Oversight Hearing on AARO and UAPs/UFOs Nov 19th 2024 (UnEdited)

0:09 this hearing will come to order I'd like to first thank our witness Dr John for kazasi for testifying he is our newly appointed director of the all domain anomaly resolution officer Arrow an office Congress established in the fiscal year 20122 ndaa to investigate this very serious problem of unidentified anomalous phenomenon or UAP Dr klosi comes to Arrow from the research directorate of the National Security Agency where he worked in areas of Optics research and crypto mathematics he previously served at the dod special Communications Enterprise office we look forward to regular engagements between you and the committee when unidentified anomalous phenomenon enter our airspace we need to know about it we need to identify it but in order to do that we need to reduce the stigma and credibility challenges associated with these events our service members scientists foreign partners and the general public need to know that

1:10 their reporting research and Analysis will be taken seriously and acted on in good faith in the spirit of transparency Arrow recently released a Consolidated annual report just a few months after releasing the first volume of the historical record report in March of this year these public documents help highlight the the challenges still facing this office including the lack of timely and actionable sensor data the need to resist the need to revisit places cases placed in the active archive and the importance of improving reporting sources both in the interagency and internationally in this hearing I want to probe a series of specific issues first as incidents at Langley and elsewhere have demonstrated unmanned aerial systems or uas continue to pose significant threats to our national security in addition to safety of flight issues these uas create for our own pilots and air crew the US uas present clear and un undeniable Counter

2:11 Intelligence concerns around some of the most sensitive airspace while standard uas are not part of Arrow's Mission your work on sensors at military installations across the country will be critical to making sure that we have the domain awareness necessary to accurately identify and track these objects I expect your office to also play close attention to any anomalous characteristics that these systems could present in the future second I look forward to your presentation of three case studies demonstrating cases that Arrow has resolved including the go fast which is one of the most prominent UAP cases however I believe it is important to acknowledge ongoing public interest in the Nimitz incident the gimbal video and other prominent UAP cases and for Arrow to share what it can about those cases as well it's also important that arrows speak to unresolved cases and what types of anomalous activity have merited further analysis and while I know Arrow has gone through a period of

3:12 transition over the past year it is important to share these disclosures both resolved and unresolved cases with the public even when a senate hearing is not scheduled lastly while some have been hesitant to come forward to arrow in the past I hope that potential individuals with firsthand knowledge of unreported programs view your AR your arrival in this position as an opportunity for a new start Arrow has was created by Congress to do this work Congress waved non-disclosure agreements for those who disclose information to arrow and gave Arrow the authority to go and turn over every Rock I hope those with information to share use this opportunity so that we as your Senators who represent you can do our jobs I look forward to hearing more on these issu from Dr klosi and for members to start a dialogue on this important topic with that I would like to turn to senator erst for her opening statement thank you madam chair and thank you Dr kosi our hearing today is about identifying uaps

4:14 and understanding their potential implications which could range from technological advancements to potential threats to our national security are these phenomena tied to foreign adversaries such as China or Russia leveraging Advanced Technologies beyond our current capabilities or do they represent unknown scientific phenomena that challenge our current understanding we must answer these critical questions to ensure that our national security is not compromised it is vital that all agencies work in tandem to aggregate data identify patterns and develop robust analytical Frameworks our ability to detect track and respond to uaps requires the latest technology and full cooperation from all government branches thanks very much Dr klosi for your attention to this matter and I look forward to the valuable insights that you and arrow can provide to our committee and I yield back thank

5:15 you Dr kazasi please make your opening statement thank you chairwoman Jill brand ranking member Ernst and distinguished members of the subcommittee it is a pleasure to be here on behalf of the Department of Defense as the new director of the AL domain anomaly res resolution office I appreciate the opportunity to provide a status update on Arrow's work and respond to your questions about unidentified anomalous phenomenon or UAP on behalf of the department and the entire Arrow team I want to say how grateful we are to Congress for its continued support unidentified objects in any domain pose potential threats to US Safety and Security reports of UAP activity particularly near National Security sites must be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the US government by way of introduction I'm John kosi I'm a researcher at my core with an academic background in mathematics physics and Engineering I've spent most of my career at the National Security Agency leading Advanced research in the areas of Optics Computing and uh crypto mathematics by Nature I am drawn to tough scientific

