AARO’s Historical Records Report May Be in Violation of Law(s), According to Attorney Daniel Sheehan

In the inaugural episode of NewsNation’s “Reality Check with Ross Coulthart”, Sheehan disclosed that in 1977 he was retained by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to investigate the topic of UFOs for a series of reports being prepared by Congress’ Science and Technology Committee for President Jimmy Carter. Sheehan was granted access to the secret files of Project Blue Book, an archive of roughly 700 UFO cases that the long-running Air Force project was unable to resolve. While reviewing the archive’s rolls of microfiche, he found a series of black and white photographs of “a crashed flying saucer” that was in the process of being recovered by Air Force personnel, estimated by Sheehan to have been taken sometime in “the late 40s or early 50s.”

“It was a winter scene; there was snow on the ground and the saucer was a classic, large disc saucer about 40, 50 feet across with a big dome on the top of it” surrounded by Air Force personnel. The craft had crashed into a snow-covered field, and after gouging a trench across the field came to rest in a “big snow covered embankment,” embedded “at a 45 degree angle just stuck in the side of the hill.”

Around the bottom of the craft’s dome were a series of symbols that were not of a language that Sheehan recognized; realizing that he had just discovered official evidence of a UFO crash/retrieval operation, he traced the markings onto a page in a notepad that he had smuggled into the records room, of which he also successfully managed to smuggle back out upon leaving the archive. Although Sheehan’s findings were reported to the CRS, he believes that President Carter was not briefed on the evidence of the UFO crash he discovered.

Jumping forward to the twenty-first century, shortly after the establishment of AARO former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon arranged for then-AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick to conduct an interview with Sheehan to discuss what his 1977 investigation had uncovered. Sheehan said that he “provided [Kirkpatrick], under oath,” what he had witnessed in the classified Blue Book documents. Sheehan says that he hasn’t spoken of his interview with Kirkpatrick until now because of a non-disclosure agreement he signed with AARO.

But despite Sheehan having personally reported his first-hand knowledge of documentation of the existence of at least one crash/retrieval operation, AARO stated that “all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse-engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist,” or are misinterpretations of “authentic, highly sensitive national security programs” that deal with more prosaic technologies, according to the report, titled Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Volume I.

In another section, the report states that AARO had “found no evidence that U.S. companies ever possessed off-world technology,” and that the heads of the companies that reportedly were in the possession of recovered UAP “denied on the record that they have ever recovered, possessed, or engaged in reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology.”

Sheehan pointed out that “the way the report was written it was a kind of wiggle language of trying to pretend that somehow they had no direct evidence.

“But [in] a court of law, as a 50-year practicing attorney from Harvard Law School, I can tell you that is direct, admissible, first-hand testimony about the fact that there is direct visual photographic evidence of a crash retrieval program, directly being undertaken by government officials. And [Kirkpatrick] knows that it existed.”

“I think that it was a transparent, willful, conscious lie, just like Project Blue Book was,” Sheehan concluded, describing the information in ARRO’s report as “propaganda.”

Sheehan also states that by lying to both Congress and the American public in this manner, Dr. Kirkpatrick is in violation of an executive order signed into law in 1981 by President Ronald Regan: “Executive Order 12333 — United States Intelligence Activities” was a directive issued to extend both the powers and the responsibilities of the powers, responsibilities of intelligence agencies, an order referred to as “the foundational authority” by the National Security Agency.

Sheehan says that by willfully publishing such misleading information in AARO’s report, Dr. Kirkpatrick, acting as an intelligence official, may have been in violation of Part 2 of EO 12333, “Conduct of Intelligence Activities”, specifically Part 2.13, “Limitation on Covert Action”, of which states that “no covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.”

Sheehan explains that “executive order 12333 explicitly prohibits anybody in the intelligence Community from engaging in any kind of a covert program to try to influence the political opinion of the American citizen,” and that “they’re prohibited from engaging in things like a thing called ‘public diplomacy’,” adding that the campaign of lies that obscured the actions undertaken during the Iran-Contra affair as one well-known example.

“That’s a ridiculous position to take and it’s propaganda,” Sheehan adds, regarding AARO’s report. “It is exactly what Executive Order 12333 is designed to prohibit, and they’re in violation of that.”

Sheehan says that lawmakers working on the UAP issue were looking to include enforcement measures in the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023—also referred to as the Schumer Amendment—but those measures were stripped out of the act by a cadre of Representatives led by Mike Turner (R-OH). He says that such violations will continue “unless Congress convenes hearings on this” and remedies the issue “with particular pieces of legislation, and puts in criminal sanctions for these types of violations.”

To that end, Sheehan’s New Paradigm Institute has set up a petition that calls on Congress to convene hearings with UAP whistleblowers, an endeavor that Sheehan says he is “perfectly willing to testify to Congress about the first-hand direct photographic evidence that I saw of the crash retrieval of a of a UFO.”