Executive Summary
Legislative action concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena (or UAP) initiated by the US Congress from 2020 to the present responds to a challenge that may be among the greatest and most complex faced by the United States since its dawning with the Declaration of Independence and through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression, WWII, the civil rights era, and the Vietnam War. There may not be social consensus within government, academia, and the media about whether some UAP are indeed nonanthropogenic vehicles, but evidence from sources as diverse as US government intelligence, allied foreign government assessments, scientific analyses, aviator and ground witness reports, and public record testimony strongly favor that interpretation. Should public certainty about the UAP presence be attained, Congress’s legislative efforts to date will pale in comparison with those that will inevitably follow.
It might therefore seem that continued engagements with UAP by Congress will be sufficient to enable it to reckon in broad fashion with the myriad national security, geopolitical, scientific, economic, and social challenges raised by that presence. Yet recent federal UAP legislation reveals that Congress’s concern is less with UAP vehicles themselves than the prospect that components of the US Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and other executive branch departments and agencies have known since the 1940s or 1950s of the existence of the vehicles and taken it seriously enough to initiate and maintain related classified intelligence and research programs that were almost entirely concealed from Congress—and certainly, in that case, never made known to the American people.
Concern with that possibility runs through federal UAP legislation and is most pronounced in the UAP Disclosure Act, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2024 sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Michael Rounds that seeks to establish an elite panel under the authority of the President to review for potential declassification all extant government records on UAP, any such “technologies of unknown origin” retrieved by the government or its defense contractors, and biological evidence of related “nonhuman intelligences” (NHI). There is very little in the Disclosure Act to indicate that Schumer, Rounds, and their cosponsors Senators Marco Rubio and Kirsten Gillibrand deem such records to be conjectural, and 2022 legislation that established a process by which members of the Intelligence Community can legally disclose information to Congress invokes with similar confidence programs to detect, track, retrieve, and reverse engineer UAP vehicles as well as efforts to conceal them through disinformation. Both these and several other expressions of interest from Congress about such programs strongly indicate that the challenge of UAP for the US government is due not only to the vehicles themselves, but also to the executive branch’s extension of secrecy about UAP and its activities to the legislative branch.
In other words, that legislation concerning that possibility has been passed at all implies that the problem raised for the federal government by UAP is far greater than all but a few of the most informed public commentators have dared to acknowledge. In essence, the likely terrestrial presence of UAP and, at least by proxy, their nonhuman designers and operators, holds almost unfathomable existential implications for Americans and humanity and therefore requires the informed participation of Congress in all pertinent US government decisions and policy. If the texts of the UAP Disclosure Act and related legislation are accurate, however, in their assertions that the executive branch has imposed blanket secrecy—what might be called “hyperclassification”—over apparently decades-old government UAP knowledge and activities, then Congress has been entirely excluded from decision-making and governance of these. As much as some in government might believe that this could be justified due to the potential national and global security threat posed by UAP, it would prevent Congress from carrying out its constitutionally prescribed responsibilities of legislating and exercising oversight over possible defense, intelligence, scientific, and other federal government activities concerning the vehicles. Put in more fulsome terms, the almost exclusive purview that the executive branch seems to enjoy over UAP affairs infringes on the legislative branch to such an extent that it may have rendered the American system of separate powers inoperative with respect to one of the most important issues government has faced and thereby fomented a latent constitutional crisis—conditions that would also hinder the government’s ability to reckon with the very matter that UAP secrecy presumably would have been intended to help address in the first place.
Should this indeed be true, it urgently calls for a forceful response from Congress, a radical public reassertion of its full role in the US government, as well as legislation powerful enough to ballast the executive branch—perhaps the presidency included—and thereby restore balance. The present text (which the author is publishing as a white paper rather than as an academic article for reasons of expediency) lays out a summary case for why it is highly likely that the executive branch indeed harms Congress with UAP secrecy and proposes a suite of remedies. These are as follows:
Passage of the UAP Disclosure Act. As the current draft language of this legislation includes provisions for the establishment of a board of retired government officials that would gather and review on behalf of the President classified records concerning UAP, subpoena witnesses and material evidence by which the reality of classified government UAP activities and programs might be verified, and propose specific UAP records for declassification.
