The Pentagon‘s former chief UFO investigator has revealed a sensitive new government program to recover ‘alleged alien tech’ in the event of a ‘shoot down.’
Dr Sean Kirkpatrick — a longtime CIA scientist who headed the US military’s UFO-chasing All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — admitted to the program’s existence when pressed during a new interview.
The retrieval program’s protocols were for ‘any UAP recovery’ involving ‘everything from balloons to drones to alleged alien tech,’ as Dr Kirkpatrick told podcast host John Michael Godier.
In recent years, Pentagon brass, NASA experts and academics have all reframed what were once called ‘flying saucers’ as ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ (UAP).
The revelation is the first time that the US government has officially acknowledged a UAP or UFO retrieval program, despite decades of speculation and whistleblower testimony that America has already been in possession of alien craft for decades.
It also comes amid multiple federal investigations into ‘mothership’ UFOs over key US military sites, releasing hard to identify, much less catch, ‘drone swarm’ UFOs.
This week, the Pentagon’s North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admitted that America’s military installations have been plagued, since 2022, by at least 600 so-called ‘drone’ incursions, many still unexplained.
This model of a sunken and deteriorated Soviet K-129 submarine was created by the CIA during its 1971-74 AZORIAN mission – one of the most elaborate terrestrial ‘crash retrieval’ missions undertaken in secret by the US intelligence community and now declassified
The now retired director of the Pentagon UFO office, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick (above), spent 2023 engaged in heated public sparring with UFO whistleblowers over alleged retrievals of alien spacecraft dating back to the Cold War-era
Classified documents suggest that the new UFO crash retrieval program began in early 2023, with a focus on ‘response and recovery and material transfer.’
Dr Kirkpatrick initiated high-level meetings formalizing AARO’s version of a UFO crash retrieval program in January and February 2023 — according to the redacted documents released last September via the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
As one scheduling email explained: ‘The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the disposition of funding within the context of safety and security implications of UAP.’
Establishing ‘a receiving point’ for any and all recovered UFO materials was one key issue to be addressed, the meeting memo added.
‘The problem is those types of activities are already covered under Foreign Materiel Collection and Analysis,’ as Dr Kirkpatrick told Godier and listeners to his Event Horizon podcast Thursday.
‘There’s already a process and procedures in place for many of these things,’ he continued. ‘So this conversation was really to start [asking]: How do we document that for UAP? And, what kind of procedures do we need to put in place?’
Since at least the dawn of the Cold War, America has had crash retrieval programs, led by the CIA, but comprising all branches of the US military.
These programs were set up mainly to acquire Russian and Chinese tech, including the CIA’s top secret salvaging of a nuclear-equipped, sunken Soviet sub in 1974.
‘Equally important was retrieving US fragments that had landed in foreign nations to prevent the Soviets from recovering and exploiting them,’ according to curator James E. David of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Dr Kirkpatrick’s latest disclosure adds context to an intriguing release of 78-pages worth of redacted plans between AARO and US Space Command (above), where the physicist had previously served as deputy director of intelligence from 2019 to 2021
Space Command was only the just one of the branches AARO consulted.
Leadership from the White House’s Joint Chiefs of Staff also weighed in on the UFO recovery effort, including its directorates for intelligence (J2), operations (J3), strategy and policy (J5).
‘AARO is Congressionally directed to come up with not just standard reporting procedures, but also mitigation and response procedures in the event of a shoot down or a collection of any sort of UAP,’ Dr Kirkpatrick said.
‘To do that mitigation and response, as well as standardized reporting,’ he added, ‘will occur through all of the combatant commands.’
‘Because they already have people in place that would collect [crashes].’
‘Like, if we shot down another Chinese high altitude balloon, it’s that team that would go and collect it, right? It’s those procedures and processes on how it gets notified and how we go and get it.’
Space Command records obtained via FOIA show that Dr Kirkpatrick had meetings to establish AARO’s version of a UFO-specific crash retrieval program on April 10 with Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, Commander of US Northern Command.
General VanHerck, who led the mission to takedown the infamous Chinese spy balloon back in February 2023, has also taken a hard stance on domestic UFO cases.
‘If there are unknown objects within North America,’ he said of the recent wave of baffling drone swarms over US bases, ‘go out and identify them.’
Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch (center) testified under oath before Congress in July 2023 alleging widespread illegalities stemming from a long-secret UFO ‘crash retrieval’ program. Grusch and Dr Kirkpatrick sparred publicly over these claims that summer
Whistleblowers with knowledge of a classified UFO ‘reverse engineering’ program have opted to testify to the Senate intelligence committee, in part over their reported mistrust of Dr. Kirkpatrick and his Pentagon UFO office. Above, a page from Project 1794 declassified in 2012
General VanHerck, who also has a leadership role over NORAD, has pled with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to authorize more electronic eavesdropping equipment to solve the severe national security mysteries involving the drone UFOs.
But the general has also acknowledged that strict rules govern the use of this level of espionage tech over US soil.
Although Dr Kirkpatrick told Event Horizon’s listeners that he found no evidence that the US government has previously recovered an alien spacecraft via its past crash retrieval programs, several of his predecessors have contradicted his claims.
Dr James Lacatski, a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst and missile expert who managed one UFO-centered program from 2008-2012, has claimed that the US not only has recovered alien spacecraft but that officials have gotten inside one.
‘The United States,’ as Dr Lacatski wrote in a 2023 book on that program, ‘was in possession of a craft of unknown origin and had successfully gained access to its interior.’
This craft, as he briefed then US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2011, had ‘no intakes, exhaust, wings, or control surfaces […] no engine, fuel tanks, or fuel.’
Dr Lacatski’s book, ‘Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations,’ was co-authored with Las Vegas-based investigative reporter George Knapp and biochemist Dr Colm Kelleher.
Dr Kelleher had worked alongside Dr Lacatski from the private contractor side of the DIA’s once highly secretive UFO program, the Advanced Weapons System. Application program (AAWSAP).
When asked by UFO documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell whether or not he himself had entered this recovered UFO, Dr Lacatski replied: ‘I can’t answer that.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to Dr Lacatski for comment and will update this article if he replies.