By Michael and James Hall—authors of the popular The Sword of Damocles: Our Nuclear Age, on Audible, Kindle and Amazon books.
We are currently putting the finishing touches on our book, Heaven and Earth: Conscious Reality. The work examines human, artificial, and non-human intelligence in relation to conscious behavior, including six chapters focused on NHI/UAP. This updated draft of Chapter 19—originally previewed here—integrates newly surfaced details, such as disclosures from Jay Stratton’s latest book. While many questions and competing narratives persist, the investigation moves forward.
—Jay Stratton, first director of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) :
“I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human craft and non-human beings.”
After Luis Elizondo left the Pentagon in October 2017, the investigation of UAP continued informally inside the Defense Department, kept alive above all by John “Jay” Stratton. This chapter follows the story from that point to the autumn of 2026. It is the most crowded period of all: in less than nine years the government created three successive UAP offices, Congress held six public hearings, whistleblowers testified under oath, and a president ordered the release of the government’s UFO files.
The three offices can be confusing, because each replaced the one before it and the acronyms are similar. In brief:
• UAPTF – the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (August 2020–November 2021), run by the Navy and led by Jay Stratton.
• AOIMSG – the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (November 2021–July 2022), a short-lived successor.
• AARO – the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (July 2022 to the present), which took over AOIMSG’s work and broadened it to the sea, space, and beyond.
Timeline at a Glance: Chapter Nineteen
Date
Event
2018
Stratton sets up an office to handle congressional interest
2019
Navy issues new UAP reporting guidelines; July drone swarm off California
April 27, 2020
Pentagon officially releases the three Navy videos
August 4, 2020
UAP Task Force established, with Stratton as director
December 27, 2020
Congress orders a UAP report within 180 days
June 25, 2021
ODNI’s Preliminary Assessment is released
November 2021
Task Force replaced by AOIMSG
Early 2022
Stratton retires
May 17, 2022
First public congressional UAP hearing in more than fifty years
July 2022
AOIMSG becomes AARO
June–July 2023
David Grusch goes public and testifies before Congress
December 2023
Seventeen nights of drone incursions at Langley Air Force Base
2024
AARO historical report; House and Senate hearings; New Jersey drones
2025
Congressional roundtable; Yemen “orb” video; European drone wave; The Age of Disclosure
February 19, 2026
President Trump orders the release of UFO files
May 8, 2026
PURSUE website launches
July 2026
House adopts the UAP Disclosure Act; NDA waiver for witnesses
October 13, 2026
Stratton’s memoir, Out of the Shadows, is published
2017–2019: Stratton Carries the Thread
The New York Times story of December 2017 set off a surge of congressional interest, and Stratton’s superiors assigned him to handle engagement with lawmakers and oversight committees.[1] By 2018 he had set up an internal office that coordinated with congressional and interagency stakeholders, laying the groundwork for what would become the UAP Task Force. According to whistleblower accounts and Stratton’s own statements, these interim efforts focused on collecting data and technical analysis but were limited by lack of access to classified programs that may have held deeper answers. The arrangement worked hand in hand with Elizondo’s push from outside government, which used public and legislative pressure to make the Pentagon take UAP seriously.
Stratton was well suited to the job. As described in Chapter Seventeen, he had been involved since 2005 and had worked across AAWSAP and AATIP, and in 2018 he entered the Senior Executive Service. That depth gave the effort continuity and expertise—though, by his own later account, even he found certain compartments closed to him, echoing Elizondo’s famous complaint. In 2019, by Stratton’s account, a senior friend in Nevada warned him that powerful people were angry about his inquiries, a warning he took as a threat to his safety.[2]
Stratton is widely credited with popularizing “Unidentified Aerial (later Anomalous) Phenomena” in place of “UFO,” giving the subject a more modern and less stigmatized name. Britain’s Ministry of Defence had used the term since the 1980s, but its adoption by US agencies gave the conversation a professional tone. His naval intelligence background matters too. The Office of Naval Intelligence—America’s oldest intelligence service, founded in 1882—has been interested in unusual aerial events since at least the 1950s; declassified files show that ONI routinely received copies of Project Blue Book reports, and the Navy continues to investigate sightings today.[3]
In 2019, as details of UAP activity leaked into public view, the Navy announced new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters, and a grassroots movement began calling for congressional investigation. Members of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees—Florida senator Marco Rubio prominent among them—pressed for briefings and began writing UAP language into defense and intelligence legislation.
2019, July 14–17: The Channel Islands Swarm
On the evenings of July 14–17, 2019, several Navy warships operating near California’s Channel Islands—including the destroyers USS Kidd, Rafael Peralta, Russell, John Finn, and Paul Hamilton, later joined by the littoral combat ship USS Omaha—logged repeated encounters with groups of unidentified flying objects, which they labeled “UAVs” (drones). Deck logs obtained through FOIA show that as many as six craft at a time circled the ships for ninety minutes or more, flying in poor visibility at roughly 200 to 700 feet, flashing lights, and at times matching the ships’ course and speed. On July 15, Omaha’s combat information center tracked up to fourteen contacts on radar at once, some accelerating to 40 to 50 knots before abruptly reversing course or vanishing from the sensors. The objects’ endurance, their coordination, and the absence of any nearby launch vessel exceeded the abilities of off-the-shelf drones, prompting an investigation involving the Navy, Coast Guard, and FBI and, eventually, briefings for the Chief of Naval Operations. Despite classified analyses—first by an internal Navy team known as “Red Blitz” and later by the UAP Task Force—no origin has ever been publicly identified, whether civilian, US military, or foreign. The West Coast swarm remains one of the most puzzling unresolved cases in the Navy’s files.[4]
2020, April 27: The Videos Become Official
On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense officially released the three Navy videos—“FLIR1,” “GIMBAL,” and “GOFAST”—that had first appeared with the December 2017 New York Times article.[5]
Left to right: FLIR1 (“Tic Tac”), GIMBAL, and GOFAST.
