Sean Michael Kirkpatrick (born 1967/1968)[4] is an American laser and materials physicist who served as the first director of the United States Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

[7][8][9] In 1986, he was invited as a teenager to the inaugural High School Honors Research Program, sponsored by the United States Department of Energy, to study at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 2003, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he first served as a program manager assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office from 2003 to 2005, and then as a staff scientist for the Directorate of Science and Technology from 2005 to 2007.

[13] In March 2023, Kirkpatrick and Avi Loeb released a manuscript on the physical constraints of hypothetical alien spaceships existing in the solar system.

[24] In January 2024, Kirkpatrick published an op-ed in Scientific American, stating that he had found no evidence of aliens as director of AARO, and that the allegations of a coverup of UFOs by the US government "derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology.