Tim Phillips

Tim Phillips is a former Lieutenant Colonel (US Army, retired) and Senior National Intelligence Service executive whose federal career spanned forty-five years across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. He was appointed to the Senior National Intelligence Service in 2006, with senior roles in technical intelligence and special access programmes prior to AARO.

Phillips joined the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in October 2023 as Deputy Director under first AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick. He served as Acting Director following Kirkpatrick's December 2023 departure and continued in the Deputy Director role under incoming Director Jon Kosloski from August 2024.

In May 2025 Phillips began a public-interview campaign in which he stated he was "no longer under the tyranny of the DoD's Public Affairs Office." Over the following weeks he gave on-record interviews to the New York Post, Liberation Times (Christopher Sharp), the Weaponized podcast (Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp), and other outlets. On 10 July 2025 ODNI counter-intelligence ordered him to cease all interviews without explicit DoD Public Affairs approval. Eight days later, on 18 July 2025, ODNI Human Resources terminated his federal employment effective immediately, forcing him into early retirement. No reason was given and no appeal was permitted.

The Phillips interview series, particularly the exclusive with Christopher Sharp at Liberation Times, produced the most consequential post-AARO disclosure on record from a former senior official. Phillips confirmed that AARO had detected UAPs operating in space, with some of those objects demonstrating what he termed "signature management" behaviour, including actively avoiding detection over sensitive US military locations. He confirmed AARO had established a formal collaboration with US Space Force and US Space Command to capture and analyse that data going forward.

Phillips further confirmed that AARO had identified 40 to 50 cases showing "utterly bizarre" capabilities including instantaneous acceleration, right-angle turns, and manoeuvres that the best aerospace engineers consulted by the office could not explain through any known physics or human-engineered system. He stated AARO had "conclusively proved" these cases were neither US adversary technology nor US or allied platforms. Despite this, the office had not released a single video of these unexplained cases to the public.

Phillips also confirmed AARO had contacted Glenn Gaffney, former Director of Science and Technology at the CIA, in connection with sworn congressional testimony from David Grusch alleging a blocked transfer of non-human-intelligence technology. Phillips refused to characterise the objects he was describing as non-human or extraterrestrial, a framing Sharp described as "describing a dog without calling it a dog."