The Pentagon’s former UFO chief has revealed his conclusion to one of the most famous UFO cases of the modern era: the Navy’s baffling ‘cube in a sphere’ UFO was just a super high-tech drone.

US Navy fighter pilots had reported seeing these other-worldly craft near the Atlantic coast between 2014 and 2015, which nearly tore the wing off an F/A-18 Super Hornet that was flying with the USS Roosevelt during one incident.

Now Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Pentagon’s recently retired UFO chief, says that the objects were likely ‘next generation,’ ‘spherical’ drones that move ‘very accurately.’

While not confirmed, his description matches a drone-prototype made public by Chinese researchers in 2022 — a silver orb with eight thrusters configured at the tips of an internal cube, making it capable of unprecedented mid-air twists and turns.

The case highlights why UFOs must be taken seriously and not be subject to ridicule, Kirkpatrick suggested. 

Dr Kirkpatrick’s new comments come ahead of the Pentagon’s congressionally mandated ‘Historical Record Report’ on UFOs, due to lawmakers in June of 2024. 

DailyMail.com was given an early draft transcript of Dr. Kirkpatrick’s appearance on Fresh Produce Media’s ‘In the Room with Peter Bergen,’ in which the physicist delved deeper into the national security risk that has come from stigmatizing eyewitness reports of UFOs.

‘That gap could potentially be exploited by somebody,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick told Bergen, ‘put a platform in [the] continental United States that nobody knew was there.’

A longtime laser physicist, Dr. Kirkpatrick’s government service took him to the Air Force Research Laboratory, the CIA and a position at America’s highly secretive spy satellite agency the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) before chasing UFOs.

The physicist’s Air Force colleagues once nicknamed him ‘Dr. Evil’ after the laser-obsessed villain in the Austin Powers series of spy film spoofs. 

‘One of my going away presents, as I was leaving the National Reconnaissance Office,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick told CNN national security reporter Peter Bergen, ‘was one of my close colleagues gave me a shark with a laser pointer strapped to its head.’

Dr. Kirkpatrick headed up the Pentagon’s then-brand new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) from July 2022 until the end of December 2023, leveraging his scientific expertise toward the tricky task of investigating military UFO cases.

Last May, Dr. Kirkpatrick briefed NASA’s UFO advisory panel that AARO had logged roughly 800 cases of flying, spherical ‘metallic orb’ UFOs.

‘This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick told the panel. ‘We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers.’ 

It’s unclear just how similar these metallic orbs may be to the UFOs first brought to public attention by former Navy lieutenant and fighter pilot Ryan Graves, who described them to Congress as ‘a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere.’

But Dr. Kirkpatrick told the podcast these otherworldly craft may very likely have been a foreign espionage platform.

‘There’s a large number of people, pilots, others, who have said, ‘Hey, I saw this giant sphere. It had a cube in it,” he said, ”I don’t understand it. It must be an alien.”

‘Well, actually, no, there’s a number of papers out,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick continued in this early, uncut draft of his podcast interview with CNN analyst Peter Bergen.

‘The most recent one was from, University of Singapore, I believe, where the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical.’

‘They’ve taken about a two-meter size, inflatable, and they put a cube inside of it,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick continued. ‘And everywhere the corner of the cube touches the sphere, they’ve fused it, cut it out, and put little thrusters in.’

‘So, now I have eight thrusters. And I can put cameras on it and anything else I want,’ the ex-AARO chief told Bergen. 

‘With eight thrusters in a cube configuration, I can maneuver this drone around very accurately.’ 

Scientists with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) in China did, in fact, prototype a spherical drone along these lines, dubbed the ‘Spherical Indoor Coandă Effect Drone (SpICED)’ in a September 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Drones. 

The research team in Singapore noted that their new prototype, which benefited from an internal propulsion system with eight nozzles in a cube configuration, showed a promising 40 percent reduction in ‘trajectory control error’ during their test flights. 

The SUTD’s ‘cube in a sphere’ drone prototype, they wrote, proved to be more swiftly and accurately maneuverable than their past internal ‘tetrahedron’ configuration.

But the Chinese-made drone is not the only novel unmanned spherical craft in production: Swiss-based Flyability has been producing ‘spherical’ drones since at least 2015, when it won a $1 million competition in the United Arab Emirates.

