The Pentagon’s UFO chief will resign by the end of the year amid a wave of complaints accusing him of making false statements about UFO whistleblowers and fostering an “atmosphere of disinterest,” understands.
“Four main candidates” were interviewed to replace the current director of the Pentagon’s UFO Office, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, after months of heated public disputes between the former CIA physicist, UFO whistleblowers and activists.
According to a former Pentagon official involved in related UFO investigation programs in the past who spoke to , the Pentagon appears to have already made the decision on Kirkpatrick’s unnamed successor.
“Given their track record in public affairs,” this former official said, “they may not release anything to the press until long after the change, but who knows? They might surprise us.”
The personnel change marks the culmination of a months-long exchange of accusations and counter-accusations between Kirkpatrick and former intelligence officer David Grusch, who has alleged widespread illegalities related to a long-secret UFO program.
This week, Grusch publicly accused Kirkpatrick of lying about his office’s efforts to investigate those allegations, which Grusch laid out under oath to Congress last July.
Kirkpatrick previously called Grusch’s same statement to the House Oversight Committee “insulting.” […] to the officials of the Ministry of Defense and Intelligence.’
But other UFO whistleblowers working with Grusch, themselves former and current Defense Department and intelligence community officials, reportedly “did not trust Sean and never trusted him,” according to a lawyer who assisted them in their efforts.
“Four main candidates” were interviewed to replace the current director of the Pentagon’s UFO Office, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick (above), after heated public confrontations between the former CIA physicist and UFO whistleblowers, of whom sources say: “Don’t trust and never trust Sean.”
Air Force and intelligence veteran David Grusch (center) testified under oath before Congress in July of this year, alleging widespread illegalities surrounding a long-secret UFO “crash recovery” program. Grusch is flanked by two naval pilots with knowledge of UFO incursions
While the exact reasons for his alleged departure remain unclear, Dr. Kirkpatrick has faced intense public criticism in recent weeks from UFO enthusiasts and so-called “disclosure” advocates who advocate for government transparency regarding UFOs and aliens.
A citizen petition hosted by Change.org calling for the “immediate removal” of Dr. Kirkpatrick’s call has collected 1,739 signatures since it was published on October 22, 2023.
The petition’s author, Lisa Fine, accused Kirkpatrick of “running a secret committee that directs the actions and public statements of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).”
‘DR. “Kirkpatrick has repeatedly lied to the American people about a lack of evidence of UFOs/UAPs,” Fine said, citing updated terminology for “unidentified flying objects.”
In recent years, Pentagon experts, NASA experts and others have taken to calling what were once known as flying saucers “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP.
Grusch, a former Defense Department official, appeared on camera for the first time for NewsNation to tell his story of deeply covert U.S. programs that he said have “intact and partially intact” spacecraft of non-human origin
The petition’s as yet unproven claim that Dr. Kirkpatrick’s assembly of a secret advisory board to run AARO first emerged that same day in a report from Matt Ford, host of YouTube channel “The Good Trouble Show,” who quoted an anonymous source.
But the other recent accusations that Kirkpatrick “lied to the American people” were much more direct.
This Halloween, AARO hosted a Q&A conference call between reporters and Dr. Kirkpatrick, in which the physicist answered several questions about David Grusch and his claims of a covert UFO crash recovery and reverse engineering program.
On the call, Kirkpatrick told the assembled media that he had interviewed “quite a few people, now over 30 people” in connection with the alleged secret and illegal activity.
“I think we interviewed most of the people he interviewed [Grusch] “I may have spoken to him,” Kirkpatrick added, referring to the investigative work Grusch reportedly conducted while supporting AARO’s predecessor, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.
“We’ve invited him at least four or five times now [Grusch] “People who have come in over the last eight months or so,” Kirkpatrick told reporters on the call, “and been rejected.”
But Grusch was quick to accuse Kirkpatrick of fabricating his AARO team’s outreach efforts in their entirety.
“I haven’t received any emails or calls from them,” Grusch told NewsNation reporters the following day. ‘That’s a lie.’
Grush accused Dr. Kirkpatrick, during a Halloween conference call with reporters earlier this week, accused of fabricating outreach efforts by the Pentagon’s AARO staff. “I don’t have any emails or calls from them,” Grusch told NewsNation reporters on Wednesday. ‘That’s a lie’
Similarly, retired U.S. Air Force captain David Schindele, a former Minuteman ICBM launch control officer who reported his UFO encounter to AARO, said he felt the staff exuded an “atmosphere of disinterest.”
Schindele told viewers of Matt Ford’s Good Trouble that Kirkpatrick and his AARO team are “not people I want to talk to again.”
However, the Mail’s former intelligence official – who has intimate knowledge of the military’s ever-evolving UFO/UAP investigative portfolio – cautioned against drawing a direct link between these controversies and any plans for Kirkpatrick’s departure.
“Sean has told people straight up that he will be leaving by the end of the year,” this former intelligence official told on condition of anonymity.
“I think it’s completely a planned exit. “He probably gave them a timeline when he took the job,” this source said, citing Dr. Kirpatrick’s family life.