6:16 problems which is what brought me to arrow and the UAP Mission since I arrived at Arrow in August I've been impressed by the breadth and depth of my team's experience and the framework they've established to rigorously analyze UAP reports ER has taken meaningful steps to improve data collection and retention bolster sensor development effectively triage UAP reports and reduce the stigma of reporting UAP events last year Arrow worked with the dod's joint staff to issue guidance to defense personel worldwide on how to report UAP observations and is working with the military services regarding implementation Arrow has also launched a public website that features UAP imagery case resolutions material analysis archival records and more these are only a few examples of Arrow's recent progress and we're just getting started to date Arrow has over 1600 UAP reports in its Holdings from across the US government I'll share a slide in just a few minutes with updated UAP analytic Trends you'll see that many reports

7:17 resolve the commonplace objects like birds balloons and unmanned systems While others lack sufficient data for comprehensive analysis although only a small percentage of reports received by Arrow poent are potentially anomalous these are the cases that require significant time resources and a focused scientific inquiry by arrow and its network of Partners it is important to underscore that to date Arrow has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings activity or technology to accomplish Arrow's National Security Mission I have set three priorities for the office building strong Partnerships promoting transparency and scaling up the work of the office Arrow cannot do its work alone building Partnerships across government Academia industry and with the public is essential to the success of the office strong cooperation with the military services is particularly important we rely on their support to implement our reporting guidance and to amplify the message that there should be zero stigma

8:19 associated with UAP reporting we also rely on Partnerships with the National Labs the office of the Director of National Intelligence FBI Department of Homeland Security NASA all of which play a role in the whole of government effort to address UAP recognizing the talent and expertise that reside outside of the government Arrow will continue to explore new ways to partner with the academic and scientific communities to investigate its most complex UAP cases a related priority for Arrow is transparency our ability to collaborate with key Partners including the scientific community and the public relies on information sharing to include downgrading and declass classifying UAP related information in some cases it may be unclear to the public why the dod classified a piece of information in the first place why are photos of seemingly benign objects such as balloons classified it's often the case that an object or phenomenon isn't itself a security concern but the location Source or method used to

9:21 capture it is still sensitive many cases are difficult to quickly release to the public but are reported to the appropriate committees in Congress that are authorized by law or House and Senate leadership to receive the information it is important to note that Arrow does not unilaterally declassify information instead we work with the originator of a classified record to ensure that declassifying that record does not inadvertently harm National Security this can take time nonetheless the department is committed to declassifying and publicly sharing more information on UAP while protecting sensitive sources and methods I'll be sharing some newly declassed ified imagery in just a few minutes arrow is also working closely with the National Archives and Records Administration to make UAP related documents publicly available in a digitized collection meanwhile Arrow continues to review the US historical record relating to UAP we welcome any former or current government civilian

10:23 contractor or military service member with relevant information to reach out to us at www. arrow. my final priority is scaling up Arrow's work to match its Mission Arrow needs to bolster the quantity quality and diversity of data that it acquires and examines this means tapping into existing data sources within the inter agency while deploying Arrow's own organic sensor capabilities to the extent that UAP results from the domain awareness gaps more and better data will help us fill those gaps and help us understand what is being encountered in closing arrow is committed to the highest standards of scientific Integrity we will not foreclose on any explanation for UAP prematurely we will continue to follow the science and data wherever they lead we will continue to have an open and Frank dialogue with Congress in settings like these and in classified briefings we will continue to keep you fully and currently informed of all UAP information active or historical and finally we will share as much

11:23 information as possible at the unclassified level to inform the public of Arrow's activities and its fin for now I'd like to turn to a brief presentation of UAP Trends and cases and then i' be happy to take questions okay this chart represents the UAP reporting since 1996 and as has previous previously been discussed by arrow that sensor placement seems to have caused a bias in our data both Geographic and at altitude and we're working to resolve that bias in 2025 or reduce that bias through broader engagements with the dod as well as the IC and the rest of the government also by incorporating broader sensors into our data and through a public reporting mechanism that we hope to have live in 2025 on the left side shows the

12:24 altitudes and we'll see it's a bit cut off we'll see that most of the reporting occurs between 15,000 and 25,000 ft that happens to be where most of our sensors are and the reporting above and below that is also often coming from those same Platforms in the center we'll see that the resolved cases have the vast majority being balloons and uas we're seeing a great increase in satellites recently particularly with the launch of Mega satellite constellations such as starlink where the satellites are catching what called uh satellite flares or glint off the sun just after sunset or just Before Sunrise and on the rightmost we'll see the morphology or the shapes that have been reported the majority have been lights or orbs we think that there's going to be a increase in the lights with the mega constellations but our most interesting cases some of which I'll discuss later are actually the shapes such as the

