By Bob Gaydos

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
… holds hearing on AARO

What with all the news all the time being all things Trump these days, it has been easy to lose track of some of our elected representatives not directly involved in that slog through history.

For example, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, always an active, outspoken member of the upper chamber of Congress, had fallen completely off my radar. As a New Yorker, I assumed she was working diligently and, well, no news is good news, right?

       Then she recently reappeared in as unlikely a place as I could imagine and, almost literally, back on the radar.

        Remember those “Chinese” balloons flying over the United States a few months back? Perhaps you’ve seen on TV recently released Navy videos of strange objects their pilots couldn’t identify. UFOs. Or, as the government prefers to call them today, UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

      They’re on Gillibrand’s radar. She is chairman of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. As such, she is charged with overseeing that government agencies charged with identifying, assessing, protecting against and notifying Americans about any emerging threats — identifiable, flying or not — are doing their jobs. Especially that notifying part.

     Those balloon sightings and recent public comments by a recently retired high-level intelligence officer that the government has had a long-standing secret program of crash retrieval and reverse engineering of unidentified spacecraft of “non-human origin,” have given sudden urgency and immediacy to Gillibrand’s Senate post. And she’s taking it seriously.

     She and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, succeeded in adding an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill requiring that any private enterprise which has been given a contract to retrieve, research or re-engineer anything discovered from unidentified, non-human phenomena make that information known to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

     That mouthful of an office was established in 2022 for the express purpose of resolving decades of UFO reports … and non-reports. Its report, due in June of next year, is supposed to include “any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress,” and “any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.”

      Any coverups.

      Typically serious about her responsibilities, Gillibrand fought for and gained additional funding for AARO, so that it could actually perform the function for which it was ostensibly established. Previously, it just had enough funding to cover office expenses. A front.

     Gillibrand wants any private businesses to report to AARO about any involvement in such retrievals and reverse engineering efforts and the requirement includes substantial financial penalties for anyone refusing to do so or hiding such information.

     The interesting thing about the claims made by the whistleblower, David Grusch, is that nobody in the government tried to quickly shut him up.

     Gillibrand’s subcommittee held both a classified closed hearing and an open hearing on AARO in April. Its director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick was the sole witness. He testified: “I should state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. government’s leadership of its findings.”

   Does Gillibrand believe Grusch or others who have reported witnessing non-human vehicles or other phenomena for decades?

     “I have no idea,” she recently told a reporter who asked her. “So I’m going to do the work and analyze it and figure it out.”

     She’s back on the radar.

rjgaydos@gmail.com