“Well, you know, that’s a really weird-looking thing. Lit from the bottom, not light on the top, big tic-tac thing, flying around. Well, what is that? That kind of stuff is a flight hazard,” Kirkpatrick told Bergen at the time, although offering no additional details on any instances where such an object was believed to have been mistaken for a UAP.

West told The Debrief that Kirkpatrick’s remarks had initially sounded “almost as if he was trying to explain the Nimitz Tic-Tac, which would be rather a stretch.” However, with the release of the AARO’s report on the Eglin UAP case, it is now clear that this was the incident Kirkpatrick had been referring to at the time. West says that although some kind of lighter-than-air object cannot be dismissed, even AARO seemed uncertain whether this was a definitive conclusion, despite the report now being categorized as resolved.

West says that while the release of radar data from the Eglin incident might be helpful in making further determinations about the other objects the pilot detected, some caution would still be warranted.

“There’s a long history of conflating radar data with visual sightings,” West told The Debrief. “Unless it can clearly be demonstrated, we need to be open to the idea that what was seen on radar was not the same thing as seen visually (or on other sensors).” West cites similar instances where radar returns may have been unrelated to the primary objects captured on camera, including a case investigated by the Chilean Navy several years ago, which, after initially being touted as an unknown, was quickly revealed to have been a conventional aircraft.

“In the Chilean Navy case, much was made of the fact that there was no object on radar where the pilots thought the object was,” West says, “because it was 3x as far away.”

“So [the Eglin] the radar data could be something else, an unrelated glitch, or maybe even something related to the object (like a radar jammer/spoofer).”

While these possibilities exist, fundamentally, it remains unknown what the radar data might actually entail since, in addition to very little being said about it in AARO’s report, it presently remains inaccessible to the public.

“The problem here is that we don’t have the data,” West says. “We have the assessments of multiple experts that the sum total of the available data points towards something non-anomalous and lighter than air.”

“But unfortunately, we can’t check their work.”

Asked if he felt that it would be helpful for independent analysts to review at least some of the additional data that was available to AARO investigators, West said that this might not only make AARO’s job easier, but it could potentially improve their analysis in significant ways.

“Ideally the data would be public, as the more eyes you have on something, the quicker issues and questions get resolved,” West told The Debrief. “AARO works with two partners, an IC (Intelligence Community) partner and an S&T (Science and Technology) partner. It’s not clear who they are, but they both seem to have reached similar conclusions. Oddly, neither seem to comment on the lighting balloon hypothesis, which suggests that it was internal to AARO, so three teams.”

One primary issue is that AARO, by virtue of its job within the government, often has to work with classified information related to various technologies and military operations. This limits its ability to properly communicate its findings and how much it can reveal about the experts and kinds of analysis from these three teams being employed in AARO’s investigations.

“The multi-domain and classified approach results in a fragmented report with very little visibility as to the workings of the three teams,” West says. “Adding more people, such as myself, or the broader public, would help iron out the inconsistencies and poorly communicated details.”

“There’s a risk it gets too messy, but I advocate for an approach called ‘curated crowdsourcing,’ which I described a few years ago,” West says, referencing an article in which he explains how crowdsourced information and analysis led to a reasonable explanation for the Chilean UAP footage within just a few days of its release.

Had the issues present in its recent report on the Eglin incident been the only instance where problems in AARO’s conclusions had been noted, some of the problems with its analysis might have been deemed innocuous. However, the release of the office’s proposed resolution for the 2023 Eglin UAP incident follows just weeks after the appearance of AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume I, which received a lackluster reception due to several factual inaccuracies it contained.

West shares some of those concerns about the mistakes in AARO’s recent publications, which he feels point to why independent analysis by civilian researchers is important.

“AARO should have had the report fact-checked and edited,” West told The Debrief. “They messed up.”

“They have multiple teams of highly paid people working with them, and they have done some good work. But putting out a report with lots of minor errors makes them look bad and casts doubt on their broader conclusions, such as the circular conversations leading up to the Kona Blue proposal and stories about crash retrievals.”

Unlike cases such as the Eglin UAP incident, which may involve reliance on some appropriately classified information, the public version of AARO’s historical report draws much of its contents from publicly accessible information. Additionally, an unclassified version of the report was planned for public release all along, as directed in legislation passed into law that required the completion and publication of the report.

Given that it was destined for public release anyhow, West told The Debrief that AARO might have benefited from having independent researchers offer feedback before the final version of the Historical Report was published.

“Since the report was going to be unclassified, there’s no reason why they could not utilize outside experts to review an embargoed version,” West says. “They could even contract with them, having them sign NDAs.

Fundamentally, West says that working more closely with independent researchers under such circumstances could have helped AARO produce a better, more accurate final report and may have reduced negative responses from many who, justifiably, viewed the report as lacking quality and factual merit.

“There’s no real downside,” West concluded, “and an error-free report is a much better way of conveying your research and conclusions than what they actually produced.”

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.