13:26 triangles or the cylinders and at the bottom we'll see the geographic bias that I mentioned before where most of the reports historically had been near the government sites this bias has been reduced recently by reporting from the FAA we now get weekly reports from them and great thank you to our aviators for making those reports it helps our analysis quite a bit okay A case that we thought would be a trans medium case as it was reported is well known on the outside known as the Puerto Rico case was Data collected in 2013 when a Customs and Border Patrol aircraft observed an object flying near an airport in Puerto Rico the green line in this diagram is the track that the airplane was taking and those many crossed lines are the directions that the camera was facing at the time that the airplane was flying around the airport and we'll watch the video in just a moment the orange arrow in the center is where we assess that

14:27 the UAP was actually flying and trans medium means that it goes from one domain into another in this case it looks like it goes from the air into the water and then back into the air we assess that it was actually flying over the airport the entire time and this video was taken with infrared and what appears to be the trans medium part where it goes into the is actually where the temperature of the water is equal to the temperature of of the object and the camera can no longer distinguish between the two it's not that the object actually goes into the water and so we assess that the object likely a pair of balloons or sky lanterns was floating at about seven knots over the airport and descending to about 200 meters and this video will be released and our report will be released later this year the go fast was uh captured the public attention and Congressional

15:27 attention when it was made public 2017 looks like an object flying very fast over the water very close to the water through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis using trigonometry we assess with high confidence that the app object is not actually close to the water but is rather closer to 13,000 ft diagram here shows as the platform is flying and capturing the object if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude a trick of the eye called Parallax makes it look like the object is moving much faster and so we've written a detailed paper on Parallax released that on our website so that the public can literally check our math on analysis an interesting case which I don't believe the public is familiar with is uh captured in 2018 from a UAV flying in the Mediterranean watching Mount Etna as it was erupting and it appears that that object is flying through the plume of super superheated

16:29 gas and Ash this was a rather difficult case to resolve we had to pull in support from a number of IC and S&T partners and even reach out to a volcanologist and through very detailed 3D modeling and pixel by pixel analysis of the object as it's traversing across the clouds they assess that the object was actually 170 meters away from the plume and not flying through it and to be clear Arrow does not believe every object is a bird a balloon or a UAV we do have some very anomalous objects it's just the nature of resolution we can only resolve things that we understand so we're now working on additional products where we can inform the public Congress and others of the objects as we're studying them rather than once we've resolved them with that I'll take your questions thank you Dr kloski I appreciate your um your um testimony um it's been wildly reported that individuals claiming first tailing knowledge of unreported UAP

17:31 programs have been reluctant to engage with arrow what message do you have for those individuals and how will you work to gain their trust I would let them know that Congress has gone out of its way to create the organization Arrow specifically to conduct these sorts of Investigations and has uniquely empowered them to have access to all UAP related information whether that's historic or current and we take that responsib ability and those authorities very seriously and so we have been reaching out to AB broader Community encouraging folks who had talked to Arrow Personnel in the past and maybe felt uncomfortable to come back to us we've met with several of their interlocutors and a couple of firsthand Witnesses and we are making great progress and those firsthand witnesses that we have talked to do feel comfortable coming back to us and so we hope that more folks that do have information would go to www. arrow. Mill fill out the form send it to us so we

18:32 can bring them in for interviews and add their information to our investigations thank you um I recently just read your report from March your historic report and I would encourage anyone who's interested in this topic to read the report because um when I was asked by a reporter about it they said well it doesn't show any any evidence of secret programs that have aliens that's not how I wrote the report what I wrote the report is the US government took sightings extremely serious ious L over the last 75 years put some of the greatest Minds ever to analyze these cases because they assess them as some deeply unknown phenomena that may or may not cause threats that may or may not be related to adversaries but are certainly something that the US government need to know about and what I read from this report is that we resolved numbers of cases but in almost every instance whether it was in the 40s the 50s the 60s the 70s the 80s the 90s the knots half the cases were unresolved so I don't think this is an example of the government not taking these cases seriously I think this is an example of

19:34 our government spending 75 years taking these cases very seriously and interestingly for the group that put together this report they didn't have access to any firsthand reporting and so from my perspective for whistleblowers and people who want to come in please come in because the purpose of Arrow is so that the Senators can do our job to provide oversight accountability and transparency we find it very concerning conning that our Pilots that our Navy officers that people who have sightings of uaps are denigrated are um somehow dismissed or disregarded um they need to be protected this is a huge issue for National Security because number one we don't have domain awareness which is very problematic number two um we don't have domain superiority if we don't understand how different uaps are flying what technology they're using um what they mission is what their purpose is and at the base level we have so many uaps around our bases around our

