Vergano: Is there anything you’d say to the more general reader, like, who thinks, “Okay, well, people aren’t talking about UFOs—the government must know something,” I mean, like, who maybe are maybe more amenable to, like, a reasonable argument?

Kirkpatrick: Well, what I would say is that the government spends a lot of time and effort developing advanced technology for a variety of reasons. Some of this is just people having observed things or seen things or got access to things that they shouldn’t have—that they don’t understand. And just because they don’t understand it, they seem to leap to “it must be extraterrestrial,” as opposed to, well, it could just be maybe the United States has an edge. So I would take some comfort in that.

We laid out a very clear, scientifically based plan that is being executed to do everything from calibrating our sensors and training our operators on known objects to investigating what state-of-the-art technologies are happening across the world that we may not know about or not recognize. And so my team and I put all that in place, and that’s all been executed and analyzed and done in a rational sanction.

What happens to that is where I get frustrated because where that goes beyond that—and “Does it fall on the deaf ears of these policy makers?” You know, I’ve got better things to do. So I’m hoping that once this report gets delivered, there will be an unclassified version that goes to the public that will help clear up at least some of this.