In an incident reported last year, a U.S. military MQ-9 Reaper drone flying a routine mission observed a “metallic orb,” a defense official told Congress Wednesday.
While popular culture has labeled what’s thought to be alien spacecraft as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), the Pentagon recently created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) which has taken on the role of legitimately tracking encounters with what it terms Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
“What we have done is reduce the most typically reported UAP characteristics to these fields, mostly around 1 to 4 meters wide,” said Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of AARO, who appeared in front of a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, describing how UAPs mostly appear. “Silver. Translucent. Metallic. 10,000 to 30,000 feet [in the air] with apparent velocities from the stationary to mach to no thermal exhausts usually detected.”
The statement is particularly notable because previously publicized military UAP sightings have come from manned aircraft. This is the first public instance of a military drone spotting a UAP.
Kirkpatrick was tight-lipped as to the origins of the aircraft, but acknowledged the almost inhuman levels of speed and design. But he was clear that UAP sightings have a wide range of potential explanations.
“That range spans adversary breakthrough technology on one hand, known objects and phenomena in the middle, all the way to the extreme theories of extraterrestrials.”
The Reaper episode he described occurred in 2022 somewhere in the Middle East and was accompanied by a video showing what appears to be a bright, shimmering silver orb following an aircraft that he described as a “spherical UAP.”