2020, August 4: The UAP Task Force Is Established
On August 4, 2020, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist formally established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. It was led by the Department of the Navy under the Office of Naval Intelligence and overseen by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Its mission was to standardize how UAP were reported and collected across the military services. Jay Stratton served as its first director. He was joined by physicist Dr. Travis Taylor as chief scientist and by analysts including Sarah Gamm of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), who evaluated classified imagery and multisensor data. Intelligence officer David Grusch represented the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to the Task Force and its predecessor effort from 2019 to 2021 before moving to the NGA; he would later become the most consequential whistleblower in the field.[6]
Not everyone at the top took the subject seriously. Stratton writes that at an August 2020 briefing for Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Trussler, the Navy’s top intelligence officer, passed Esper a tinfoil hat—an episode Stratton says he witnessed.[7]
Though not formally assigned, Elizondo is said to have briefed congressional and Defense Department officials, Christopher Mellon reportedly offered informal guidance, and Hal Puthoff is believed to have influenced the Task Force’s analytical approach. Staff from the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees and personnel from the DIA and ONI worked through Stratton’s office to coordinate oversight and reporting. Stratton has said the FBI was among his earliest partners, helping with classified congressional briefings and remaining a key investigative ally.
Inside the Task Force: WARLOCK. Stratton’s memoir describes one way he tried to get better data. Reviving in smaller form the earlier Interloper idea (see Chapter Eighteen), he arranged for a Navy P-3 patrol aircraft fitted with cameras and plasma-detecting radar—a project he calls WARLOCK—to fly off the coast of Virginia, where UAP were often reported, supported by a control center code-named Giant Killer that would alert the aircraft to sightings. He secured sixteen hours of flight time. On the first mission, he writes, the pilot spotted a sphere about six feet across at 20,000 feet, then lost it while the crew was setting up its equipment. Navy records confirm the existence of the control center and the squadron involved, but not the sighting.[8]
Even former intelligence chiefs began speaking differently. In December 2020, former CIA director John Brennan said that some of the phenomena “continue to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”[9]
2020, December 27: Congress Orders a Report
The mechanism behind the government’s first public UAP assessment was Senate Report 116-233, which accompanied the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. Drafted in June 2020 by the Senate Intelligence Committee, then under Acting Chairman Marco Rubio, it directed the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to deliver a full assessment of UAP within 180 days.[10]
The process drew little attention at the time, but UAP had gained serious support from both parties. In the end it took a pandemic to push the requirement into law: the provision rode inside the COVID-19 relief and spending package, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, signed on December 27, 2020.[11]
Public anticipation built through the spring. In March 2021, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said there were “a lot more sightings than have been made public,” describing objects seen by Navy and Air Force pilots or captured by satellite that performed maneuvers “difficult to explain”—including traveling faster than sound without a sonic boom.[12] In May 2021 former president Barack Obama added credibility to the subject when he acknowledged footage and records of objects in the sky that “we don’t know exactly what they are.”[13]
2021, June 25: The Preliminary Assessment
Under the tight deadline, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines marshaled the resources of her office and worked with the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to deliver the Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to Congress on June 25, 2021. With only a handful of dedicated Task Force analysts, the team combined Navy sensor and incident data with contributions from the DIA, FBI, NRO, NGA, and NSA; civilian agencies including the FAA, NOAA, and DARPA offered context on normal flight, weather, and emerging aerospace technologies.
The unclassified report examined 144 reports from US government sources dating from 2004 to 2021. Eighty involved observation by multiple sensors. The Task Force identified only one with high confidence—a large, deflating balloon. The others remained unexplained. It was the government’s first public reckoning with UAP, and it remains the cornerstone of the transparency efforts that followed.[14] In November 2021, at the direction of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, the Task Force was replaced by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). Stratton retired from government service in early 2022.[15]
Looking Back, 1947: The Twining Memo and the ODNI Report
Remarkably, this had all happened before. As we have already seen, at the dawn of the nuclear age hundreds of military and civilian pilots encountered unknown objects and filed reports strikingly similar to today’s. On September 23, 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, commander of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, sent a classified memorandum on the sightings to Army Air Forces headquarters. Seventy-four years later, on June 25, 2021, the ODNI released a public report on the same subject. If history does not repeat itself, government bureaucracy certainly does.
The then strictly internal Twining memo concluded that “the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” It called for a formal study, which led to twenty-two years of Air Force investigations under three code names—Projects Sign, Grudge, and finally Blue Book, the last of which popularized the term “unidentified flying object.” Its recommendation read:
Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code name for a detailed study of this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to be forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30 days as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data should be effected.[16]
The 2021 report likewise called for widening the study, building a larger data set, standardizing reporting across services and agencies, and using artificial intelligence to detect patterns:
In line with the provisions of Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the IAA for FY 2021, the UAPTF’s long-term goal is to widen the scope of its work to include additional UAP events documented by a broader swath of USG personnel and technical systems in its analysis. As the dataset increases, the UAPTF’s ability to employ data analytics to detect trends will also improve. The initial focus will be to employ artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms to cluster and recognize similarities and patterns in features of the data points. . . . The majority of UAP data is from U.S. Navy reporting, but efforts are underway to standardize incident reporting across U.S. military services and other government agencies to ensure all relevant data is captured with respect to particular incidents and any U.S. activities that might be relevant.[17]
The parallels continue in how the two documents describe the objects. The 1947 memo summarized the reports this way:
The apparent common description is as follows: (1) Metallic or light reflecting surface. (2) Absence of trail, except in a few instances where the object apparently was operating under high performance conditions. (3) Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top. (4) Several reports of well kept formation flights varying from three to nine objects. (5) Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a substantial rumbling roar was noted.[18]
It added that “the reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and motion which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.” Seventy-four years later, the ODNI wrote:
In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics. Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings. The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management.[19]
Everyone, then and now, wanted to know what these objects were—or who was behind them. In 1947 Twining directed that consideration be given to “the possibility that these objects are of domestic origin—the product of some high security project”; to “the lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects”; and to “the possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge.” The ODNI’s 2021 categories were remarkably similar: airborne clutter; natural atmospheric phenomena; US government or industry development programs, which it could not confirm accounted for any reports; foreign adversary systems; and an “other” category for objects that might require “additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize.” On adversaries, the 2021 report stated that “we currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” while promising to keep watching, “particularly as some UAP have been detected near military facilities or by aircraft carrying the USG’s most advanced sensor systems.”
The most significant finding of the modern report was that UAP pose a hazard to flight safety: “The UAPTF has 11 reports of documented instances in which pilots reported near misses with a UAP.” Like its 1947 predecessor, it called for further study. It also prompted NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former senator, to commission an independent study of UAP science; NASA published that report in September 2023.
