What's happening on the Hill?
January 23, 2025: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls on President Trump to declassify UFO documents.
Schumer advocated for a UAP Transparency bill on the floor of Congress in December 2023, stating:
"The United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAP over many decades, but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and additionally it breeds mistrust. We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAP has also been withheld from Congress, which, if true, is in violation of the laws requiring full notification to the Legislative Branch, especially as it relates to the four Congressional Leaders, the Defense Committees, and the Intelligence Committee."
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) have been big news in Washington, especially since 2017.
The last few years have been exciting, especially due to the landmark 2017 New York Times article, which detailed a secret internal government program that investigated and audited the government's knowledge, reporting, and involvement with UFOs. Of note was the heavy involvement of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Also of note in the article was the confirmation and release of the ‘FLIR’ and the ‘GIMBAL’ videos taken by military officials. These videos were later confirmed by the Pentagon to be authentic videos taken by Naval aviators. Read here, for example, for more details.
Public testimonies of the pilots involved indicate that the surrounding events were anomalous and inconsistent with natural phenomena or human technology. See, for example, [1,2,3,4] for testimonies regarding the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter off the coast of San Diego, accompanied by 'FLIR'. See e.g. [5,6] regarding the 2013-2015 encounters off Virginia Beach, accompanied by 'GIMBAL'. See also [7,8] for a few measured summaries of some of the developments.
In the rest of this drop-down section, we give a summary of some of the key events of the last several years. We'll leave more detailed histories beyond the last few years and more speculative claims to other sections.
The May 2022 House Intelligence Committee hearing was the first Congressional UFO hearing in over 50 years.
The backdrop of this hearing was various meetings, briefings, and Select Committees in Congress over the previous years. The hearing was officially a follow-up to a 2021 Preliminary Assessment released by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The Assessment was compiled by the UAP Task Force, which was started and led by the Navy in 2020 to investigate incursions by UAP reported by Naval and other aviators and then report them to the public and Congress. The Assessment noted 144 UAP reports, including 80 involving observations by multiple sensors (and 11 'near-misses').
In the hearing, Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott Bray, the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, were the key witnesses. The purpose of the hearing was to focus on the national security risks posed by UAP, rather than to investigate extraterrestrial life. The witnesses acknowledged the UAP incidents and confirmed that they could not be explained by any conventional means like natural phenomena or US or adversarial technologies.
There were two additional landmark House Oversight Committee hearings, in July 2023 and November 2024.
In the first hearing, Navy fighter pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor testified about their squadrons' detections and sightings of UAP. Intelligence Officer David Grusch testified about his role in internal investigations of government UFO programs, and in particular of conversations with people directly involved in these programs.
In the second hearing, Intelligence Officer Lue Elizondo testified about his internal role in investigating UAP. Navy Admiral Tim Gallaudet testified about his experience with footage and reporting of UAP in the Navy. Journalist Michael Shellenberger and former NASA Official Michael Gold also gave testimonies. Sydney Morrison '25 was in attendance, thanks to the House Oversight Committee staff's generous support of students.
(Nov. 2024) Photo: The New Paradigm Institute
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sponsored and passed a UAP Amendment to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
This was a landmark in establishing study, reporting, and de-stigmatization of UAP across the government as well as establishing and fortifying Congressional oversight on the issue. It established the creation of a permanent UAP office, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which replaced previous temporary organizations. The purpose of AARO and the bill at large were to increase funding, interagency coordination, national security focus, and transparency regarding UAP. Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ruben Gallego were key advocates of the bill and the movement within Congress surrounding it.
For the past two years, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sponsored bills with Sen. Mike Rounds regarding government transparency on UAP. See the 2023 and 2024 versions.
The Schumer-Rounds legislation was modeled after the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It would have greatly broadened the transparency and oversight requirements and given more Congressional power to allow for investigation into efforts, knowledge, and historical accounts within the government of UAP. This would have included public reporting and interagency collaboration regarding UAP.
Of note were terms and phrases like 'Legacy Programs', 'Incursions of UAP into military airspace', 'Non-Human Intelligence' which were defined in the context of the bill. It also would have mandated historical reviews for any potential 'reverse engineering programs' and secretive, compartmentalized government programs beyond oversight .
The bill was killed in committee two years in a row, mostly by Congressmen with ties to the military and defense industry.
The AARO office held hearings in May 2023 and November 2024 giving some summaries of the UAP incidents they've collected.
This included a summary of common traits (flight characteristics, morphologies, areas of reporting, kinds of sensor data) of UAP reports collected by AARO.
