Coast to Coast AM: AARO and Current Sightings

It seems that Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, in coordination with the Director, National Intelligence, has renamed the nearly incomprehensibly named Airborne Object Identification and Management Group to the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which I suspect will be called Arrow by those in the know. The responsibilities of this will be broader than those of the old office whose name I won’t try to pronounce.

Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick who was the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center, is the director of AARO.

The mission of AARO will be to synchronize efforts across the DoD and other federal agencies to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security and this includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.

I will note here that the emphasis seems to be on military and official sites and that this seems to ignore sightings and reports from the civilian population. This seems to be an effort to control the data under the umbrella of national security which will mean that the reports are born classified. It doesn’t scream transparency to me.

Reports that might be ignored are like the one from June 19 this year, in Bruce, South Dakota. The witness said he watched the object, that was about 75 degrees above the horizon for four or five minutes. He said that the object was a bright light behind a “V” shaped object. It was slightly smaller than the full moon. He said that a cloud started to form above the “V.” The cloud was lighted by a glow from the UFO.

Given the date and the description, it seemed that this might be another sighting of the SpaceX launch. However, he mentioned a triangular shaped UFO with an aura or cloud around it. The time, however, seems to suggest the sighting was about two hours after the launch on June 19. If the witness’ timing is off, then a SpaceX launch might be the solution. Without a photograph, and with the witness talking about a distinctive “V” shape, and the timing issue, this is a tough call.

I’ll note here that Project Blue Book would have ignored the differences and listed this as the SpaceX launch. Given the circumstances, and the mission of the new AARO office, this sighting would not be of importance. Blue Book’s mission was to clear UFO sightings, keeping them from the dreaded “unidentified” category. With the new AARO office, similar sightings might not be investigated at all.

Without more information or a photograph, this is more of an insufficient data for scientific analysis sighting than an unidentified one.

A photograph was taken in Utah on May 16 of this year. The witness said that he was taking panoramic views in the area for scenery purposes. It wasn’t until he was reviewing the pictures that the UFO was spotted. He supplied both the panoramic view and the enlarged version of the UFO which shows its triangular shape.

The UFO is the small black dot on the right side of the photograph.

A close up of the UFO.

I currently have no explanation for the object in the photograph, other than to say it doesn’t seem to be an artifact created in the camera or a lens flare or some sort of natural phenomenon. And, I suspect, given there was no visual sighting that the new AARO office wouldn’t be interested in it. There is a real lack of scientific information and no witness testimony to accompany the picture.