A Congressional Inquiry into Executive Branch UAP Secrecy, Supported by an Intelligence Community Inspectors General Forum Review. As the Disclosure Act’s review panel would execute its work over a five-year period and meet with success only if backed with the full support and power of the President, an additional measure is needed: a congressional investigation into UAP secrecy, modeled on the Church Committee, that would seek to determine which government entities have knowledge of and taken action regarding UAP and assesses the damage done to Congress and the US system of separate powers by secrecy. The Intelligence Community Inspectors General Forum, a forum by which the Inspectors Generals of all intelligence agencies and components coordinate their work, should also conduct a review of any potential classified federal government UAP activities and programs in preparation of and support of the congressional inquiry.
Crafting and Passage of a Congressional UAP Governance Act. The passage of legislation establishing that Congress has the responsibility and power to legislate over matters concerning UAP, and that it understands these to be a priority of such consequence as to demand the involvement of all branches of the federal government and all relevant federal agencies, rather than only the DoD, DoE, and agencies within the IC. By declaring that Congress and the rest of the federal government must play a role in UAP affairs, the legislation would make it untenable for any executive branch element or component to maintain blanket or extreme classification over fundamental facts about UAP. And for the legislative branch to execute its responsibilities over UAP, Congress and its various committees would be entitled to receive information on UAP from the executive. This legislation could also contain a declassification provision that would expedite the release of UAP information to the public.
Short of a course of action involving these or equally forceful measures, Congress will remain in a subservient and inconsequential position vis-à-vis the executive branch with respect to UAP and thereby leave a democratic system already suffering several other ills in a damaged state. Even worse, UAP secrecy could then continue unimpeded, compounding the dangers and lost opportunities that Americans may already face on account of their collective ignorance about the UAP presence.
As the current government discourse about UAP is split between congressional calls for transparency and executive branch silence and denial, this paper also makes a case for the high likelihood of US government UAP secrecy before discussing the provisions by which it might be addressed. This case for the reality of secrecy is made in four steps, each of which deals with a specific pool of historical evidence and culminates in a key finding.
1.Although the AARO’s 2024 report says otherwise, examination of the US government’s extant publicly available data suffices to show that it is all but certain that some UAP are nonanthropogenic vehicles. Both US Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt’s account of the UAP reports received by the service’s Project Blue Book and analyses of these by astronomer J. Allen Hynek most clearly shows this, and it is reinforced by the work of other pioneering scientists and researchers, including Coral Lorenzen, James McDonald, and Jacques Vallée.
2. Several pools of historical data, including declassified US Air Force, CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other government records, additionally show that some components of the DoD, the Intelligence Community, and the Atomic Energy Commission / DoE as well as some National Security Council members and staff are highly likely to have known that some UAP are nonanthropogenic vehicles. The most significant data are records and corroborating testimony of UAP events that occurred from the 1940s through the 1970s at US Air Force bases and other federal government facilities housing nuclear weapons and nuclear energy research programs. Due to the extreme value for national security of these areas, those UAP events would inevitably have been made known to the uppermost tier of senior executive branch leadership.
3. There is a high likelihood that the executive branch has maintained excessive secrecy about its knowledge of UAP vehicles and activities and programs that may concern them. This is obvious from congressional legislation asserting this to be the case, but it is strongly attested to by historical events, such as the meeting of the CIA-convened Robertson Panel, CIA and DoD records and testimony, and the assessments of foreign governments.
4. It is likely that the executive branch has undertaken efforts to retrieve and reverse engineer crashed UAP vehicles and successfully cloaked these in secrecy. As unbelievable as that may seem, it is attested to by congressional UAP legislation, the public statements and action of several former cabinet-level officials and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a recent Intelligence Community whistleblower, and current US senators.