We’ve been covering the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) here ever since it came into existence. They have reportedly been analyzing hundreds if not thousands of reported cases involving UFOs (or UAP as they want us to call them now) for a couple of years and have produced multiple reports, both public and classified, detailing their findings. But have they gotten any results? The current head of AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, addressed reporters this week to provide an update, but nobody should get their hopes up very high just yet. Kirkpatrick said that they are focusing on the most recent sightings at the moment, rather than some of the more famous ones from the past. And he admitted that they might never get to the bottom of some of the biggest cases such as the now-famous 2004 “Tic Tac” incident off the coast of southern California. (Government Executive)

The Pentagon’s office to explore unidentified aerial phenomena may never get to the bottom of some of the most famous sightings, due to a lack of data. But it hopes a new reporting mechanism will help.

The head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, said Tuesday that the office has to focus on the newest sightings first, not necessarily the ones that are the most prevalent in the public mind.

“The way we investigate cases we really prioritize more of the operational ones from today than we do going backwards in time, and the reason for that is there is no supporting data to actually analyze,” Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the AARO office told reporters.

Kirkpatrick’s complaints about a “lack of data” in the older cases are fair enough, I suppose. Many of them contain little more than the testimony of witnesses. Even when there is a video available as is the case with the Tic Tac, there’s not a lot more data available that was retained. That was another issue he complained about to reporters, but he said that more data would be permanently stored in the future under the new guidelines the office recently released.

Still, having a video is still a pretty important piece of data in my opinion. And we have the sworn testimony of one of the pilots involved in the encounter as well, along with their memories of the missing radar data that was recorded at the time. But that sort of information is really only good in ruling out what something isn’t. It doesn’t really define what it was. Speaking as someone who has seen three Tic Tacs myself, I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what they are, how they work, or where they come from. I’m just fairly sure that they weren’t built at Lockheed. (Or if they were, Lockheed has a lot of explaining to do.)

What the office will accomplish in the future is unclear, but some changes seem to be on the way. It’s being reported that Kirkpatrick is on his way out at AARO this year, possibly not by his own choosing. Some of the UFO whistleblowers who have been coming forward, such as David Grusch, have been complaining about him, suggesting that he hasn’t been honest about his interactions with them or the testimony that he has received. One attorney representing some of the whistleblowers said that they “don’t trust and never did trust Sean.” It’s also being reported that four candidates have already been interviewed for his position.

Will new management make a difference? Possibly. We know that quite a few members of Congress, particularly Tim Burchett of Tennessee, have taken a great interest in this investigation and have been pushing for the declassification and release of more government information about UFOs. The claims made earlier this year by Grusch about secret government crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs have only fueled the flames further. Perhaps with a new face at the head of AARO, we’ll learn more. Only time will tell.