's long past time that they got some answers. At a hearing in July, David Fravor repeated the story he told ABC News five years ago. I'm not like a UFO fanatic. It's not me. But I will tell you that what we saw with four sets of eyes over a five-minute period, still, there's nothing, we have nothing close to it. Fravor appeared alongside Lieutenant Ryan Graves, another former Navy pilot. These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine. And David Grush, a former military intelligence officer turned whistleblower. Grush repeated explosive and unverified claims he's made in the past that the U.S. government has recovered evidence of extraterrestrials. As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries. Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics? And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program. And that he was retaliated against after learning of a supposed secret Pentagon program that aimed to collect and reverse engineer UAPs. In the last couple of years, have you had incidences that have caused you to be in fear for your life for addressing these issues? Yes, personally. After the hearing, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick refuted Grush's claims in a letter published on his personal LinkedIn page. He wrote Arrow has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of a reverse engineering program for non-human technology. The Pentagon adding it has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information about UAPs. You can say categorically you've seen no convincing, confirmable evidence of intact spacecraft kept by the U.S. government. No, I have seen nothing that leads me to that conclusion. Is it possible there is some secret program that you're just not aware of? I don't think so. I have access to anything and everything I need. Why do you think these whistleblowers are coming forward? Well, one, I think the recent law, which extended whistleblower protections to them and named Arrow as the authorized disclosure authority, opens the door for them to come and tell us exactly what they think they saw or know about. You believe them? I believe that they believe what they're telling me. And I, my job is not to, it's not a question of belief, right? It's a question of what can I go research? Kirkpatrick says between 95 and 98% of cases reviewed by his office are readily explainable. Large birds, balloons, debris or drones, but a small number remain a mystery. So we are going to follow our data and our investigations wherever it goes, right? So I have a full range of hypotheses. So you can't rule it out? I can't rule it out, but I don't have any evidence that says that yet. Most Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond earth and a majority say UAPs under investigation are likely proof of contact. Do you think extraterrestrial life is out there? I think it's statistically unrealistic to think it isn't. I mean, given, given the vastness of the universe. Are you going to find it on your watch? Well, wouldn't that be fun? I mean, that would be probably the best outcome of this job.