In 2019, I began watching a New York Post YouTube series called “The Basement Office,” which was hosted by Steven Greenstreet, a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist. In the series, he was nearly always accompanied by Nick Pope, and together they would explore the UFO phenomenon. To my utter surprise, Greenstreet not only seemed to take the subject seriously, but came across as a guy absolutely mind-blown by revelations that there was something to all of this after all; a guy who was busy struggling to integrate these new revelations into his former perspectives. In short, I found that I really enjoyed the show.
Then it seemed to stop. Rather abruptly, too, I might add, and this I found rather disconcerting. Certainly disappointing.
Ultimately, my pessimistic suspicions proved to be correct, for when Greenstreet reappeared on the scene, or at least came to my attention once again, his attitude towards the phenomenon had shifted to the extreme other end of the spectrum. Now he only seemed interested in discrediting the subject at all costs. Then he abruptly fell off my radar once again.
Then, on May 8, 2024, on the New York Post YouTube channel, Greenstreet provides an interview he had with none other than Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. While it didn’t come to me directly given the YouTube algorithm echochamber, channels that I’d subscribed to highlighted the interview, provided summaries, included their own angles on the subject, and provided links to his original interview. As much as I valued their insights – more or less – it became obvious that I needed to listen to the entire interview, so that’s precisely what my embarrassingly obsessive ass did.
In this interview, the conspiracy theory Kirkpatrick was weaving gained clarity.
You see, “UFO Activists” have successfully infected particular members of Congress with their UFO religion, subsequently leading these Congressional members to form the UAP Caucus. While Kirpatrick couldn’t identify the particular “UFO Activists” in the interview, apparently for legal reasons, Greenstreet proudly proclaims that he had previously identified fifteen of them himself, as he detailed in former videos of his. According to him, these individuals include Kit Green, Hal Putoff, Chris Mellon, George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, Robert Bigelow, Eric Davis, Lue Elizondo, Jay Stratton, Travis Taylor, Colm Kelleher, James Lacatski, Leslie Kean, Garry Nolan, and David Grusch. He asserts that a number of them have worked together over the decades and the stories of a UFO conspiracy by certain unelected officials against the public all seem to derive from them. These perceptions are echoed in the ARRO Report, which Greenstreet interprets as his vindication.
As for the UAP Caucus, it presently has six official members, according to their website, including Representatives Tim Burchett, Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, Nancy Mace, Eric Burlison, and Andy Ogles. They also list seventeen other members of Congress who have expressed support for their mission.
As Kirkpatrick said in an interview with the National Security Space Association, as supplied by Greestreet’s video, and which apparently occurred March 14, 2024: “I think that is disturbing and should be a flag for the National Security Community, because how can you then trust those people if they are not objective enough to understand evidentiary-based assertions like that? How can you trust them with our national secrets?”
In essence, Kirkpatrick’s conspiracy narrative is this: UFO Activists infected Congress with their UFO religion through the media, which consequently resulted in a threat to national security.
According to Kirkpatrick, at least publicly, it all began on December 16, 2017, when the New York Times published an article, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” which according to Greenstreet contained deliberate falsehoods and deceptions. It was co-written by Leslie Kean, one of those aforementioned activists, and her “sources for the article [were] other activists in the same group,” many of whom the ARRO report notes “were a part of AAWSAP [Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program], a 2008 Pentagon Aerospace technology program that went off the rails when program contractors misappropriated taxpayer funds to hunt UFOs, ghosts, and monsters at Skinwalker Ranch, a supposed paranormal hotspot in Utah. Kirkpatrick says the Pentagon had no idea they were doing this.”
Greenstreet and Kirkpatrick both allege that AATIP, which the aforementioned article brought to light, was never an official Pentagon program and that it was not headed by Lou Elizondo.
Remember this point. It will be referenced in a later post.
