Column: The Pentagon’s former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally

Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government’s lead investigator of UFOs. “After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena,” Kirkpatrick wrote in a Scientific American op-ed in January, shortly after his December retirement from AARO, he and his team were overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,” producing “a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.” You’re seeing the degradation of critical thinking skills and rational thought when it comes to analyzing what’s out in the world. From the start, Kirkpatrick says, he was determined to conduct a rigorously empirical inquiry: “We were looking for any data to substantiate any claims that were being made to Congress or in the social media arena.” That applied not only to pilots’ reports of objects that seemed to have displayed unusual aeronautical behavior, but a farrago of reports in the press, online, and among committed UFO believers about purportedly secret government programs to collect, examine and even attempt to reverse-engineer technology supposedly retrieved from crashed extraterrestrial UAPs. They have been made by witnesses paraded before congressional committees — though as Kirkpatrick noted in Scientific American, “none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’ and statement for the record despite numerous invitations.” The source of the narrative is a small cadre of individuals associated with Las Vegas industrialist Robert Bigelow, who funded research into UAPs — as well as on paranormal phenomena — through a private organization he disbanded in 2004. “You’re seeing the degradation of critical thinking skills and rational thought when it comes to analyzing what’s out in the world.” When scientific data confound received beliefs, he says, “people cry ‘conspiracy,’ or ‘the data is wrong,’ or ‘scientists are making it up.’.