Officials at the Department of Defense claimed in a draft document that aliens could be visiting our solar system and releasing smaller probes like missions conducted by NASA when studying other planets.

The draft was written by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department. It centered on the physical constraints of unidentified aerial phenomena and claimed that a mothership already in the solar system could send probes to Earth.

"An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions," the report said. "These ‘dandelion seeds’ could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability."

The paper suggested that the solar system had already been visited by its first interstellar traveler, referring to an exceptionally fast object detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii in October 2017. Its orbit was also different than those in Earth's solar system, leading scientists to believe that the object was pulled by other forces.

The object was named “Oumuamua,” the Hawaiian term for “scout,” which Loeb and Kirkpatrick claimed could be the mothership that sends the probes to planets. Another object was spotted three years later, in 2020. Neither object had a cometary tail, leading some scientists to believe they were artificial.

“With proper design, these tiny probes would reach the Earth or other solar system planets for exploration, as the parent craft passes by within a fraction of the Earth-Sun separation — just like ‘Oumuamua’ did,” the paper read. “Astronomers would not be able to notice the spray of mini-probes because they do not reflect enough sunlight for existing survey telescopes to notice them.”

The Pentagon established AARO in July 2022 to track flying objects and objects that move underwater and in space, especially those discovered around military bases and installations. Before his role as the leader of AARO, Kirkpatrick was the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center.

The report was released on March 7, after a month of scrutiny over unidentified flying objects over the U.S. In the first two weeks of February, the U.S. Air Force has shot down four flying objects that have intruded on the skies over North America. Militaries have adjusted radars to try to spot more incursions.

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