According to the director of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office, ‘the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens.’

The alternative to what would be a literally Earth-changing discovery of extraterrestrial life exploring our own planet would be that a rival foreign power could be ‘doing stuff in our backyard,’ he said.

The longtime laser and materials physicist and head of the Pentagon’s UFO-chasing All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) delivered this bracing assessment as news broke of his impending retirement from government service.

Dr. Kirkpatrick’s 18-month tenure as AARO’s first ever director has been laced with controversy, as expected for a mandate once relegated to the scientific fringe.

While some UFO whistleblowers now accuse Kirkpatrick of fostering an ‘atmosphere of disinterest,’ others have suggested his superiors are holding AARO’s efforts back even though a few have described ‘really positive’ experiences with the office.

‘I’m ready to move on,’ Kirkpatrick told Politico Tuesday, upon official confirmation of his retirement. ‘I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.’

Dr. Kirkpatrick added that there remains lingering tasks he hopes to have finished — including AARO’s congressionally directed ‘Historical Record Report’ on UFOs, which is due to Congress in June 2024, over six months after Kirkpatrick’s departure.

At a press conference this past Halloween, Kirkpatrick announced a new secure reporting mechanism designed to help AARO investigate claims of alleged highly secretive and potentially illegal US government UFO programs.

‘The reporting mechanism is for current or former US government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of alleged US government programs or activities related to UAP [UFOs] dating back to 1945,’ he said.

Ever since UFOs exploded back into public consciousness with a series of New York Times exposes in December 2017, government officials, scientists and devotees have reframed the mysteries as unidentified aerial, or anomalous, phenomena: ‘UAP.’

The new name hopes to add caution and reduce preconceived notions as to the true nature these airborne mysteries.

When asked at the Halloween press conference whether AARO has reached out to officials from adversarial foreign nations in an effort to pool UAP data, Dr. Kirkpatrick replied that the concept was a non-starter from a national security standpoint.

‘We certainly have not reached out to any adversaries, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which they’re adversaries,’ Kirkpatrick said.

While AARO’s annual UAP report released this October found that ‘none’ of its hundreds of military UFO cases ‘have been positively attributed to foreign activities,’ Kirkpatrick expressed concern over telling, but less concrete, evidence.

‘I am worried from a national security perspective,’ Kirkpatrick told CNN in advance of the report’s release.

‘There are some indicators that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard,’ he said.

Last summer, the AARO chief, who once worked on optical and laser physics projects for America’s intelligence gathering agencies, including the CIA, described AARO’s national security mandate to ABC News as avoiding ‘technical surprise.’

To judge from AARO’s own presentations to Congress and NASA’s UAP advisory panel, the office has zeroed-in on a series of troubling cases involving so-called ‘metallic orb’ UAP.

This time last year, a classified 22-page report, compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), described hundreds of unresolved cases, some involving ‘orbs’ caught on drone cameras that were then seen ‘suddenly bolting off the screen.’

Some non-government groups, including OSINT specialists Bellingcat, have offered prosaic explanations for one of these ‘orbs’ — but Kirkpatrick has openly speculated in a paper with Harvard physicist Dr. Avi Loeb that these UAP could be alien probes.

Despite serious concerns from AARO’s soon-to-be-departing director that the solution the UAP mystery might prove to be advanced tech flown by a foreign power, evidence exists that these ‘metallic orbs’ predate even the Cold War era.

One 1944 Newsweek article, titled ‘The Silver Sphere Puzzle,’ explored similar cases of flying orbs during WWII, as did a report from the Associated Press headlined ‘Balls of Silver Seen Over Reich Intrigue Science.’

Then too, journalists and investigators suspected it was a wartime anti-radar device from one of America’s then-adversarial nations, Nazi Germany.

‘It could be that those floating silver balls encountered by American airmen over the Reich are another German attempt to create interference for radio communications,’ the AP’s wartime radio editor wrote.

‘The most common misconception is that [the possible phenomena] are all the same thing and they’re all extraterrestrial,’ as Kirkpatrick told ABC News last July, ‘and neither of those are true.’

Have YOU seen one? The Pentagon reveals what the most commonly reported UFO looks like

Ever since the first sighting more than 75 years ago, popular culture has usually depicted a UFO as a flying saucer emitting a powerful halo of light.

But that could finally change following the official release of information from the Pentagon about the mysterious aerial phenomena.

Based on clues from reported sightings, the typical UFO has a round shape, usually described as spherical or an orb, with a white or silver colour, often translucent.

It also has a size of between 3 and 13 feet (1 to 4 metres) and usually travels through the air at a height just below commercial passenger planes.

The Pentagon has also released a hotspot map that reveals the location of reported UFO sightings, including Japan and the Middle East.