UAP for India
27 July 2026 — Analysis — Explainer
Six years of legislation, five public hearings and five annual reports have built a real oversight architecture for unidentified anomalous phenomena — but every disclosure mechanism Congress has actually voted on has been trimmed back before it became law.
On 26 July 2023, in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building, a former intelligence officer named David Grusch sat before the House Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee and testified under oath that the United States has run a multi-decade programme to recover and reverse-engineer “non-human” craft, and that officials with direct knowledge had described the recovery of “non-human biologics.” Alongside him, Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor described unexplained radar and visual contacts they had personally witnessed — Fravor's 2004 “Tic Tac” encounter off the California coast, and Graves's account of unidentified objects routinely crossing East Coast training ranges. It was, by most measures, the most-watched congressional hearing on the subject in American history, carried live by CBS News and other national outlets.[1]
What is less well understood is that the hearing was not a starting point. It was the midpoint of a six-year run of legislative activity that began with a single paragraph buried in a Senate committee report in 2020, produced a new Pentagon office, forced two unclassified intelligence assessments, nearly created a JFK-style national declassification regime, and — in the very week this piece was written — saw the House of Representatives pass a disclosure framework for the third time since 2023.
Read end to end, that record does not tell a story of either stonewalling or breakthrough. It tells a more specific story about how a legislature builds oversight of a secretive executive-branch programme: each time Congress has proposed a disclosure mechanism with real teeth — subpoena-like authority, eminent domain over recovered materials, a binding twenty-five-year sunset on secrecy — that mechanism has been narrowed, delayed or stripped out before final passage, while the softer, oversight-only apparatus (a Pentagon office, an annual report, a hearing) has survived every cycle intact. This piece sets out that record, the political-science logic behind it, and the two most recent cycles in which the pattern is easiest to see.
Each disclosure mechanism has been narrowed, delayed or stripped out before final passage, while the softer, oversight-only apparatus has survived every cycle intact.
The end of 2020 saw an unusual amount of defence-legislation friction in Washington, and it is worth being precise about which bill did what, because two separate pieces of year-end legislation are often conflated in later UAP writing. President Trump vetoed H.R. 6395, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, on 23 December 2020, objecting to provisions unrelated to UAP — the renaming of Confederate-named military bases and the absence of a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.[2] Congress overrode that veto in short order: the House voted 322–87 on 28 December 2020 and the Senate followed 81–13 on 1 January 2021, the first override of Trump's presidency.
The provision that actually started the modern UAP record, however, came from a different bill passed the same week. The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was enacted as Division W of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 — the year-end omnibus spending package, distinct from the NDAA — which Trump signed without controversy on 27 December 2020, as confirmed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's own legislative record.[3] At the instruction of the committee, then chaired by Senator Marco Rubio, Division W directed the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, to deliver an unclassified report to Congress within 180 days on what the intelligence community actually knew about unidentified aerial phenomena.
That report arrived on 25 June 2021 as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.[4] It catalogued 144 reports, almost all from US military aviators between 2004 and 2021, and could offer a definitive prosaic explanation for exactly one of them — a deflating balloon. The remaining 143 were left officially unresolved. The assessment explicitly declined to rule out “novel entry vehicles” or “foreign adversary systems,” and it stated flatly that UAP “probably lack a single explanation,” a sentence quoted in nearly every piece of subsequent legislation and testimony on the subject.
That one paragraph of report language is the entire origin of the modern UAP oversight apparatus: no separate “UAP Act” was needed to force the first disclosure — a reporting mandate buried in intelligence-committee report language did it. It set a template Congress would keep returning to for the next five years: legislate a reporting requirement, receive a document, decide the document raises more questions than it answers, legislate again.
The 2021 assessment leaned heavily on the Navy's own Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, an ad hoc body with no independent statutory footing. Congress moved to fix that in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, whose Section 1683 directed the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly establish “an office, organizational structure, and authorities” for detecting, tracking and — where possible — attributing UAP.
The office that resulted, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, stood up in late 2021 with a mandate that read as management coordination more than investigation. It did not last as a distinct entity: on 20 July 2022 the Deputy Secretary of Defense, jointly with the DNI, signed a memorandum renaming and substantially expanding it into the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, adding sea, space and the deliberately novel “transmedium” category — objects that appear to move between domains, such as air to water — to its remit.[5]
AARO's statutory basis was cemented in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, enacted December 2022 and now codified at 50 U.S.C. § 3373, which requires every US government employee, contractor and service member to report UAP-related information to AARO regardless of classification level — a legal compulsion to report that had never previously existed anywhere in the executive branch.[6]
In under two years, Congress had moved UAP oversight from an informal Navy safety programme to a statutorily chartered office with mandatory reporting authority across the Department of Defense and intelligence community, using NDAA riders rather than standalone bills — an example of what political scientists call institutional capacity-building: the creation of a durable bureaucratic body able to absorb a policy problem on an ongoing basis, as distinct from a one-off transparency order that would have to be renewed or re-litigated each time.
Congress has now held five major public hearings on UAP, each drawing on a different evidentiary register. On 17 May 2022, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation held the first open congressional hearing devoted to UFOs since 1969. Chaired by Representative André Carson, it took sworn testimony from Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, who told the subcommittee the department's tally of UAP reports had grown to roughly 400, up sharply from the 144 examined a year earlier — figures reported live by NPR from the hearing room.[7]
Carson opened the session with a line that framed the entire subsequent oversight effort: “They are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated.” The hearing mattered less for new revelations than for what it established procedurally — that the Pentagon would now answer UAP questions in open session, on the record, under oath, on a recurring basis, paired each time with a closed classified briefing.
That two-track pattern was tested less than a year later. On 19 April 2023, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, convened a hearing on AARO's mission, activities, oversight and budget, with founding director Sean Kirkpatrick as the sole witness.[8] Kirkpatrick told the subcommittee AARO was then tracking roughly 650 cases and stated plainly that “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics” — a formulation he and his successors have repeated, nearly word for word, in every report and hearing since.
What made the hearing notable was less Kirkpatrick's substantive answers than the senators' visible frustration with them: as DefenseScoop reported afterward, several subcommittee members pushed back on the pace and specificity of AARO's disclosures, arguing that Congress still lacked the case-level detail that would let it independently judge whether AARO's “no evidence” conclusion reflected a genuinely resolved caseload or simply one the office had not yet finished working through.[9] That tension — between an office reporting aggregate statistics and a Congress wanting individually adjudicated cases — never fully went away, and it is a large part of why the next hearing, three months later, leaned so heavily on named individuals testifying to specific personal encounters rather than office-level statistics.
That next hearing was the 26 July 2023 session already described above, formally titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency” and chaired by Representative Glenn Grothman.[10] Grusch's allegation of a “multi-decade” crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme made the headlines, but he repeatedly told the committee that operational specifics would have to wait for a classified setting — a qualification that left the most consequential claims formally untestable in public.
Graves and Fravor supplied the hearing's more grounded material: years of unexplained sensor and visual contacts logged by working Navy aircrew, including, as NPR reported, formations of dark cube-shaped objects tracked off the Atlantic coast that current systems could neither classify nor consistently track.[11] AARO's own public position, then and since, has been close to the opposite of Grusch's core claim: Kirkpatrick said publicly that the person he understood to be the source of the crash-retrieval allegations had declined AARO's request for a direct interview, an account Grusch disputed.
That disagreement was never resolved by subsequent reporting, and it fed directly into the historical review examined below; for a closer look at how that specific evidentiary gap between AARO's written findings and sworn testimony still stands, see our companion explainer on AARO's annual reports, which tracks it across all five reporting cycles.
The fourth major hearing came sixteen months later. On 13 November 2024, the House Oversight Committee convened “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” jointly announced by Representatives Nancy Mace and Glenn Grothman.[12] The panel — former NASA administrator Michael Gold, former AATIP-linked Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, and journalist Michael Shellenberger — pressed harder on the crash-retrieval theme than Pentagon witnesses in previous hearings had been willing to engage with.
Gallaudet told the committee he believed the country was “being visited by non-human intelligence with technology we really don't understand and with intentions we don't understand either,” while Shellenberger detailed claims about an alleged compartmented programme he called “Immaculate Constellation,” which he said quarantined UAP-related sighting data outside AARO's own reporting chain — an allegation AARO has not confirmed and that, as with Grusch's claims a year earlier, rests on witness assertion rather than documentary evidence made public.
A fifth hearing followed on 9 September 2025, “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” convened by Representative Anna Paulina Luna's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.[13] Its witnesses — two Air Force veterans, journalist George Knapp, and Joe Spielberger of the Project On Government Oversight — concentrated less on individual sighting claims than on whether existing whistleblower statutes actually protect personnel who report UAP-related programme spending, precisely the gap a pending House bill discussed below was written to close.
Separately from the hearings, AARO's own statutory reporting obligations generated documents on a predictable cycle — until, as discussed below, that cycle itself began to slip. The Fiscal Year 2023 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, released in October 2023, put the cumulative case archive at 801 reports as of 30 April 2023 and disclosed that over a hundred of the newer reports had come through a new Federal Aviation Administration data-sharing channel, describing unshaped lights typically logged between 5,000 and 60,000 feet.[14]
The more consequential document arrived five months later. On 8 March 2024, AARO released the Historical Record Report, Volume I, covering the period from 1945 to 31 October 2023 — a document Congress had mandated under Section 6802(j) of the FY2023 NDAA specifically to examine decades of claims about a secret US crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme, the same category of claim Grusch would later put under oath.[15]
This is a distinct document from the FY2023 annual caseload report described above; the two are frequently conflated in press coverage despite being separated by five months and addressing entirely different questions — one a running tally of new sightings, the other a one-time historical audit going back nearly eighty years.
After interviewing more than thirty current and former officials, AARO's Historical Record Report stated it had found no verifiable evidence that the US government, or any other government, has ever possessed or reverse-engineered off-world technology, and it specifically rejected the long-circulating claim that a piece of recovered metal held by a government contractor was of non-terrestrial origin, assessing it as ordinary and terrestrial. A Freedom of Information Act release obtained by The Black Vault, showing internal Pentagon rollout emails, indicated that Defense Department public-affairs staff had deliberately minimised the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's statutory co-authorship role in how the report was presented to the press.[16]
AARO's reporting cadence continued through two more annual cycles, each shaped by a change in the office's own leadership. The Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, released 14 November 2024, logged 757 new reports — 485 from the current reporting window plus 272 older cases newly surfaced, mostly from FAA data — taking the cumulative archive to 1,652 cases; of these, AARO had resolved 292, virtually all to balloons, birds and small uncrewed aircraft systems, while 21 were flagged for further analysis as “truly anomalous,” AARO's term for a case current data cannot resolve rather than a claim of exotic origin.[17]
By then AARO had a new director: founding director Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist with a background in directed-energy weapons, departed in December 2023, and on 26 August 2024 the Pentagon announced Dr Jon T. Kosloski, a cryptomathematician recruited from the National Security Agency, as his permanent successor.[18] The shift from a physicist to a signals-intelligence specialist read, to some outside observers, as the Pentagon leaning further toward treating UAP as principally a sensor-data and pattern-analysis problem rather than a materials-science or biological one — a framing that lines up with AARO's own repeated public statements that its central limitation is a lack of “timely and actionable sensor data,” not a shortage of physical evidence to examine.
Testifying to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on 19 November 2024, Kosloski told senators that fewer than 3.5 percent of AARO's total caseload carried any signature suggestive of genuinely novel technology, while acknowledging a small number of cases he personally could not yet explain. The most recent cycle, the Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report, was not published until 20 July 2026 — months later than the office's own prior cadence would have suggested, since the FY2023 report had come in October and the FY2024 report in November.[19]
It logged only 319 new reports, a drop AARO attributes to having already worked through a backlog of FAA data in the previous cycle, taking the cumulative archive to 1,870 cases, of which nine were flagged for further analysis, down from 21 the year before. Its most operationally interesting entry is a single maritime case in which US Navy assets reported roughly a hundred airborne objects and two probable uncrewed surface systems operating off the Virginia coast, which AARO says it is still investigating, constrained, as with so many prior cases, by a lack of timely sensor data.[20]
Not every institutional step in this record required a statute. On 14 September 2023, NASA's independent UAP study team — a panel of sixteen scientists, former astronauts and data specialists the agency had convened the previous year at Congress's informal urging rather than under any explicit legislative mandate — published its final report. Its central finding was that the team had found no evidence that any UAP had an extraterrestrial origin, but that the absence of consistent, high-quality, curated sensor data made it impossible for scientists to say much more than that with confidence — the same data complaint AARO's own annual reports would keep repeating for years afterward.[21]
NASA's most concrete follow-through was organisational rather than legislative: acting on the study team's central recommendation, the agency named Mark McInerney, previously its own liaison to the Department of Defense on UAP matters, as its first director of UAP research days after the report's release — giving the civilian scientific establishment a standing point of contact with AARO for the first time, separate from the Pentagon's own reporting chain, and one Congress did not have to legislate into existence because NASA built it on its own initiative.[22] Readers wanting NASA's findings case by case can consult our full account of NASA's UAP investigation.
Two days after the July 2023 Oversight hearing, the Senate passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 with an unusually ambitious rider attached: the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, filed by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds as Senate Amendment 797 to S. 2226.[23]
Modelled explicitly on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, it would have created a UAP Records Collection at the National Archives, established a presidentially appointed Review Board with authority to compel agencies to release records, presumed disclosure within twenty-five years unless the President personally certified an ongoing harm, and — its most contested clause — asserted federal eminent domain over “any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence” in the possession of any private person or entity.
The Senate's version cleared the chamber attached to the broader defence bill, but the House and Senate versions of the FY2024 NDAA then had to be reconciled in conference committee, and it was there that the Act's most forceful provisions were removed.
According to reporting from The Debrief's ongoing coverage of the bill's progress, the eminent-domain clause and the independent Review Board's compulsory-release authority were both stripped during conference negotiations, with several outlets attributing the removal primarily to quiet opposition from the Pentagon and defence contractors wary of a mechanism that could force disclosure of classified or proprietary material outside the normal declassification chain — an account that rests on legal and press analysis of the conference process rather than on any on-the-record statement from the Department of Defense itself, and should be read with that caveat.[24]
What did become law, signed by President Biden on 22 December 2023 as Public Law 118-31, was a considerably narrower version at Sections 1841 through 1843: NARA must maintain a UAP Records Collection; every federal agency must review its own UAP-related holdings and either transmit them to NARA for eventual public release or document a specific ground for postponement; and postponement grounds are limited to a defined list rather than the President's broad discretionary certification the Senate version had originally proposed.[25] The National Archives subsequently issued implementing guidance to federal agencies, setting an October 2024 deadline for agencies to identify their holdings and a further deadline of 30 September 2025 for transmitting whatever could be publicly released.[26]
There is no eminent domain provision anywhere in the enacted text, and no independent review board with authority to overrule an agency's own classification call — the version that became law asks agencies to self-report and self-postpone, with NARA acting as archivist rather than adjudicator. The pattern that would repeat through 2024 and 2025 was set here first: the maximal disclosure proposal clears one chamber, draws heavy press coverage, and is quietly reduced to a records-management exercise by the time it reaches the President's desk.
The maximal disclosure proposal clears one chamber, draws heavy press coverage, and is quietly reduced to a records-management exercise by the time it reaches the President's desk.
The comparison to the 1992 JFK Act was never incidental. Schumer and Rounds, joined at introduction by Senators Marco Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Todd Young and Martin Heinrich, said explicitly in their joint press release announcing the bill that it was modelled after the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.[27] It is a genuinely useful yardstick, because the 1992 statute created an independent Assassination Records Review Board with statutory authority to overrule an agency's own classification decision; it operated for several years, reviewed contested withholdings case by case, and is generally credited with forcing the release of material agencies had wanted to keep sealed.
The enacted UAP Records Collection language has no equivalent body: Sections 1841 through 1843 leave the disclosure determination with the agency that generated the record in the first place, reviewable by NARA as archivist but not overridable by any independent adjudicator. After the House stripped the independent review board and the eminent-domain clause from the conference text, Schumer and Rounds held a joint colloquy on the Senate floor on 13 December 2023 to register their objection to the narrower final language — a rare instance of a bill's own sponsors publicly criticising the compromise version of their own amendment on the floor of the chamber that had just passed it.
The pattern traced above is not an accident of any one Congress, any one committee, or any one administration; it repeats too consistently across six years, three Congresses and two presidencies of opposite parties for that. It is better explained as a structural feature of how legislatures oversee a secretive part of the executive branch.