The makers of Flyability’s ‘gimbal’ drone and the SpICED balloon drone both cited collision safety as their reasoning for pursuing these unmanned aircrafts’ round designs — not high maneuverability for clandestine spying.  

But they are not the only actors pursuing this kind of aerospace research, according to AARO’s departing director. 

‘They’ve tried these all over the place,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick said.

‘There are a number of advanced technologies that are being commercialized that people don’t recognize,’ he said. ‘Why they go immediately to ‘this is extraterrestrial’ is another conversation.’

Speaking to Bergen’s podcast, Dr. Kirkpatrick emphasized that he sees more terrestrial, counter-intelligence and defense-oriented tasks as AARO’s primary reason for being.

‘The office’s mission is not to prove the existence of extraterrestrials,’ he said.  

‘The office’s mission is to minimize technical and intelligence surprise. That is the primary mission.’

The laser physicist noted that last February’s Chinese spy balloon drama, when multiple objects were tracked and shot down within US and Canadian airspace, could be attributed to AARO’s work focusing on anomalous aerial activities.

In the past, Dr. Kirkpatrick said, ‘in the long list of things that they need to be paying attention to, this one was at the bottom of that list.’ 

‘So, there is a gap — and no one fully, I think, appreciated until the last few years that that gap could potentially be exploited by somebody,’ he explained, ‘put a platform in, you know, [the] continental United States that nobody knew was there.’ 

But Dr. Kirkpatrick’s terrestrial approach during his 18-month tenure at AARO has not been without its critics — particularly over his very public disagreements with UFO whistleblower and fellow NRO veteran David Grusch. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick expanded his own criticisms of Grusch in his new interview with Bergen, describing him as someone who had ‘fallen to the influence’ of UFO ‘True Believers’ within the US military and private defense contractor Bigelow Aerospace, which investigated UFO cases on contract for the Pentagon from 2007 to 2012.

In a new op-ed published by Scientific American last week, Dr. Kirkpatrick further dismissed Grusch as one of several ‘conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers.” 

Grusch, a former high-ranking US intelligence official, has accused the US military and its private contractors of illegally hiding evidence of crashed UFOs, recovered ‘beings,’ and even UFO-related deaths, both under oath to Congress and in the press. 

For their part, these same UFO whistleblowers have accused Dr. Kirkpatrick of fostering an ‘atmosphere of disinterest,’ while others have suggested his superiors are secretly holding back AARO’s UFO investigation efforts. 

Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-trained lawyer who represented UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo in his complaint to the Pentagon’s Inspector General, said last year to DailyMail.com, ‘really knowledgeable’ UFO whistleblowers ‘never did trust Sean.’ 

Instead, ‘what they were doing is they were going straight through to the Senate Intelligence Committee,’ Sheehan said. 

(To be sure, however, some military UFO witnesses have also described ‘really positive’ experiences with the Dr. Kirkpatrick’s office.)

In portions of Dr. Kirkpatrick’s podcast interview — which appear to have been cut before air — the retired government scientist commented that AARO’s benefit to the US Intelligence Community (IC) was its latitude to conduct domestic surveillance.  

‘We filled a gap,’ Dr. Kirkpatrick said. ‘The intelligence community is prohibited by law from observing [the] continental United States, right?’ 

‘And so, the only people that actually have authority to do that, really, are FBI, Homeland Security, [and] a few other counter-intelligence elements across the IC,’ he noted, ‘but that’s pretty much it.’

‘No one fully, I think, appreciated until the last few years that that gap could potentially be exploited by somebody […] And that’s where you ended up with Chinese balloons,’ he said. 

DailyMail.com has reached out to Peter Bergen and a spokesperson for his podcast, in an effort to learn why these statements were deleted from the final version of the new interview. This article will be updated with their response.

The actor who played King Charles in The Crown almost committed a food crime when he ate asparagus with a knife and fork in one scene, an investigator for the show has revealed.

Speak with History EXTRA Annie Sulzberger magazine said Dominic West tried to reach for cutlery while tucking into vegetables in Highgrove during filming.

“Our wonderful etiquette advisor, David Rankin Hunt, stopped him and said, fancy people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks, they use their fingers,” she said.

