Gillibrand
© Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Protect Our CareU.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand defended service members who spoke out about UFOs and aliens.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand intends to get to the bottom of potential UFO activity.

While that's not a word you are likely to hear around the halls of government - the official term is unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP - the topic is currently the subject of heightened scrutiny. A House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing July 26 on UFOs in which lawmakers heard testimony from three former military officials who made claims ranging from allegations of the federal government sheltering alien spacecraft to encounters with unknown objects.

Having helped lead the effort to create the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office tasked with detecting and identifying mysterious objects a few years ago, probing for answers is right up Gillibrand's alley.

City & State caught up with the senator to discuss some of her recent legislative wins, the Trump indictment, the Equal Rights Amendment and the dire need for federal action to help New York support asylum-seekers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What were your biggest takeaways from the recent testimony about alleged secret government programs involving UFOs?

They are very serious allegations. The hearing had two sets of testimony. The first was from pilots who saw an object flying in the sky that looked like a Tic Tac that had very strange patterns and abilities. Those pilots were retaliated against, and their careers were derailed, which is how I got involved in the issue. We want our pilots and our service members to come forward when they see things that they cannot identify, which is why I created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to review all of these unidentified aerial phenomena in a scientific and thorough way.

So far, they are looking at about 600 (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) reports and data sets and they've only finished about half of them. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence made a report on what AARO accomplished in January. There they assessed the first 366 unidentified aerial phenomena, about 26 were basically drone-like systems, 163 were balloon or balloon like-entities, six were birds or debris, but they couldn't identify 171. We realized for AARO to really work better we are going to need a lot more sensors around military bases, nuclear sites, on our aircrafts. That is going to be one of my to-dos for the new Congress. Some of the unidentified aerial phenomena is going to be Chinese, some is going to be Russian, some is going to be Iranian and some may be others. But we need to know what we can know and at least identify the knowable so our pilots are safer, so that we know what else is in the sky. We were not tracking these spy balloons when the AARO office was created. That's a problem. We need to know when our adversaries are spying on us. We need domain awareness, and we need air superiority. If our adversaries have technology that we don't have, we need to know about it.

The second testimony was about a service member whose job was to investigate all UAP programs and co-locate them and write an assessment. Through that effort, this whistleblower met several people who said they had worked on alien-related programs where they either had crash material or that crash material resulted in dead aliens. I have no ability to verify that testimony because we've not been told of any such programs. We've asked for all information related to all programs and have not been given that detail. One of three things are true: Either it doesn't exist and they worked on programs that were alien-related which weren't, or they are making it up, or these programs do exist and the Department of Defense is not either read in on it, or the need to know is so small that the people that have been testifying in front of us don't know about it, or they are just misrepresenting the facts.

I intend to get to the bottom of it. I think these service members - certainly the whistleblowers that I've met - are very thoughtful, serious people. So I really want to investigate it to its fullest. An arrow stands for (All-domain) Anomaly Resolution Office.

I understand you helped secure full funding for AARO this year, but do you feel like the U.S. is doing enough to research and review unidentified anomalous phenomena incidents?

I think this AARO office is excellent and built to do this job. If there are special access programs - they are called SAP programs - that Congress was not read in on, we put an amendment in the defense bill to say they can't be funded. We do not want to be misled. We do not want to be led astray. We want to get to the bottom of this and this office is perfectly positioned to do that work.

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