20:36 military sites around our nuclear sites that it's deeply disturbing that adversaries at a minimum could be using these opportunities to spy to uh glean intelligence that will harm our long-term National Security so um I'm grateful that you're taking the whistleblowers very seriously I'm grateful that arrow is trying its best to integrate the private sector the public into to their work um interestingly in this hearing we heard that the FAA is now working hand and glove which is very helpful we want the this uh public facing um uh accessibility to be put in place by 2025 so that people can upload their videos their data their reports I've met with people who have followed this issue for decades and they have thousands of of examples thousands of pieces of data that ultimately I want uploaded into arrows so you can cross reference historic information with current information because this group at Arrow are the best scientists that we can find

21:36 anywhere and they will do the work that's needed to be done um so I just want to thank you for that and then with my last 42 seconds um can you tell us about any of the cases that Merit further analysis by your IC and Science and Technology Partners what is it that makes these cases anomalous and a large number of reports are placed in the active archive because Arrow does not have enough information what might prompt you to reopen a case like that and do you have any examples sure I'll start with the active archive case so that is just the place where we put cases where we don't have enough scientific information to resolve them at that time but we're always looking for opportunities to correlate them to new cases that come in as the new cases come in as well as enrich those cases with additional data we do have one example that I'm aware of where we were able to correlate a number of observations of interesting lights in the sky and eventually we concluded that it was multiple people observing starlink flares just as an example three cases that Merit analysis that we're

22:37 working on right now one we might be in the process of resolving but nonetheless is still interesting the first one was brought to us by a law enforcement officer out west where he observed a large orange orb floating several hundred feet above the ground a couple miles away he went to investigate what was going on with that orb and as he was pulling up to the location where he thought would below the orb about 40 to 60 met away from some object that was the area was well lit he saw a blacker than black object he said it was about the size of a Prius four to six feet wide and as he got 40 to 60 meters away from the object it tilted up about 45 degrees and then it shot up vertically he says 10 to 100 times faster than any drone he's ever seen before and it did that without making a sound as far as he could tell from inside of his vehicle and just as it left his field of view through his windshield then it emitted very bright red and blue lights that elited illuminated the inside of his

23:38 vehicle as brightly as as if someone had set off fireworks just outside of his vehicle or Street flares so that's anomalous because of the size of the vehicle with the great acceleration and when he came back to investigate that area he found no disturbance of the ground beneath it so that's one interesting one another one comes to us from Southeast us there was a US facility where two cars of government contractors were leaving the facility around 9:00 in the morning they looked up in the sky and saw a large metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airplane and it was stationary they observed that there was a very bright white light behind or around the object they saw it stationary for 15 to 20 seconds and then it disappeared obviously an object that large stationary unless it's a blimp is unusual then disappearing we can't explain how that would happen and then the last case was interesting we had a aircraft that was flying parallel to

24:38 another aircraft and it was capturing imagery of it and a small looking object appeared to fly between the two of them much faster than them through very careful analysis we think that the object might have actually been further away than the object that it was videotaping but it requires very careful analysis to come to those conclusions and we don't have the metadata to support that yet Senator Ernst yes thank you madam chair and Dr kosi you you mentioned that you do work with the intelligence Community you're working with the FAA uh has Arrow involved Academia have you gone to universities do you have outside organizations that you are working with and if so can can you walk us through some of that collaboration sure right now most of our collaborations that are veering towards Academia are with your University Affiliated research centers associated

25:40 with universities or with ffc's our partnership with universities I would say is lacking right now we have some one-off associations with University um professors however that's our fault and it's largely because of the need to declassify data we need to give the professors something to work on before we can really engage them so we're working significantly on declassification effort we've hired a number of declassification experts and we're going to be trying to get cases like the ones that I just discussed here Declassified so that we can engage with the universities on a regular basis and provide them the data talking to a scientist without data is going to be rather disappointing so hopefully in 2025 will be increasing those efforts right well I appreciate that I think there's a huge pool of talent out there that that uh you should tap into um given the Public's growing concern and interest in uaps how do you balance the need for the transparency that our public is demanding uh with the potential risk of

26:42 revealing classified defense information yeah that's always a concern that's on the front of our minds we want to make sure that we're deconflict both on potential us programs and what the IC might be tracking for adversarial programs as we're aggregating that information and preparing to share it however often times we can remove the discussion of the unidentified and anomalous activity from the sensitive information that our partners are concerned with and that's usually going to be the platforms that the information was collected with if it is a truly anomalous and so we have our partners working alongside in the declassification of that data very good and then without having to explain the UAP what do we need to begin uh really doing about them what what precautions can we take what should we be doing them I think that removing the stigma reducing the stigma is the first step we need to make sure that we're having honest and transparent conversations

27:43 about them because if we're hesitant to discuss them then it opens the opportunity for an adversary as you had mentioned earlier Senator Gill brand to come in in and conduct some activity so we need to do that and we need to have more persistent monitoring and understand that whether it is a UAP or a counter uas issue that we need to have that complete domain awareness around our national security facilities wonderful thank you thank you madam chair um just a couple of follow-up questions um we didn't discuss in this setting uh the local the most recent uh UAP um or uas um uh encounter with uh BAS like Langley um I know that um the incursion by uas that were publicly made available um through the press that took over two weeks was fairly alarming to Senators because um there was a question about what technology they were using

28:44 there was a tech there was a question about why it was so hard to detect um can you speak to how Arrow will be integrated into the review of these kinds of cases and how you can be helpful to both the intelligence community and the Department of Defense in analyzing or being able to more quickly analyze what's knowable and what's not knowable so that because once you do identify it as a drone for example it then goes to the right department at DOD the intelligence Community to assess deal with or take down as the incident might be but talk to us a little bit about what role you can play for the both the dod and the IC community in these kinds of incursions that are happening when we don't know what tech is being used and we don't understand a flight pattern or we don't understand how they arrive and and depart in the way they do yeah we are generally going to be supporting them through an advisory capacity as an organization that

29:44 naturally needs to conduct Baseline experiments of the environment to see what normal looks like whether it's um balloons Birds anomalous activity or drones flying through an environment we're going to gather a lot of data that will allow us to characterize an environment very well and then detect and follow those tracks hopefully rather efficiently there's also a lot of overlap in the type of sensors that are going to be used for the counter uas Mission and the UAP Mission whether that's active uh detection like Radars or passive like cameras and so as arrow is trying to push the bounds on detectability for UAP we're hopefully going to have best practices that we can also provide to the counter uas and potentially we might have additional technologies that we can offer them to support um I'd like to just address a little bit of reporting and feedback um as you know arrow is required to develop a mechanism for the public to report UAP

30:45 information now that that mechanism for current and former military civilian and contractor personnel has been established can you speak to Arrow's plans for a public reporting mechanism and how did Arrow arrive at this approach and were other options considered and second for pilots and operators who have reported a UAP what feedback if any has Arrow provided to these individuals related to what arrow is doing with their report and how the report has been resolved how does such feedback or lack thereof impact the frequency of UAP reporting yeah the public REM reporting mechanism that we've decided to go with is going to look similar to the reporting mechanism that we currently have for historical events where we're going to ask folks to go to our website download a PDF form put in the narrative for their account and then email that to us with ACC companying uh media usually it'll probably be imagery we went with that option because we thought one we could do it rather quickly we could do it efficiently make it very costeffective for the taxpayer but also

31:46 we think we can gather all the data that we're going to need to conduct our analysis and then we're going to have that feed into an automated processing system that will cross-correlate that against all the other public reported cases as well as the US government cases we did consider a number of other reporting mechanisms as to include automated online fors as well as cell phone apps and we ultimately decided that this would be the safest cheapest and easiest to maintain in the future while protecting the private information of the individuals who are reporting for the regarding the feedback from uh the the resolved reports right now we don't have a good feedback me mechanism it's fairly informal we're working on building a case management system that Arrow will use at all classification levels and hopefully in that we'll be able to provide feedback as the case is going through the resolution process that we have multiple phases then the

32:49 folks who report that whether it's a pilot at the classified level or someone potentially reporting through another mechanism they'll get that Auto aut at feedback um and then it is not determined at this point yet how much information will be able to include in that feedback where it is in the process it'll depend on the classification of the resolution of the case my final question is is there anything that you need to tell the senate that you need from us whether it's funding whether it's support whether it's legislation um is there any requests that Arrow has of us or anything else you need to brief us on uh for us to be able to do our jobs uh to protect our service members as well as um integrate public uh interest and public um data and information into the future analysis e efforts of Arrow so first of all I want to say thank you again I think that the authorities that we have are remarkable and I think that we are well resourced

33:50 as an office the only ask that I would have is that you continue to Champion us particularly with Witnesses encourage them to come forward and report to us so that we can have a more fome investigation of the potential historic um or ongoing Legacy programs thank you so much uh hearing