In March 2024, AARO released a historical review which concluded there was ... "no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology" nor evidence for programs "reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology" ... HOWEVER ...
The AARO review was heavily criticized for basic factual errors, omissions, and a lack of clarity in its investigative procedure. The most glaring omissions were the lack of mention of the 2004 Nimitz incident or the 2013-2015 Virginia Beach incursions which were the subject of the Congressional Hearing the previous summer. There were also basic errors as far as dates and names in the early history of UFO sightings and related USG programs investigating them from the 1940s-1960s. See this article by Chris Mellon and this tweet by Robert Powell for more detailed criticisms of the review.
Also noteworthy were articles by the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and many others who repeated the AARO office conclusions without scrutiny or journalistic oversight into the review.
US Military History of UFOs since 1947
One could argue that UFOs have been seen for all of human history. We won't do that here.
In modern history, for example, there were the airship craze of the 1890s, foo fighters seen by Allied pilots in WWII, and ghost rockets seen by the Swedish Army in 1946.
Here, we give a brief account including the main points of US Military's involvement in the phenomenon. See here for a more detailed chronology.
The modern era of military and public interest in UFOs started in 1947, the 'Summer of the Saucer'.
The sightings of 'flying saucers' and unexplainably moving lights in the sky by Kenneth Arnold in June 1947 made headlines within weeks when they were corroborated by sightings in the public and investigated by the military. These headlines gave way to waves of UFO sightings and reports across the country, with the saucer craze sweeping the nation.
In July 1947, weeks after the Arnold headlines, was the famous Roswell crash incident involving Roswell Army Air Field, the only base in the world at the time with a nuclear-bomber-ready air unit. There, a crashed object was recovered on a local rancher's farm. The Army issued a press release claiming they recovered a crashed alien spacecraft, briefly sparking a huge national story until the next day when relevant Army officer Jesse Marcel retracted the claim, insisting he and the crew mistakenly identified a weather balloon. (Later in 1978, Marcel went back on his retraction and stated that it indeed was a flying saucer and that the balloon story was a cover-up. See here for a good account of the mystery surrounding the incident.)
The national craze subsided after the summer, but UFOs remained a hot topic in the decades that followed, continuing into today. July 1947 was also a critical time in the reorganization of the structure of our military and intelligence apparatus, with the National Security Act of 1947 reorganizing the Army, Navy, and then-newly-formed Air Force and creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) among a host of other reforms.
Notably, shortly after that summer, in September 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining issued an internal memo (reported on almost a decade later in 1956) to Brigadier General George Schulgen of the Army Air Forces, stating:
“It is the opinion that the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious ... The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted … lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.”
Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first CIA director and one of the first leaders of American centralized intelligence, became a board member of the civilian UFO organization NICAP. In fact, Donald Keyhoe (a NICAP director and Naval Academy classmate of Hillenkoetter) rumored that he wanted public disclosure of UFO information. Hillenkoetter notably said in a 1960 New York Times Article:
"Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense."
In 1948, the Air Force initiated studies within the military of the nature and national security responses needed for UFOs.
The first effort was Project Sign, which evolved into Project Grudge before mostly ending in 1949. The conclusions of these projects were that any sightings could not be attributed to any foreign adversary and did not seem to pose any national security threat. In the backdrop of the emerging Cold War, the main conclusion reached was that the public craze and interest in the topic could be exploited by a foreign power to create internal panic. As such, the position of the office was to publicly disparage UFO sightings as misidentifications or stories by crazed individuals, even though a large percentage of the sightings they catalogued could not be explained.
1951-52 was a big period for UFOs, including major sightings by the public over Texas and over Washington D.C., the latter of which involved fighter jets scrambled to intercept the objects. In March 1952, with the creation of Project Blue Book, the Air Force restructured their UFO reporting mechanisms due to frustration by senior officials about the state of the investigations. The goal was to reduce the stigma associated with mysterious sightings and to collect and corroborate reports from members of the public and military. Also of note was the Robertson Panel in 1952 which shifted the focus of government UFO investigations to public education and debunking efforts.
The leader of these early efforts, Edward Ruppelt, was disheartened by the apathy, confusion, and lack of rigor surrounding the topic in the Air Force investigations. His 1956 book claimed the existence of a report (still unverified to this day) an extraterrestrial hypothesis as an 'Estimate of the Situation' regarding UFOs. Notably, he published an addendum to the book in 1960 reversing and claiming that UFOs are not real, shortly before his sudden death in 1960.
In the following years, the topic gained more intrigue in popular culture. At the same time civilian non-profit groups such as NICAP and APRO ran their own investigations and cataloguing of reports.
