The Pentagon's head of the office responsible for investigating UFOs, Sean Kirkpatrick, is stepping down from his position in December.

During an interview on Tuesday, the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) said that he would be retiring from the federal government after nearly 18 months on the job. He also deferred his planned retirement last year to take on the job as the head of AARO and said that he now feels that he has achieved his goals.

Pentagon UFO Chief Announces Retirement

Kirkpatrick said that he is ready to move on and believes that he has accomplished everything that he said he was going to do. However, he noted that there are still some tasks that he wants to finish, including completing the first volume of a historical review of the unidentified anomalous phenomena issue, before retiring.

Tim Phillips, Kirkpatrick's deputy, will lead the office in an acting role until the Pentagon selects a permanent replacement. The AARO head is a physicist and he took on the job after spending decades in a variety of scientific jobs for the military, as per Politico.

Kirkpatrick's tenure has been marked by a high level of public and congressional interest in the issue of UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In July 2022, President Joe Biden's administration established the office to look into unidentified craft military pilots have increasingly reported seeing in the skies.

The office was also tasked with determining whether or not these unidentified crafts posed a threat to national security. Since then, Kirkpatrick has investigated more than 800 cases of such encounters.

In the last few months, AARO has been seen in the news frequently, including due to its role in helping the US detect a fleet of Chinese surveillance balloons. Kirkpatrick himself has made headlines this summer after he fired back at a whistleblower's explosive claim that the government is simply covering up a decades-long program to reverse-engineer alien craft.

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Reporting UFO Sightings

The situation comes as the Pentagon launched an online reporting tool for certain encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena. The decision is to expand its effort to be more transparent about its exploration of the unknown, according to The Guardian.

So far, the only ones eligible to use the secure form are current or former federal employees or people "with direct knowledge of US government programs or activities to UAP dating back to 1945." The form went live on Tuesday on AARO's website.

Officials added that an option for the public to submit reports is also coming soon. The decision also indicates that the government is slowly moving closer to fulfilling its promise of complete openness about what it knows or does not know about everything from strange flashes in the sky to the possibility of alien life and sightings of unusual flying aircraft.

The reports would be used "to inform" the office's Historical Record Report, which would then be submitted to Congress by June 2024. They will be used to inform the office's investigations into alleged US government programs UFOs, said Forbes.

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