From a story on politico.com by Lara Seligman headlined “Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings”:

The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth.

In a draft paper dated March 7, Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be “probes” from an extraterrestrial “parent craft.”