“I’m sure he’s ready to go. “To be honest, I wouldn’t read anything more into it.”
The source added that he had heard that AARO’s first and current director was taking a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – where the core of an apparent staff biography for Kirkpatrick was briefly located before he mysteriously disappeared.
Veteran Australian television news broadcaster and investigative reporter Ross Coulthart, who conducted the first television interview with David Grusch, said in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) that this staff bio “needs some explanation.”
“The AARO chief is also likely investigating possible @Battelle links to crash retrieval/engineering programs,” Coulthart said, referring to the military contractor UT-Battelle, which operates the Oak Ridge laboratory on behalf of the Department of Energy.
A recent report by Chron contributor Christopher Sharp and others claimed that Battelle board member Stephanie O’Sullivan “had knowledge of a UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” only to hide it from investigators Senate to hide.
During her final years in government, O’Sullivan served as deputy assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), after successfully leading parts of the US spy agency’s Science and Technology Directorate.
Still, when asked for comment, Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough said Dr. Whatever his future plans, Kirkpatrick is not currently moonlighting for Battelle or ORNL in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Veteran Australian television news broadcaster and investigative reporter Ross Coulthart, who conducted the first television interview with David Grusch, said on social media that Kirkpatrick’s apparent staff biography on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory website “needs some explanation.”
‘DR. “Kirkpatrick remains the director of AARO,” Gough said. “He is not currently employed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”
“We have no AARO personnel announcements to make at this time,” she added.
Outside official channels, however, news of Kirkpatrick’s planned departure reached Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-educated lawyer who represented former UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo in his formal complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general.
“He’s leaving at the end of the year – and that’s a big deal,” Sheehan told , adding that he knows there are “four main candidates” for the job at the top of AARO.
When asked for comment, Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough said Dr. Kirkpatrick (pictured above) “remains the director of AARO” and is “not currently employed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”
Sheehan, whose history of litigating progressive civil rights cases dates back to the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers, is now general counsel, president and co-founder of the New Paradigm Institute.
The institute, a branch of the 501(C)(3) nonprofit Romero Institute, describes itself as advocating public policy for “social, environmental and cosmic goals,” which presumably includes UAP transparency.
Chris Mellon, a former Secretary of Defense intelligence official and passionate advocate for greater government due diligence and transparency on the UAP issue, told that he, too, had heard of similar developments at AARO.
“As for Sean, I’ve heard some of the same rumors,” Mellon wrote via email, “but they’re just rumors, I really don’t know his plans.”
Earlier this summer, before Grusch’s sworn testimony before Congress, Mellon told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, “I was told by Defense Department officials and by former intelligence officials that we recovered technology that did not come from this Earth.”
Sources with similar firsthand accounts have become even more hesitant to share their knowledge with AARO, despite the bureau’s new “second phase” effort to diligently investigate hidden UFO crash recovery programs.
“This phase of the reporting mechanism is aimed at current or former U.S. government employees, military personnel or contractors with direct knowledge of alleged U.S. government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945,” Kirkpatrick told reporters this Halloween.
However, with the future of AARO leadership in limbo, Sheehan told that many fearful UFO whistleblowers have instead opted to testify before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for now.
Whistleblowers with knowledge of a secret UFO “reverse engineering” program have chosen to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, in part because of their alleged distrust of Dr. Kirkpatrick and his UFO office at the Pentagon. Above is a page from Project 1794, released in 2012
Above, more documents from Project 1794: a Cold War-era U.S. Air Force attempt to build a supersonic flying saucer in collaboration with a Canadian defense contractor
“They went straight to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Sheehan said.
“Then a queue forms of people who have real, direct knowledge – and Dave Grusch is in communication with those people, and our people are in communication with those people.”
“We know they don’t want to join Sean’s AARO group until it’s clear who will take his place,” Sheehan stressed.
“None of the whistleblowers want to go in there because they don’t think it’s stable or safe.”
The former intelligence officer who received the message from Dr. Confirming Kirkpatrick’s departure, he expressed the opinion that “the public is holding back from Dave.” [Grusch] was probably unexpected.’
Despite a long summer of conflicting schedules by both Grusch and Dr. In other words, the official suspects that AARO probably did not expect its director to be publicly called a liar.
Among other inconsistencies, Grusch testified under oath before Congress in July of this year that his last personal interaction was with Dr. Kirkpatrick took place in 2022.
“He and I had a confidential conversation in April 2022 before he took over AARO in July 2022,” Grusch told Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida during the hearing under oath.
Grusch added that he was Dr. Kirkpatrick shared “some concerns” he had regarding national security issues relevant to AARO’s UAP mandate.
But during AARO’s Halloween conference call on Tuesday, Kirkpatrick claimed that the two had not spoken in nearly five years.
“I think the last time I spoke to Mr. Grusch was when I was in J2 [Directorate for Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff] at U.S. Space Command,” Kirkpatrick said, “about five years ago.”
“And it wasn’t about that issue,” he added.
When confronted with these and other discrepancies, the former intelligence official told : “I believe Dave.”