Building AARO From Scratch

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick served as the founding director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) from its creation in 2022 until his resignation in late 2023. As a physicist and former intelligence community official, Kirkpatrick brought scientific methodology to the office's investigation of military UAP reports.

Kirkpatrick's tenure was marked by tension between his commitment to scientific scepticism and the extraordinary nature of the claims being made by whistleblowers including David Grusch. He publicly disputed Grusch's allegations and maintained that AARO had found no verifiable evidence of non-human craft or crash retrieval programmes.

A Contested Legacy

Kirkpatrick resigned before his work was complete and has since made public statements suggesting that political pressure and internal resistance complicated AARO's mission. Whether his sceptical public position accurately reflects what AARO found, or whether it was shaped by institutional constraints, remains a live question in the UAP research community.