Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government’s lead investigator of UFOs.
It was in that latter position — as the first director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, that Kirkpatrick came face to face with the tide of misinformation and disinformation infecting America’s public discourse on scientific matters.
“After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena,” Kirkpatrick wrote in a Scientific American op-ed in January, shortly after his December retirement from AARO, he and his team were overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,” producing “a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.”