2022, May 17: The First Public Hearing in Half a Century
On May 17, 2022, the House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation—chaired by Representative André Carson, with Ranking Member Rick Crawford—held the first public UAP hearing in more than fifty years. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald S. Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray testified about AOIMSG. Bray said the UAP database had grown from 144 reports to roughly 400. Officials showed declassified clips, including a 2021 spherical object and triangular shapes recorded through night-vision optics, and walked through the categories from airborne clutter to unexplained events. They said no material had been found indicating a non-earthly origin and no attempts at communication had been documented, while noting eleven near misses with UAP—an air-safety concern that drew sustained attention. Lawmakers pressed for leadership appointments, closer work with the FAA to standardize civilian reporting, continued efforts to remove stigma among aviators, and regular unclassified updates.
2022, July: AOIMSG Becomes AARO
Following congressional direction, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memorandum on July 15, 2022, expanding AOIMSG’s mission beyond the air and renaming it the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Publicly announced on July 20, AARO was chartered to investigate anomalous objects in the air, at sea, in space, underwater, and moving between these domains, and to coordinate UAP work across the Defense Department and the wider government. AARO reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense; it launched its public website on August 31, 2023.
AARO has faced intense scrutiny and frequent leadership changes. Its first director, physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, chosen by Hicks, drew criticism from advocates and former colleagues for downplaying compelling Navy encounters, clashing with whistleblowers, and frustrating congressional inquiries. He stepped down in December 2023. Tim Phillips served as acting director and expanded unclassified reporting. Dr. Jon T. Kosloski, a longtime technical leader at the National Security Agency, was named director in 2024 and remained in the post through the record releases of 2026. Questions about AARO’s pace and openness have followed it throughout.[20]
2022, December 23: The FY2023 NDAA
The James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 passed the House on December 8, 2022 (350–80), and the Senate on December 15 (83–11), and President Biden signed it on December 23. It authorized $857.9 billion for national defense and strengthened the government’s UAP reporting and whistleblower rules:[21]
• A secure reporting channel. AARO must maintain a protected process for current and former Defense Department personnel and contractors to report UAP-related events and programs directly to the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees; such disclosures are not to be treated as violations of nondisclosure agreements.
• Protection from retaliation. Federal employees and contractors who make authorized disclosures may not be punished with actions such as loss of security clearance, suspension, or firing.
• A historical review. AARO must inventory existing UAP-related nondisclosure agreements and special access arrangements and produce a history of government involvement with UAP since 1945.
• Regular reports. The Defense Department and ODNI must jointly submit annual classified reports and unclassified public summaries on UAP incidents, trends, and risks.
• Resources. The law created no separate appropriation, but it authorized the department to devote resources to scientific analysis, sensor data, material analysis, and witness interviews under AARO.
Implementation has been uneven. Much of AARO’s deeper analysis remains classified, weakening its public summaries; whistleblowers such as David Grusch have reported intimidation despite the new protections; and several deadlines slipped. Still, the law laid the foundation for ongoing oversight and led to a clear increase in reporting and cooperation between agencies—most visibly in AARO’s October 2023 annual report, which logged 291 new reports between August 2022 and April 2023.
2023: Whistleblowers and Witnesses
January: Gila Bend, Arizona. During a training flight near Gila Bend, an F-16 instructor pilot spotted a dark object ahead of the jet; moments later something struck the canopy, causing minor damage and no injuries. A bird strike was ruled out, and the military later attributed the impact to a small drone whose operator and origin remain unknown. According to FAA documents obtained by The War Zone, it was the first of several UAP reports in that area within a single day.[22]
February 15: USS Jackson. Off Southern California, in the W-291 warning area, the littoral combat ship USS Jackson (LCS-6) recorded four unidentified objects with its electro-optical and infrared cameras. Crew members described glowing, Tic Tac-shaped objects—one of which appeared to rise from the ocean and take to the air—moving in coordination with no visible propulsion or heat plume before departing together. Navy Chief Alexandro Wiggins, who witnessed the event, later described it to Congress, emphasizing that it involved movement between water and air.
April 19: Senate hearing. The Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, held closed and open sessions on AARO. Director Sean Kirkpatrick described the office’s mission, its partners, and a caseload of more than 650 reports. Senators pressed him on funding and staff, on standardizing and destigmatizing reporting, and on plans for regular public reports.
Looking back, 2021–2022: How the Grusch story began. The year’s biggest story had begun two years earlier. In July 2021, David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, confidentially gave classified information to the Defense Department’s Inspector General alleging that elements of the intelligence community had improperly withheld UAP material from Congress. In May 2022 his attorney, former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III, filed a “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” and a retaliation complaint with the current IC Inspector General, Thomas Monheim. By July 2022 Monheim had judged the complaint “credible and urgent” and sent a summary to the Director of National Intelligence and both congressional intelligence committees. That December, Grusch gave hours of classified briefings to committee staff in a secure facility. He has also said he helped draft the UAP whistleblower provisions in the FY2023 defense act.[23]
June 5: The Grusch story breaks. Investigative journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published Grusch’s claims in The Debrief: that the United States operated highly secret programs to retrieve and reverse-engineer crashed craft. The New York Times and Politico had declined the story, and The Washington Post had spent weeks checking it. Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough said AARO had no verifiable information supporting the claims. Days later, in an interview with Le Parisien, Grusch spoke of “non-human biologics” and very large craft, fueling a surge of public and congressional interest.
July 26: Grusch, Graves, and Fravor testify. A House Oversight subcommittee hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,” heard from former Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor and from Grusch. Under oath, Grusch said he had interviewed more than forty witnesses over four years, that the government had known of non-human activity since the 1930s, and that he had been denied access to decades-old programs involving recovered craft and “non-human biologics.” Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, put the mood plainly: “We’re going to uncover the cover-up.”[24]
In other interviews Grusch described what he called the first documented recovery of an anomalous vehicle, in June 1933 near Magenta, Italy. He says Italian secret-service memos—including rough technical sketches—describe a largely intact, lens-shaped craft that Benito Mussolini’s government moved to a secure airbase, where it stayed under guard until 1944–45, and that Pope Pius XII quietly passed word of it to US intelligence, enabling the Office of Strategic Services to seize it at the end of the war. In Grusch’s view, this European recovery foreshadowed Roswell. None of it has been corroborated by documents in the public record.
