CIA and the UFO question is John Kiriakou’s consistent framing that unidentified craft and alien technology are a Pentagon matter, not a CIA one. On his first day he asked his boss “where are the aliens?”; the boss laughed that it was everybody’s first question, but “that’s all at the Pentagon.”[1] Kiriakou adds that nearly every one of his former fighter-pilot friends — flying F-16s, F-18s and F-35s — “has seen something,” sometimes a ship emerging from the ocean, “completely inexplicable.”[2] The CIA, he stresses, recruits spies and steals secrets; it is “not beaming waves at your head.”[3]
He has repeated the same first-day anecdote and its answer in numerous other interviews. His question was always some version of “Where are the UFOs?” or “So, where are the aliens?”, and the answer was always the same: everyone asks that on their first day, and “there’s nothing in the system” — all such information sits at the Pentagon.[4][5] He says he agrees with a retired CIA officer’s claim that the Pentagon, not the CIA, holds all UFO-related information.[6] He recalls that when he started at the CIA the agency was still transitioning from typewriters to computers, with files kept in floor-to-ceiling rotating card files on 5-by-8 cards — and found nothing indicating the CIA held UFO information outside special compartmented channels.[7] Kiriakou also says that within the CIA, UFO matters were always understood to be a Department of Defense issue, joking that the only things in the Langley basement are “the gym, the boiler room, and the supply room.”[8] A retired CIA officer separately told him the agency once built an internal, Wikipedia-like intranet system, and that on the day it launched the number one search term was “UFOs and extraterrestrials.”[4] He says the CIA would never lead a project to reverse-engineer a crashed UFO — DARPA would take the lead, bringing in the CIA and other, probably DOD, agencies to assist.[9]
Kiriakou’s own sighting (Jay Dyer)
John Kiriakou recounts that at 17, driving through Pennsylvania Amish country with his father, they watched a silent orange trapezoid “in the shape of a saucer” hover 1,500 feet up, then shoot off “at a fantastic speed that defied the laws of physics.” His father refused to report it — “people are going to think we’re insane.”[10][11][12][13][14] In a separate telling he places the family home in New Castle, Pennsylvania, with the restaurant they were driving to in nearby Sharon.[12] Years later a cousin, an F-15 pilot, told him Air Force pilots “see stuff like that all the time,” sometimes “coming up out of the water off the coast of Norfolk” — filing a form the Pentagon never answers.[15][16][17]
Kiriakou also says he personally saw a UFO alongside his father, an elementary school principal of 44 years, describing an object that flew in a way defying the laws of gravity.[18] He separately recounts that a Pentagon-frequenting F-14 pilot, at his uncle’s Alexandria, Virginia restaurant, told him he once watched an unidentified craft dive into the ocean and shoot back out about ten seconds later.[19] He also cites Harvard physicist Avi Loeb, who led an undersea expedition off Papua New Guinea and retrieved BB-sized metal fragments whose composition, Loeb says, does not match any known Earth alloy.[20]