Official government investigations into UFOs continued until they were largely terminated in 1969.
In that year, the Condon Report was released, which was commissioned by the Air Force to investigate Project Blue Book, NICAP, and APRO records. The Report gave explanations to many of the sightings investigated, although admitted there was a nontrivial percentage that had no conventional explanation. The conclusions of the report can be summarized by the statement of Condon:
"Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby."
The report was broadly lauded and accepted by the media, having a huge impact on public perception of UFOs within both government and scientific communities. It led to the termination of Project Blue Book and of governmental investigations into UFOs. It led to decreased belief in UFOs across academic communities and the public, with membership in organizations like NICAP plummeting afterwards.
However there were many critics, most notably the astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who had been a scientific consultant with Air Force UFO investigations since the Project Sign days and deeply involved in Project Blue Book. He wrote that the report was biased and had no basis to settle the UFO question since it "avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined." Hynek was a notable figure because he started out skeptical in the early days of UFO investigations. However, he changed his opinions over the following years, particularly noting the Air Force's lack of openness and willingness to investigate the matter seriously.
While public interest, fascination, sightings, reporting, and organization around UFOs continued, the topic was largely viewed as a crank subject by the government and media until the recent developments.
Statements about UFOs by Presidents
Gerald Ford, while a Representative in Congress in 1966, pushed for investigations into UFO sightings in his home state of Michigan. He lambasted J. Allen Hynek's remarks that the sightings may have been 'swamp gas'.
Jimmy Carter had a UFO sighting. While Governor of Georgia in 1973, he reported it to NICAP and to the International UFO Bureau. While on the campaign trail, he made statements that he took the UFO issue seriously and would push for government transparency on the issue, although he never followed through. He may have been briefed on the matter and directed the NSA and CIA to investigate it.
Ronald Reagan saw a UFO in 1974. While president, he once said about humanity: “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”
Bill Clinton was interested in UFOs and recently expressed this publicly. His Chief of Staff, John Podesta, pushed for some basic investigations into UFOs during the Clinton Administration. Podesta was also an adviser to Obama and Chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign. During her 2016 campaign, Clinton announced she would be pro-transparency on UFOs. In fact, during her campaign, Podesta was actively communicating about UFOs: the emails are even on WikiLeaks. (This saga includes Blink 182 guitarist Tom DeLonge, who played a role for some time in organizing and funding UFO media efforts.) Podesta later stated that he regretted not pushing harder for disclosure during the Obama administration.
Barack Obama said “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
Joe Biden responded to the February 2023 shootdowns of the Chinese balloon and 3 unidentified (and still unexplained) objects over Alaska, Lake Huron, and Canada, promising "safer and more secure skies".
Donald Trump said he knows "very interesting" things about Roswell and that he'll "have to think about" declassifying them. He also said "I have met with pilots… Am I a believer? No, I can't say I am. But I have met with people, serious people, that say there are some really strange things flying around out there… People that are very smart and very solid have said they believe that something is out there." In other news, Donald Trump Jr. has been discussing UFOs on his Triggered Podcast...
Relevant Media
The Phenomenon (2020) by James Fox and Marc Barasch '71 is a movie containing archival footage and interviews with witness, senior government officials, and military officials. It also includes many historical details, mass sightings, Zimbabwe, and more.
Ariel Phenomenon (2022) by Randall Nickerson investigates the mass sighting by dozens of children at a boarding school in Zimbabwe in the 1990s. Includes interviews from when they were children about the experience and confirming the same stories with interviews from decades later, reuniting after they'd moved all around the world.
Age of Disclosure (2025) by Dan Farah is an upcoming film featuring 34 senior U.S. Government insiders that reveals an 80 year cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and a secret war amongst major nations to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin.
Cosmosis: UFOs & A New Reality (2024) by Jay Christopher King features notable current figures in ufology (such as Representative Tim Burchett and whistleblower David Grusch) in a moving Apple TV documentary who discuss the ontological shock of UFOs.
Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation (2019-2020) discusses the modern UFO disclosure movement from the vantage point of military sightings and history involving the government. It features important figures in the disclosure movement such as intelligence official Luis Elizondo and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon.
UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973 (2002) by Richard Dolan is a detailed chronology of the national security dimensions of the UFO phenomenon from 1941 to the present. It includes many details of specific UFO encounters at military installations and attempts by various national security and military agencies to study the phenomenon, deal with public interest, and cover up their investigations and activities. There are many, many references to the literature and primary sources.
