No aliens, US govt’s money spent over ‘self-licking ice cream cone’: Pentagon ex-UFO chief

Pentagon’s former chief investigator of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) Sean Kirkpatrick claimed that the conspiracy theorists who have been working for and within the US government have been perpetuating myths regarding UFOs that millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent into studying a “self-licking ice cream cone”.

The claims were made by Kirkpatrick in a podcast after he stepped down from the position of the first director of the defence department’s all-domain anomaly resolution office (Aaro) last month.

The department was established in 2022 to collect military reports of UAP sightings and to provide more transparency regarding what information the government has.

The first comprehensive historical record report of Aaro was submitted to Congress and will be published later this year, said Kirkpatrick, adding that it contains no evidence of the existence of alien life and not only any government cover-up. 

He added that various lawmakers happily embrace unsubstantiated stories which are circulated by “a core group of people” regarding the secret government UFO research programmes.

“They’re some of the same people that have been working behind the scenes with Congress to write legislation,” said Kirkpatrick, in the podcast.

“They’re the same people that worked with a US company and the US army to explore a piece of material that they claim was a UAP and really is a piece of missile casing from the 1950s. They’re the same people that have been influencing some of these whistleblowers who have come forward to say: ‘Hey, I don’t have any first-hand evidence, but all these people are telling me this’,” he added.

Kirkpatrick did not identify the people by name, but agreed with the observation of Bergen that “the actual conspiracy is being carried out by a group of true believers themselves to get the government involved in the business of investigating aliens”.

“That is a self-licking ice cream cone, exactly. The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens, and I could have rolled them out, but there’s none. There is no evidence of extraterrestrials. There is no evidence of aliens, and there’s no evidence of the government conspiracy,” said Kirkpatrick.

In his resignation essay, which was published last week by Scientific American, Kirkpatrick said that the lawmakers have succumbed to “conspiracy-driven decision-making” and sensationalism in their efforts to “uncover the cover-up”.

Watch: NASA Chief says Aliens exist | This World

“Worrisome is the willingness of some to make judgments and take actions on these stories without having seen or even requested supporting evidence, an omission that is all the more problematic when the claims are so extraordinary,” Kirkpatrick wrote.

“Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter. Members have a responsibility to exhibit critical-thinking skills instead of seeking the spotlight,” he wrote.

(With inputs from agencies)