Despite this, Greenstreet says, this article spawned widespread interest by the media and Congress. Gasoline was subsequently thrown on the fire when, in early June of 2023, another one of the “UFO Activists,” David Grusch, came on the scene, initially through an article in The Debrief and an edited interview on NewsNation, alleging an ongoing, decades-old secret government program that recovered UFOs and the bodies non-human pilots and was engaging in a cover-up. The following month, on July 26th, there came the historic Congressional hearings, where Ryan Graves, David Fravor, and David Grusch testified. AARO, however, was not invited, as bitterly expressed in Kirpatrick’s LinkedIn post, submitted to the site the day after the hearing, where he writes that “AARO was established, by law, to investigate the allegations and assertions presented in yesterday’s hearing. […] some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to AARO, raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”
The disinterest of the Caucus in ARRO was further confirmed when Greenstreet asked Kirkpatrick whether any member of the Caucus asked to be briefed by him. Kirkpatrick said no, with his vibe – at least to me – strongly suggesting that he’s still just as butt-hurt that Congress trusted the whistleblowers over ARRO as he was when he wrote that weird LinkedIn post. While Greenstreet viewed it through his own lens, his follow-up question strongly suggested that he got that general impression, too.
“You come off, in general, as perturbed about a lot of this, if not mildly frustrated,” he said. “Why is that?”
Kirkpatrick responded:
“One of the most frustrating and concerning things that I discovered in this assignment – and I’ve had assignments all over this world, doing a lot of really cool stuff – none of it has given me this level of frustration. Because the thing that we uncovered was that the number of, for the lack of have a better description, ‘true believers,’ that have the faith of conviction that the government is covering this up and hiding it – the number of those people that actually exist within the government, within the National Security space – people that I’ve known for decades and worked with on some very sensitive things – to have them sit in my office and tell me face to face, ‘I’m not going to help you and support you ‘cause I know you’re part of the cover-up,’ even though I’m looking at them, going, ‘I only had this job for like the last week. I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about,’ and then lay out evidence to the contrary for them… for them to ignore all of that and continue to press forward with the allegations is not just frustrating. Because some of them are in positions of authority that then make it difficult to get a job done…”
Greenstreet then provided a clip from a January 23, 2024 interview with Peter Bergen, “In the Room”, in which Kirkpatrick conveyed a similar sentiment. “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary,” he said, “that is going to make the true believers ‘convert’, if you will. It’s almost like a religion. It is basically religion.”
This butt-hurtness manifested again in the interview, too. In March of 2024, after ARRO released its “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I,” this apparently didn’t impress the Caucus, as within the same month they signed a letter supporting Grusch’s claims. Greenstreet referenced this.
“Even after the ARRO report was released,” Greenstreet began, “some Congressional leaders announced that they will still continue to pursue many of the UFO and alien claims that were dismissed in your report as unfounded. What are your thoughts on that?”
“I think, as I’ve mentioned before, that there are folks that are going to believe what they want to believe,” Kirkpatrick said, “and when they have that level of belief there is no amount of rational thought that you’re going to put in front of them that’s going to change their mind. I think it is a waste of time for them to continue to pursue that. Congress stood up ARRO with all of the authorities and resources necessary to go investigate this on behalf of both Congress and the executive branch, and they have done that job. And for them to continue to pursue that and call them liars is actually telling the men and women of ARRO that have been working on this diligently that they are less credible than anybody else that walks in the door and that they are dismissing their commitment to the Constitution and their duty, and I find that beyond reprehensible.”
Contrary to his assertions that he represents the rational and empirical side of the psychological binary with respect to the UFO issue, here he tries to trigger emotional reactions in Greenstreet and his listeners, a tactic unerringly aimed at inspiring empathy with not only himself, but the ARRO efforts he purports to represent, and by extension seeks to inspire faith in ARRO’s official conclusions. Cherry on top, he’s also calling into question the patriotism of those who question his motives and conclusions.