Elizondo has vouched for Grusch’s credibility. Liberation Times, citing a Pentagon spokesperson, has reported that Elizondo provides technical advice on classified topics to the US Space Force, and Elizondo has said Space Force personnel take UAP seriously. There is no verified evidence that Grusch has held any formal Space Force role.
September 14: NASA reports. NASA’s independent UAP study team published its report, calling for better data, more systematic collection, and an end to stigma, and NASA named a director of UAP research.
October 18: The annual report. The ODNI and Defense Department released their 2023 annual report, noting that “many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability.”[25]
December: Langley. Beginning on the evening of December 6, 2023, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia endured one of the most dramatic and sustained drone incursions ever recorded on US soil. For seventeen nights, groups of drones—some described as small quadcopters, others as large as a car—flew over the base, at times in formation over the flight line and the hangars housing F-22 Raptors. Security forces described flashing lights, abrupt maneuvers, and swarming behavior that outpaced their counter-drone tools, and the Air Force temporarily moved some fighters. Federal assets, including a NASA WB-57F aircraft, were drawn in, yet no one was ever identified as responsible.[26] Christopher Mellon later told a congressional audience that a large “mothership-like” drone was also seen, and some witnesses said smaller drones appeared to be launched from a larger vehicle arriving from the ocean.
2024: Reports, Hearings, and Drones
March: AARO’s historical report. AARO released Volume I of its congressionally required historical review, concluding that it had found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting involved extraterrestrial technology or that the government had reverse-engineered such technology. Critics in Congress and the advocacy community called the report incomplete. In April AARO also released the Kona Blue documents discussed in Chapter Seventeen.[27]
October 30: Yemen. A US MQ-9 Reaper drone operating off Yemen recorded a glowing, spherical object as a Hellfire missile was fired at it. In the footage the missile appears to strike the orb and glance away, while the object continues on, apparently unaffected. The video stayed out of public view until Representative Eric Burlison revealed it at a congressional hearing in September 2025 (described below).
November 13: “Exposing the Truth.” A joint House Oversight subcommittee hearing heard from Michael Gold, a member of NASA’s UAP study team; Luis Elizondo; journalist Michael Shellenberger; and retired Rear Admiral Dr. Tim Gallaudet. Witnesses pressed for declassification of high-resolution imagery, better scientific coordination, and legal protection for whistleblowers. Elizondo testified that the United States had operated secret crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Gallaudet declared that “there is a new nature of reality that the American public deserve to be aware of,” suggesting that non-human intelligence may lie behind at least some of the phenomena—what he called the most significant story of the century.
November 14: The annual report. The Defense Department released its fiscal year 2024 annual report, citing 757 new reports received between May 2023 and June 2024, of which twenty-one merited further analysis.
November 19: Senate hearing. The Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, chaired by Senator Gillibrand with Ranking Member Joni Ernst, heard from AARO Director Jon Kosloski, who said the office had processed more than 1,650 reports since July 2022. He described how resources were being used, plans to work more closely with the FAA, the intelligence community, and the services, and a planned secure portal for submissions from the public and whistleblowers.
November: “Edge science.” The National Science Foundation hosted an interagency meeting on disruptive technologies and “edge science” that included UAP among its topics. More than 120 experts attended from the NSF, NASA, the Space Force, the Department of Energy, and other bodies. Dr. Anna Brady-Estevez, then co-chair of the US Space Economy Interagency Working Group and a former NSF program director, said UAP were openly discussed among senior officials and argued for strong investment in related technologies—advanced energy, quantum materials, and AI.
November–December: The New Jersey drones. A wave of drone sightings spread across New Jersey and into New York and beyond. At a White House press briefing on December 12, Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich pressed National Security Council spokesman John Kirby about the mysterious drones; no clear answers were available.[28] In a 60 Minutes report recorded that winter and aired in March 2025, retired General Glen VanHerck, former commander of NORAD and US Northern Command, warned that such incursions could have “a foreign nexus, a threat nexus,” and that adversaries might be “surveilling critical infrastructure” or simply showing that they could operate freely in US airspace. He emphasized that gaps in capability, policy, and law left the country vulnerable.[29]
2025: The Insiders Step Forward
May 1: A congressional roundtable. The UAP Disclosure Fund briefed members of the House Oversight Committee at a roundtable titled Understanding UAP: Science, National Security, and Innovation.[30] Christopher Mellon, the Fund’s chairman, warned: “I don’t think the public is aware of the extent of our airspace vulnerabilities and failures, and the degree to which they’ve already been exploited and are being exploited today, and the challenge that we face in trying to sort this out.”[31] He and other experts—including Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and Rear Admiral Gallaudet—criticized excessive classification of UAP reports; Mellon noted that sophisticated satellite and NORAD sensor data apparently was not reaching Congress. Luis Elizondo moderated, stressing whistleblower protections and the growing number of encounters near nuclear facilities and other sensitive sites.
The most striking remark came from Dr. Eric Davis, who said simply: “There is a there there.”[32] Dr. Anna Brady-Estevez emphasized the scientific and technological stakes—propulsion, energy, and AI-driven detection—and urged cooperation among government, universities, and industry.[33] That same week Dr. Hal Puthoff appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he discussed remote viewing, intelligence efforts to understand anomalous phenomena, and why full disclosure is so difficult.[34] His 2023 paper on “ultraterrestrial” models weighed extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and time-travel explanations, and at the Sol Foundation’s November 2023 symposium he traced the government’s involvement from Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book onward.[35] His view: some information may eventually be released, but governments may not fully understand the phenomenon themselves.
June 1–6: Drones and executive orders. On June 1, Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web launched swarms of small drones from trucks positioned deep inside Russia, striking several strategic air bases—a turning point in modern warfare. On June 6 President Trump signed executive orders to strengthen US control of its airspace against drone threats. NewsNation’s Michael Ramsey reported Elizondo’s praise for the move as a crucial step toward addressing broader concerns, whether about adversary drones, UAP, or possibly NHI. UAP and untraceable drones have disrupted US and NATO airspace for years, and our ability to detect or stop them is limited. Something is developing, and US authorities know it.