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) by John Mack was based on the sessions and interviews of abduction victims with Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Psychology Professor John Mack. He was initially skeptical of the abduction claims and interested from an academic and theraputic point-of-view. Through his sessions, he came to the conclusion that abduction victims behaved like regular people responding to traumatic incidents that they couldn't share without ridicule. His work on abduction and encounter victims was the subject of an intense fight over academic freedom at Harvard.
UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites (2008) by Robert Hastings discusses in detail famous UFO encounters at nuclear missile sites during the Cold War.
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) by Edward Ruppelt was an early meticulous account written by the early leader of Air Force UFO investigations.
The 2001 National Press Club conference on UFOs, set up by controversial ufologist Steven Greer, organized government officials and airline pilots to speak about their experiences.
This 1999 interview with astronaut Gordon Cooper goes over first- and second-hand claims and stories of UFO encounters in the 1950s, while he was an Air Force fighter pilot.
[ ... more to come ... ]
More Resources
UAP Guide is a guide to UAP/UFOs you can share with friends, including a collection of credible documents and statements by relevant officials.
The Black Vault is a repository of declassified government documents, including about UFOs. Their owner John Greenewald vigorously makes Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and consistently publishes new documents obtained through FOIA.
Archives of the Impossible is part of Rice University's Woodson Research Center that has been collecting and professionally archiving materials related to paranormal currents in American history, including about UFOs.
NUFOHRC (National UFO Historical Records Center) is a nonprofit that maintains various historical records of UFOs, including the NICAP and APRO records and many others that have yet to be digitized.
AARO (All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) is a government organization created by Congress and tasked with collecting and reporting on UAP incidents in the military.
The Sol Foundation is a UAP-focused foundation promoting research and scholarly discussion, led by Stanford biologist Gary Nolan and anthropologist Peter Skafish. They make policy recommendations and have written white papers about various aspects about the phenomenon. See this paper for a thorough historical accounting of government secrecy regarding UAP, including both primary sources and analysis based on off-the-record conversations with high-ranking officials. Of note is their counsel Charles McCullough, who was the first Inspector General of the US Intelligence Community, and who also served as the counsel for whistleblower David Grusch.
AIAA UAP is an aerospace outreach organization run through the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. See their policy recommendations and podcast by Ryan Graves, who is their Chair and fighter pilot and witness at the July 2023 Congressional Hearing. Graves also runs Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is a non-profit sister organization focused on UAP advocacy that has a reporting system for civilian and military pilots to report their UAP experiences.
New Paradigm Institute is a UAP law and policy initiative led by constitutional scholar and public interest lawyer Danny Sheehan. They create consistent analysis of and reactions to disclosure news, collect resources for further learning, and facilitate activism and organization regarding UAP.
The Visible College is a collective of academics and scholars promoting UAP research. They have resources and lectures and organize academics around the issue.
The Galileo Project is a Harvard-based UAP research initiative led by theoretical physicist Avi Loeb aiming to search for physical objects, and not electromagnetic signals, associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment.
UAP Caucus is an independent, community-driven platform about UAP policy. See their guides for resources to learn and explore.
UAP Disclosure Fund is a nonpartisan nonprofit supporting UAP legislation, protecting whistleblowers, and raising public awareness for greater transparency. See their policy papers and recommendations.
UAP Med is a a non-profit organization for healthcare professionals which provides resources and guidance to address the variety of health effects associated with UAP exposures, and advocates for a reduction in stigma and removal of barriers to patient care and support.
The Debrief is a news site focusing on science, defense, and tech journalism. They broke the story about whistleblower David Grusch. See also their deep dive into government secrecy and classification systems (especially involving the Department of Energy) developed during the Cold War in relation to nuclear security, which may be relevant to the government's ability to keep UFOs a secret.
News Nation is a TV Channel that covers current events. They extensively cover UAP, led by investigative journalist Ross Coulthart. See his groundbreaking interview with David Grusch.
Ask a Pol is an on-the-ground journalism effort directly asking politicians in the Capitol their thoughts on various issues, including about UAP.
Weaponized is a podcast by journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp that covers current events, breaks stories, and generally discusses the UFO topic.
Public is a news site by journalist Michael Shellenberger, who testified at the November 2024 hearing. He broke the story in October 2024 about "Immaculate Constellation", an Unacknowledged Special Access Program to study UAP in the Pentagon whose existence was alleged by whistleblowers.
Liberation Times is a news site by journalist Christopher Sharp mostly focused on UAP. For example, Sharp broke a story about the CIA's "Office of Global Access", a cryptic office that whistleblowers allege was involved with crash retrievals of UFOs.
r/UFOs is a subreddit where you can find the latest news. Apply a discerning filter.
[ ... more to come ... ]
