According to a report draft shared on Tuesday, Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has noted that there is a possibility that extraterrestrial motherships and smaller probes could be visiting planets in our solar system.

Kirkpatrick, who previously served as the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center, co-authored the report with Abraham Loeb, the chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department.

The report suggests that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, which is similar to NASA missions. The AARO was established to investigate unidentified "objects of interest" around military installations, according to a Pentagon press release.

Loeb gained notoriety when he proposed that our galaxy had been traversed by its first visitor from outer space in October 2017. At that time, the PanSTARRS telescope in Hawaii detected an object moving through our solar system at a speed that caused some scientists to suggest it was from another galaxy.

Scientists dubbed the object "Oumuamua," the Hawaiian term for "scout," which Kirkpatrick and Loeb offer in their research paper as an example of a possible mothership with probe capabilities.