August: Luna on Rogan. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Representative Anna Paulina Luna said AARO personnel had told her they were privately instructed to limit what they shared in congressional briefings on certain matters, while the FBI seemed far more willing to share information.[36]
September 9: The Yemen video. One of the most accessible congressional hearings in recent memory was held by the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Representative Luna and joined by Representatives Tim Burchett and Eric Burlison. Titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” it heard from Air Force veterans Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dylan Borland, Navy Chief Alexandro Wiggins, and investigative journalist George Knapp. The most striking moment came when Burlison played the October 2024 Yemen video of a Hellfire missile apparently glancing off a glowing orb. Witnesses called it unprecedented; no known technology should absorb or deflect a missile strike that way. The central message, after three years of bipartisan interest, was that the United States and its adversaries are racing to master this technology, and whoever succeeds first will hold a decisive advantage.
September–November: The mystery drones of Europe. Beginning on September 22, 2025, a wave of unexplained drone incursions disrupted commercial and military aviation across northern and central Europe. Airports including Copenhagen, Oslo, Munich, Bremen, and Berlin Brandenburg suspended or rerouted flights; Munich was closed twice in twenty-four hours, and Bremen halted operations on November 2. In November drones flew over Belgium’s Kleine Brogel Air Base, which reportedly stores US tactical nuclear weapons; Belgian authorities described a deliberate reconnaissance operation, and similar sightings occurred at Elsenborn and Marche-en-Famenne. Sightings near NATO bases and critical infrastructure prompted allied deployments under Operation Eastern Sentry, and NATO’s eastern members held formal consultations amid Russian airspace violations. European defense ministers fast-tracked a “drone wall”—an integrated network of radars, jammers, and interceptor teams. Western assessments increasingly pointed to Russia as a likely culprit testing NATO’s defenses.
Yet something anomalous remains. Witnesses described both ordinary red and green navigation lights and a more intense red glow; officials emphasized large, fixed-wing drones. No known Russian military drone—the Orlan-10, Lancet, or SuperCam—carries navigation lights, which suggests civilian-grade or improvised aircraft used for provocation. And if one is spying, why light up like a Christmas tree? In hybrid warfare, ambiguity is itself a weapon: it forces governments to react without clear proof, erodes public confidence, and raises the risk of miscalculation. As we wrote at the time, the real weapon may not be the drones themselves but the uncertainty they sow—forcing nuclear powers to make decisions in the dark. And if these are our old, decades-long visitors, they chose a particularly volatile moment to reappear. These incidents fit a pattern that included Langley, Wright-Patterson, Nevada security sites, and the British air bases at Lakenheath, Mildenhall, and Fairford in late 2024.
Late 2025: The FBI asks for reports. The FBI moved to standardize how such sightings are reported. Its Office of the Private Sector encouraged defense contractors and infrastructure operators to report suspicious activity involving “unmanned systems”—a term covering drones, underwater vehicles, and UAP—through its eGuardian system, aiming both to ensure that credible sightings are taken seriously and to reduce the stigma that delays reporting.
November: The USS Ronald Reagan sailors. Documentary filmmaker Dave Beaty publicized accounts from sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan who recalled a glowing orange sphere, perhaps forty feet wide, hovering near the ship for hours during a 2004 voyage—seen, they said, by as many as two hundred crew members. One sailor keeping the navigation log said a superior ordered him not to record it, and he compared the sight to the biblical burning bush. The event has never been officially acknowledged.
November 21: The Age of Disclosure. Director Dan Farah’s documentary premiered on Prime Video with interviews of more than thirty current and former government, military, and intelligence officials, among them Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former DNI James Clapper, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Mike Rounds, Representative André Carson, Luis Elizondo, and Jay Stratton. The film argued that non-human intelligent life exists, that governments have hidden it for some eighty years, and that major nations are racing to reverse-engineer non-human technology. It was here that Stratton first said on camera: “I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human craft and non-human beings.” Rubio, for his part, said that objects seen over nuclear sites were “not ours.”
December: The FY2026 defense act. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 became law without the broader UAP Disclosure Act championed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds. It did include narrower provisions: the Pentagon must brief Congress on UAP intercepts by NORAD and US Northern Command since 2004—their number, location, and nature; AARO must account for UAP-related security classification guides; and reporting rules were streamlined so agencies could share UAP data with AARO more easily.[37]
2026: The Year of the Files
February 19: A presidential directive. Hours after criticizing former president Obama for remarks on a podcast—in which Obama said aliens are “real,” then clarified that he meant the odds of life elsewhere are good and that he saw no evidence of visitation while in office—President Trump announced on Truth Social that, “based on the tremendous interest shown,” he would direct Secretary Pete Hegseth and other agencies “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” along with UFO and UAP records. Representative Luna predicted “a ton of hearings,” and Senator John Fetterman said the effort “could be a bipartisan thing.”[38]
Spring: Waiting for the videos. Representative Luna demanded dozens of specific military UAP videos by a set deadline; the Pentagon missed it, and lawmakers complained that the clearest imagery still had not reached them. Defense officials, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and FBI Director Kash Patel all confirmed that an interagency release process was under way.
May 8: PURSUE launches. The government launched PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, a public website for reviewed UAP records. The first release included more than 160 files and some twenty videos, ranging from 1944–45 records to recent reports—Apollo-era photographs and transcripts, a witness account of a cigar-shaped object near a restricted test facility, and police reports of “orbs launching other orbs.” A second release on May 22 added more than two hundred documents, dozens of audio recordings, and more than forty videos requested by lawmakers, including footage of four objects in formation near Iran in 2022. A third, on June 12, included a June 5 report signed by AARO Director Jon Kosloski describing an orange “mother orb” releasing smaller red orbs. Further releases followed through the summer and fall, including the first official AAWSAP records in September and October (see Chapter Seventeen).[39]
June 9: Grusch returns. David Grusch came back to Washington for a press event on the Capitol steps with Representatives Luna, Burlison, Burchett, Jared Moskowitz, and Scott Perry, repeating his claims of crash-retrieval programs, dozens of cases involving non-human biological material, and billions of dollars moving outside effective oversight, and urging that nondisclosure obligations be waived so insiders could speak.[40] Two weeks later, at a Disclosure Forum in the Senate’s Kennedy Caucus Room, Senator Rounds said he would reintroduce the UAP Disclosure Act with Senator Schumer, and Luna said her team was giving the White House a list of people who should receive immunity.