In essence, Kirkpatrick is trying oh-so-fucking desperately to polarize the issue. He’s not framing the polarization using the currently popular political avenue of Team Red versus Team Blue, either (and if nothing else, I can give him credit for not reaching out for that low-hanging fruit), but something deeper: this, he seems to indicate, is about reason and empiricism versus belief and faith. In other words, it concerns science versus religion.
On one side – the side of which he’s a representative, of course – are the rational, empirical individuals who embrace open-mindedness coupled with healthy skepticism in their approach to the UFO/UAP subject and the associated allegations. They are dedicated to simply collecting the data and following where it leads through a process of investigation and analysis, after which they present it all to the public, entirely devoid of prejudice or ulterior motives.
On the other side, however, reside those naive individuals, many within powerful positions within the US government, who bear passionate convictions, who are possessed by a religious faith that drives them to believe not only that UFOs are alien spacecraft but that elements within our government know this, have recovered such spacecraft, and are lying to the American people about it.
And when he or ARRO provides “evidence” to the contrary, he says, the resulting backlash from the other side, from those that stand with the aforementioned “UFO Activists,” provides evidence of the nature of their emotionally-based position as a whole. He, on the other hand, is not like that, so he maintains. Remember: he’s rational, empirical, simply going where the evidence takes him.
Interestingly, he tries to hammer in this point by citing the hate-mail he has allegedly received as well as those who have threatened him and his family, even one incident where the FBI had to arrest someone on his property – none of which I doubt, and all of which I personally find reprehensible. Even so, bringing this up in this context is clearly done in an effort to elicit sympathy, and to suggest that such an individual accurately represents the “other side” is to paint the other side as irrational and violent, and ultimately reinforces his conspiracy theory.
Consequently, it turns out he is playing on the very same emotional reactions he’s condemning the other side as exhibiting in order to prop up his conspiratorial narrative.
In the end, him trying to brand the position of the so-called “UFO Activists” and UFO/UAP Caucus as being equivalent to Faith and Religion and based only in emotion and brand himself and those he wishes to associate himself with as standing for Reason and Science and all that is rational is utter hogwash.
Many of those Greenstreet refers to as activists were in high positions in our government — positions in which it would make sense that they would know what they claim to know. Assuming they’re truthful, and I assume that those such as Elizondo and Grusch most certainly are, their efforts to push to get the truth out to the public have obviously cost them dearly.
Both Grusch and Elizondo, for instance, torpedoed their careers to try and push for UFO disclosure from outside their former insider positions, and in a legal manner – getting lawyers, going through DOPSR – and it seems abundantly clear that their personal and professional lives have not only taken massive hits as a consequence, but they were intelligent enough to anticipate this. Both have been smeared and lied about multiple times, and in recent days there are even suggestions that the lives of such UFO whistleblowers may be in danger. It’s absurd to interpret their actions as being on behalf of some “UFO religion.”
As for Kirkpatrick himself, as I’ve written previously, there are strong suggestions that he is not being honest with either the public or our elected representatives, constantly straddling the line between being misleading and blatantly lying. Early on, I’d given him the benefit of the doubt and considered me might just be a naive tool, a “useful idiot,” for the Powers That Be, but since the Greenwald revelations, which I’ve covered elsewhere, and in the context of everything I’d previously researched, that naive perception of my own has passed. My working hypothesis is that it’s all deliberate obfuscation and deception.
In addition, while his credentials suggest he’s clearly an intelligent, rational, and empirical individual, he’s also clearly a very emotional one, and often tries to elicit emotions in others to manipulate them into siding with his own stated “empirical” position and “rational” perceptions. His voiced conclusions regarding the UFO phenomenon, the allegations regarding it and those associated with it, and the perhaps not coincidentally similar official conclusions of ARRO, are clearly not rational.
Kirkpatrick’s conspiracy theory is bunk. The guy is a liar and an asshole, and as someone on Reddit who I wish I could credit ingeniously suggested some time ago, one might more accurately refer to him as Jerkpatrick.
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