“So we reset it and shot it again, while Dom picked up the asparagus with his fingers.

“It’s important to have so many voices sharing their experiences because I don’t think I could have looked up the way two posh people would have eaten asparagus in 1992.”

Major David Rankin-Hunt, who has worked for the Royal Family in two roles for 33 years, has advised the makers of The Crown on everything from satatory choices to gun salutes and umbrellas.

Speaking to Femail in 2015, an etiquette expert revealed another set of rules when it comes to eating the delicacy.

“When served as a starter, rather than as an accompanying vegetable, they are eaten with the hands and dipped in the hollandaise sauce,” explains William Hanson.

‘The British eat these with the left hand (leaving the right hand free of fat, ready to shake hands or pick up a wine glass, for example); There are cultures where eating with the left hand is not customary, in this case they may eat the asparagus with the right hand. (Not many people know the left hand rule these days.)

“You can double dip the sauce, as long as it’s your own portion.”

Dominic also recently admitted that he ‘understands’ the criticism of the show – and ‘acknowledges that there is discomfort about it’.

Speaking BBC5Live this week, the actor told host Nihal Arthanayake that he had “convinced himself that the royal family is public property and therefore fair game.”

“But I still feel uncomfortable at the thought of anyone playing fair or anyone’s private life being made public,” he added.

The actor also said he understands why ‘people think this is too close to actual events’ – with series of six of the show covering both the death of Princess Diana and the late queen’s funeral planning.

“The sadness is still so, so real,” he continued. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot, I still do.

‘Ultimately you have to put your trust in Peter’s hands and he is a proven great playwright.’

Dominic also explained that he found it difficult to play the monarch as “extremely emotional” this season.

The Netflix star also claimed earlier this week that Charles was judged too harshly when Diana died.

He believes history should be kinder to the current king, who he says has “made every mistake.”

Dominic, previously best known for his role as Jimmy McNulty in The Wire, believes Charles was seen as a ‘bad guy’ after his ex-wife died with Dodi Fayed on the night of August 30.

In season six, which premiered last month and released its final episodes last week, Charles breaks down in tears when he learns of his ex-wife’s death in Paris. He then defied his mother and insisted that the royal plane be sent to France to collect her coffin, sobbing loudly when he first saw her body at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.

Dominic said: ‘You do feel sympathy for him. I think, especially around Diana’s death, he was the villain of the piece. And I think that now that we’ve had 25 years of hindsight to look back on, we might consider that – I’ve certainly judged that – as a little bit harsh on him.”

Speak with The Hollywood Reporter, he revealed, “I fight for him like you do as an actor for any character, except maybe the most villainous one. Inevitably you try to get into the mind of your character and that requires some kind of sense of common humanity and empathy.’

He said he has grown to love playing Charles on the show, and admits he is sad to see the role end.

In an interview with City and country he said, ‘I miss him. I still read all the news articles about him. I love him. I feel real affection for him, which I didn’t really feel before,” adding, “He’s likeable, but also an interesting character.”

He referred to recent events, such as Charles’ anger when his pen stopped working after the Queen died.

“It’s hard not to bring the current man into the historical man, or even the real man into Peter Morgan’s version of him. But it was a wonderful gift to have all that coronation stuff and the pen – the irritation about the pen. You don’t get much insight into what’s going on behind the public persona. So I eagerly devoured all those moments. They really are gold dust for an actor.”

He added: “He has made every mistake. He’s been through it all, it’s as bad as it gets. And it’s grilled as hard as it could be. And so I imagine, as with so much in his life, that there is a certain determination now that he is king. I think there is some relief, probably, that he is no longer allowed to be political or outspoken.”

He added: “He landed on his feet – or with a crown on his head, more accurately.”

The latest series of The Crown has proven controversial and received mixed reviews, from its portrayal of Diana’s death to Charles’ marriage to Camilla and the Queen’s existential crisis over the future of the monarchy.

There are also a series of bizarre dream sequences in which senior royals, including the Queen and Charles, speak to the late princess, played by Elizabeth Debicki, after her death.

Harry’s shame about wearing a Nazi uniform to a party has been gleefully recreated by Netflix in the very last episode of The Crown.