July: AARO’s late report. Months after its legal deadline, AARO released its fiscal year 2025 report, covering June 2024 through May 2025: 319 new reports, 370 cases resolved—all with ordinary explanations—and nine flagged for further analysis by intelligence and scientific partners. It counted fifty notifications of drones near US nuclear facilities, weapons, and launch sites, up from eighteen the year before, though none was classified as UAP, and it again rejected claims that the government holds recovered UAP material.[41]
July 22: The House adopts the UAP Disclosure Act. As part of the FY2027 defense bill, the House adopted by voice vote an amendment written by Representative Burlison and cosponsored by Representatives Eli Crane, André Carson, Anna Paulina Luna, Jared Moskowitz, and Nick Begich. Modeled on the law that governs the release of the JFK assassination records, it would create a UAP Records Collection at the National Archives; require agencies to hand over relevant records; establish a review board, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with subpoena power; require automatic release of records more than twenty-five years old unless the president certifies otherwise; extend these duties to contractors; and allow the government to take possession of recovered technologies and biological evidence held by private companies. The full defense bill passed the House 216–212. In the Senate, a procedural vote on its own defense bill had failed on July 14, leaving the provision’s fate uncertain.[42]
July 29: The NDA waiver. President Trump directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to waive earlier nondisclosure agreements for current and former employees and contractors with relevant UAP information, so they could cooperate with designated investigators. Burlison welcomed the move but warned that it was unclear whether the waiver would cover testimony before Congress; the ODNI said it would issue guidance.[43]
August: Davis goes further. In March, as described in Chapter Seventeen, Eric Davis had affirmed the Wilson–Davis notes and described the Lockheed offer to AAWSAP. In August, on NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich Tonight, he went further still, saying he had “seen the evidence” of recovered non-human bodies from at least four species—beings popularly called Grays, Nordics, insectoids, and reptilians—and that an institute holding the remains had been split into “two or three components” and moved to military medical institutes during President Obama’s first term. He appealed directly to the President: “With your signature, you could waive the SF-312 NDA to protect UAP whistleblowers like myself.”[44] No public evidence supports these claims, and the government continues to deny them; but coming from a physicist who has been part of the government’s UAP effort since AAWSAP, they show how far the insiders have become willing to go.
September 18 and October 23: AAWSAP’s records released. PURSUE’s sixth and seventh releases made public, for the first time, AAWSAP’s contract file, thirty-seven of its thirty-eight technical studies, early monthly reports, a description of the Project Capella database, and the 141-page 2010 summary report with its analysis of the Nimitz encounter. These are described in Chapter Seventeen.
October 13: Stratton’s memoir. The man who led the UAP Task Force published Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life (William Morrow). It debuted at number three on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list.[45] In the book and in interviews—beginning with Fox News anchor Bret Baier on October 12—Stratton, who spent some sixteen years investigating UAP and reached the Senior Executive Service, repeated that he has seen non-human beings and craft with his own eyes. Because the book touches every part of this history, we have placed its new information where it belongs in time throughout these three chapters: the 2005 triangle imagery and the empty DIA archive, his role in creating AAWSAP, the 2009 Lockheed offer, the Interloper and WARLOCK collection plans, and the tinfoil-hat briefing. Its other major claims include:
• A “Legacy Program.” Stratton describes a hidden effort, dating to the 1940s and involving the CIA, the Air Force, and defense contractors, that has retrieved and studied non-human craft—and that, he says, has kept even presidents “shielded from the truth.” He describes a “secret cold war race” with rival powers to master the technology.[46]
• Roswell and Holloman. Citing an unnamed informant, he writes that the 1947 Roswell craft broke into two pieces and that some of its occupants survived for a time before dying, having refused food or contact. He also says officials privately confirmed to him that a craft landed at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, in 1964 and that a being met with officials there.[47]
• The admirals. He describes two admirals and a commander who watched a craft “phase in” and hover over a training compound. When Stratton arranged for them to be formally debriefed at the Pentagon, he writes, a senior official intercepted them and warned that their reputations would be at risk—an intervention he attributes to a “hidden hand.”[48]
• The “hitchhiker effect.” After his own investigations at Skinwalker Ranch, Stratton writes, his family experienced frightening phenomena at home—including, around 4 a.m. on March 12, 2014, a gray figure with a large head and small black eyes looking through a window some nine feet off the ground at his sleeping son. He describes orbs and shadow figures in the house and says Dr. Kit Green and Dr. Garry Nolan took blood and DNA samples from the family. Researchers associated with Skinwalker Ranch have called this pattern the “hitchhiker effect,” in which phenomena seem to follow investigators home.[49]
• AARO as a “front.” Stratton calls AARO under its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, “a front for the Legacy Program,” citing classified intelligence he could not reproduce.[50]
The book drew sharp responses. Kirkpatrick called Stratton’s accusation “the most absurd thing I’ve heard today,” said Stratton offered no evidence and had a financial motive, accused Stratton and his associates of violating national security law, and declared flatly, “There is no legacy program.” Reporters also found that several of Stratton’s sources could not be confirmed: a former aide to Harry Reid could not confirm that Reid had been briefed on the program, and another former Senate staffer did not recall Stratton raising it.[51] Skeptical reviewers noted that the book offers no photographs, recordings, or documents for its most extraordinary claims.[52] These are Stratton’s own accounts and have not been independently confirmed. Still, coming from the official who did more than anyone to bring the term “UAP” into government, Out of the Shadows is the most senior insider account yet published.
Still to come. As this chapter was revised in late October 2026, House Oversight Chairman James Comer said he hoped to hold a UAP hearing during the post-election “lame-duck” session, after a planned September hearing was canceled. The fate of the UAP Disclosure Act rests with the Senate and with the House–Senate conference committee. And the files keep coming.
A Record of the Hearings
Counting only formal, open, on-the-record congressional hearings devoted to UAP since 2022, there have been six:
• May 17, 2022 — House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation. Witnesses: Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray. The first open UAP hearing in more than fifty years; focused on AOIMSG, reducing stigma, and standardized data collection; roughly 400 reports.
• April 19, 2023 — Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Witness: Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick (AARO). AARO’s process and coordination with other agencies; more than 650 cases under review.
• July 26, 2023 — House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. Witnesses: David Grusch, Ryan Graves, David Fravor. Allegations of crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs and “non-human biologics”; firsthand pilot encounters.
• November 13, 2024 — House Oversight Subcommittees on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation and on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. Witnesses: Luis Elizondo, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (ret.), Michael Shellenberger, Michael Gold. “Exposing the Truth”: concealed evidence, high-resolution imagery, an alleged race to reverse-engineer UAP technology.
• November 19, 2024 — Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Witness: Dr. Jon Kosloski (AARO). AARO’s case files and methods, followed by a closed session.
• September 9, 2025 — House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Witnesses: Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Dylan Borland, Chief Alexandro Wiggins, George Knapp. “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection”; the Yemen Hellfire video.
Alongside these came closed briefings, the May 2025 congressional roundtable, the 2026 Capitol events, and a steady stream of legislation—most recently the House’s adoption of the UAP Disclosure Act in July 2026.
Conclusion: From Back Offices to the President’s Desk
In barely two decades the story has traveled an extraordinary distance: from a radar screen aboard the USS Princeton and a trailer at Skinwalker Ranch, through a $22 million contract that dared to study the paranormal alongside propulsion, to a part-time Pentagon office kept alive by a few determined officials, to a Navy-led task force, a congressionally chartered anomaly office, six public hearings, a presidential directive, and a government website releasing UFO files to the world. Along the way, the people who did the work—Lacatski, Kelleher, Puthoff, Davis, Green, Elizondo, Mellon, Grusch, and Stratton—have moved from guarded hints to sworn testimony to memoirs that state plainly what they believe they have seen.
The official position has not moved as far. AARO still reports that every resolved case has an ordinary explanation and that it has found no evidence of recovered non-human material, and its first director now says flatly that there is no legacy program. Between those two positions lies the central question of the new modern era. If the insiders are right, the United States and its rivals are locked in a quiet race to master technologies that could reshape the balance of power. If they are wrong, the country has spent two decades chasing shadows. Either way, as the drones over Langley, New Jersey, and Europe have shown, something is operating in our airspace that our defenses cannot reliably identify—and the uncertainty itself has become a national security problem.
[1] Stratton’s exact chain of command in 2017–2020 has not been publicly detailed. Given his senior posts—including Director of Intelligence (J-2) at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center and senior analyst at the Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center—he would have reported to senior Office of Naval Intelligence leaders and possibly to officials under the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare (N2N6).
[2] Jay Stratton, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life (New York: William Morrow, 2026); summarized in R. M. McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft—and a CIA Official Blocked His Team from Getting One,” R. M. McLaren (Substack), October 2026, https://rmmclaren.substack.com/p/jay-stratton-says-lockheed-had-12.
[3] “Jay Stratton,” The UFO Database, n.d., https://theufodatabase.com/people/jay-stratton.
[4] Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, “Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed by Mysterious ‘Drones’ off California over Numerous Nights,” The War Zone, n.d., https://www.twz.com/39913/multiple-destroyers-were-swarmed-by-mysterious-drones-off-california-over-numerous-nights.
[5] US Department of Defense, “Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos,” press release, April 27, 2020, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2165713/. From 2017 to 2019 Christopher Mellon played a central role in bringing these videos to public and congressional attention. FLIR1 was recorded on November 14, 2004, off San Diego during the Nimitz encounters. GIMBAL was captured in January 2015 by an F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the East Coast and shows an object skimming above clouds while rotating in midair, with the aircrew’s astonished commentary. GOFAST, recorded during the same period, shows a fast-moving object passing low over the ocean.
[6] Dr. Travis Taylor is best known to the public for Ancient Aliens and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, but he also holds long-standing security clearances and deep expertise in sensors and directed energy. He publicly disclosed his role as the Task Force’s chief scientist in 2022. His access appears to have been limited to sensor data, pilot debriefs, and technical intelligence; no evidence places him inside any legacy crash-retrieval program. Sarah Gamm holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and astrophysics from Missouri State University and a master’s degree in countering weapons of mass destruction. She has worked as a systems engineer supporting satellite operations, as an NGA image scientist specializing in synthetic-aperture radar, and as a nuclear campaign analyst for the Air Force. In interviews she has said some UAP cases she reviewed led her to conclude that they were of non-human origin.
[7] Stratton, Out of the Shadows; McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft.”
[8] Stratton, Out of the Shadows; McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft.” The book does not give a firm date for the WARLOCK flights.
[9] John Brennan, interview by Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler, podcast, December 2020; see also Marik von Rennenkampff, “In Dramatic Shift, National Intelligence Director Does Not Rule Out ‘Extraterrestrial’ Origins for UFOs,” The Hill, November 16, 2021.
[10] US Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, S. Rep. No. 116-233 (2020).
[11] Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, Pub. L. No. 116-260, 134 Stat. 1182 (2020).
[12] John Ratcliffe, interview by Maria Bartiromo, Fox News, March 19, 2021; reported in “UFO Report Details ‘Difficult to Explain’ Sightings, Says US Ex-Intelligence Director,” Guardian, March 23, 2021.
[13] Barack Obama, interview by James Corden, The Late Late Show with James Corden, CBS, May 17, 2021.
[14] Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (Washington, DC: ODNI, June 25, 2021), https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf.
[15] “Stratton, John F.–Jay Stratton,” Anomaly Archives, n.d., https://anomalyarchives.org/collections/file/stratton-john-f. In May 2022 Radiance Technologies announced that Stratton had joined the company as a subject-matter expert in intelligence strategy.
[16] Nathan F. Twining to Commanding General, Army Air Forces, memorandum, “AMC Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs,’” September 23, 1947, Headquarters, Air Materiel Command, Wright Field, Dayton, OH, reproduced at LUFORU, accessed October 8, 2025, https://luforu.org/twining-schulgen-memo/.
[17] ODNI, Preliminary Assessment.
[18] Twining, “AMC Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs.’”
[19] ODNI, Preliminary Assessment.
[20] The succession of predecessor offices, steadily growing budgets, and repeated congressional hearings suggest that UAP research remains a priority across the defense and intelligence communities.
[21] James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, Pub. L. No. 117-263, 136 Stat. 2395 (2022).
[22] “Pilots Are Seeing Some Very Strange Things in Arizona’s Military Training Ranges,” The War Zone, n.d., https://www.twz.com/pilots-are-seeing-some-very-strange-things-in-arizonas-military-training-ranges.
[23] On March 27, 2025, Grusch joined the staff of Representative Eric Burlison as a special advisor, to help navigate classification barriers and advance disclosure legislation.
[24] Nick Mordowanec, “Former U.S. Intelligence Chief Weighs In on UFO Hearings,” Newsweek, July 31, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-hearings-john-ratcliffe-intelligence-director-weighs-1816326.
[25] Office of the Director of National Intelligence and US Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Washington, DC: ODNI, October 2023), https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/FY2023-Consolidated-Annual-Report-UAP-Oct2023.pdf.
[26] Gordon Lubold, Sarah Seligman, and Aruna Viswanatha, “Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-military-pentagon-defense-331871f4.
[27] All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, February 2024).
[28] White House press briefing, December 12, 2024, posted by Forbes Breaking News, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UoHxANv0Cc.
[29] “Drone Swarms Inside the U.S. Could Be Spying—and the Ability to Detect, Track Them Is Lagging,” 60 Minutes, CBS, March 2025, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_aIqISaVKo; “Mystery Drone Swarms Breach US Military Airspace—and Washington Is Unprepared,” Economic Times, March 24, 2025. VanHerck’s successor, General Gregory Guillot, has acknowledged that the incidents exposed weaknesses in drone detection and response.
[30] “Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation,” UAP Disclosure Fund, May 1, 2025, https://uapdisclosurefund.org/events/understanding-uap-science.
[31] Brandi Vincent, “Former Defense Officials Raise Concerns About Unexplained Drone and UAP Threats to U.S. Airspace,” DefenseScoop, May 2, 2025, https://defensescoop.com/2025/05/02/former-defense-officials-raise-concerns-about-unexplained-drone-and-uap-threats-to-u-s-airspace/.
[32] “Eric W. Davis,” Unidentified Phenomena, n.d., https://unidentifiedphenomena.com/people/eric-w-davis/.
[33] In July 2025 several advocacy groups, including the UAP Disclosure Fund, announced plans to combine their policy, legal, and grassroots efforts under a single banner. Their successor efforts organized the 2026 Capitol Hill events described later in this chapter.
[34] Hal Puthoff, interview by Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, May 2025, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_tKn9TaP8.
[35] The Sol Foundation is a nonprofit research center devoted to interdisciplinary study of UAP, led by Dr. Garry Nolan and Dr. Peter Skafish. Through symposiums, white papers, and advisory work, it seeks to establish transparent reporting standards, inform policy, and educate the public.
[36] Anna Paulina Luna, interview by Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, episode 2365, podcast, August 2025, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-yPOBaYDOo.
[37] Brandi Vincent, “Congress Wants to Know More About the Military’s UAP Intercepts Around North America,” DefenseScoop, December 10, 2025, https://defensescoop.com/2025/12/10/uap-ufo-military-intercepts-north-america-fy-2026-ndaa/.
[38] “Trump Says He’s Directing the Pentagon to Release Files Related to UFOs and Aliens,” NBC News, February 19, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-says-directing-pentagon-release-files-related-ufos-aliens-rcna259833.
[39] Wikipedia, s.v. “United States UFO files,” accessed October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files. Skeptics, including former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick and analyst Mick West, said the early releases contained little that was new or anomalous; several journalists noted that much of the material had already been public.
[40] “Grusch Returns to Capitol Hill,” UAP RAD, 2026, https://uaprad.org/public-record/briefing-2026-grusch-allegations. This was a press event, not sworn testimony.
[41] “AARO Releases FY2025 UAP Report Months After Statutory Deadline,” The Black Vault, July 21, 2026, https://theblackvault.com/documentarchive/aaro-releases-fy2025-uap-report-months-after-statutory-deadline-citing-319-new-cases-and-expanded-satellite-analysis.
[42] “The House Adopts the UAP Disclosure Act as an NDAA Amendment (22 July 2026),” UAP Globe, July 2026, https://uapglobe.com/cases/burlison-uap-amendment-2026.
[43] Eric Burlison, “Rep. Eric Burlison Releases Statement on President Trump’s UAP NDA Directive,” press release, July 29, 2026, https://burlison.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-eric-burlison-releases-statement-president-trumps-uap-nda-directive.
[44] “Former US Scientist Claims Alien Bodies Stored in Military Medical Institutes,” International Business Times (UK), August 19, 2026, https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/former-us-scientist-claims-alien-bodies-stored-1815156. The government has repeatedly said it has no confirmed evidence of recovered extraterrestrial material or biology, and no public evidence has established Davis’s claims. Puthoff made a similar claim earlier in 2026 about “four separate types” of beings.
[45] “Out of the Shadows by Jay Stratton: Claims and Fact-Check,” Where Are They, October 2026, https://wherearethey.info/book/out-of-the-shadows-revealing-the-truth-about-non-human. The list was dated November 1, 2026.
[46] Stratton, Out of the Shadows; “‘Shielded from the Truth’: Ex-UAP Chief Claims US Presidents Are Kept in the Dark About UFOs,” Cybernews, October 2026, https://cybernews.com/news/jay-stratton-ufo-claims/.
[47] Rhealene Fernando, “Humans Allegedly Captured Roswell Aliens 80 Years Ago but They Perished ‘Refusing Food or Contact,’” International Business Times (UK), October 17, 2026, https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/humans-allegedly-captured-roswell-aliens-80-years-ago-they-perished-refusing-food-contact-1826178; McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft.” In 1994 the Air Force attributed the Roswell debris to Project Mogul, a classified balloon program.
[48] “Ex-UAP Chief Claims He Saw ‘Non-Human Craft With My Own Eyes,’” International Business Times (UK), October 2026, https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/former-pentagon-uap-chief-submarine-encounter-1825705.
[49] Stratton, Out of the Shadows; Dick Russell, “Out of the Shadows: A Review,” Dick Russell’s Substack, October 2026, https://dickrussell.substack.com/p/out-of-the-shadows-a-review; McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft.” On the “hitchhiker effect,” see Colm A. Kelleher, James T. Lacatski, and George Knapp, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program (Henderson, NV: RTMA, 2021).
[50] McLaren, “Jay Stratton Says Lockheed Had 12 Nonhuman Craft.”
[51] Ben Schreckinger, “Ex-Pentagon UFO Lead Accuses Rival of Breaking ‘National Security Law,’” Paradigm, October 15, 2026, https://www.paradigm.news/p/exclusive-ex-pentagon-ufo-lead-accuses.
[52] Jason Colavito, “Review of Out of the Shadows by Jay Stratton,” Jason Colavito (blog), October 2026, https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-out-of-the-shadows-by-jay-stratton.