Securitisation — the process by which an issue is framed as a matter of national security, which licenses secrecy and executive discretion that would not be tolerated on an ordinary policy question — gives the Pentagon and the intelligence community wide latitude to decide what can be said publicly about UAP, even after Congress has mandated that something be said.
Institutions that add capacity to the state's own oversight machinery — a statutorily chartered office, a mandatory reporting duty, an annual report, a hearing — do not challenge that securitised discretion; they simply give Congress a standing channel through which the executive can keep exercising it, on a schedule. That is why AARO, its reporting mandate, and the hearings have all survived unchanged across the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump transition: none of them requires the executive to give up the classification call, only to exercise it on a fixed cadence and report the aggregate result.
None of them requires the executive to give up the classification call, only to exercise it on a fixed cadence and report the aggregate result.
Compelled disclosure is a different kind of proposal, because it transfers the classification call itself — the authority to decide what stays secret and for how long — away from the agency that generated the record and toward an outside body. That is precisely what the Disclosure Act's Review Board and eminent-domain clause would have done, and precisely what got removed in conference. The same logic explains why the FY2026 NDAA's UAP provisions, examined below, run toward internal congressional visibility rather than public release: Congress can secure more oversight of what the executive already holds without ever asking the executive to surrender the authority to classify it.
This is an instance of what political scientists call epistemic authority — the socially recognised right to determine what counts as established fact on a given question. On UAP, that authority currently sits with AARO and the Department of Defense: it is AARO's “no credible evidence” finding, not any outside adjudicator's, that functions as the official record, and every mechanism that would have created a rival source of epistemic authority — an independent review board able to overrule AARO's classification judgment, for instance — has so far failed to survive the legislative process intact.
The narrower framework enacted in December 2023 has itself become the baseline the next cycle starts from, a pattern political scientists call path dependency — the tendency for an earlier institutional choice to constrain and shape the options available later, simply because reversing course would cost more than continuing along the path already set.
When Schumer, Rounds and Gillibrand refiled substantially the same disclosure language in the 119th Congress, discussed below, they were not proposing something new; they were trying, for a third time, to re-add provisions that had already been stripped once. Each failed attempt makes the next attempt marginally harder, because it establishes that the stripped-down, agency-self-report model is what Congress has actually been willing to pass, and that record itself becomes evidence for negotiators seeking to strip the next version too.
President Trump signed the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act into law as Public Law 119-60 on 18 December 2025. The disclosure language Schumer, Rounds and Gillibrand had filed as Senate Amendment 3111 the previous July, discussed below, was not among what reached his desk.
What the enacted FY2026 NDAA does contain, as DefenseScoop reported, are three narrower, oversight-flavoured provisions: a requirement that AARO's director brief the armed services committees on the “number, location, and nature” of UAP intercepts conducted by NORTHCOM and NORAD dating back to 2004, including any data collected during those intercepts and the protocols followed; a mandated review of the classification guides AARO applies to its own material, aimed at the long-standing complaint that the office over-classifies routine findings; and a streamlining of duplicate UAP reporting requirements across federal agencies.[28]
It is a small, telling contrast with the bill Congress had actually passed a year earlier: rather than forcing disclosure outward, the FY2026 NDAA tightens Congress's own internal visibility into what AARO already holds — real oversight, but a smaller ambition than the one that keeps stalling in conference.
On 20 February 2026, the initiative shifted away from Congress entirely. President Trump posted that he would direct Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — using the “Secretary of War” title Hegseth has favoured informally since a September 2025 executive order gave “Department of War” status as a secondary name for the department, as NPR reported[29] — and other relevant agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” government files on UAP, UFOs and “alien and extraterrestrial life.” A Pentagon spokesman confirmed the department would coordinate an interagency response.
Christopher Mellon, the long-time disclosure advocate and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, told DefenseScoop the announcement “might be a consequential moment,” but that “the impact will depend on the follow-through”; Gallaudet, one of the November 2024 hearing's witnesses, was blunter: “I'll believe it when I see it.”[30]
The follow-through so far is PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — which published its first tranche of a little more than 160 declassified files on 8 May 2026, hosted not on AARO's own site but at war.gov/ufo. More than a hundred of the files carried redactions; the release included pixelated cockpit imagery and official reports describing metallic spheres, flying discs and glowing orbs.
As DefenseScoop's account of the reaction made clear, the research community's response split along familiar lines: some welcomed it as the first sustained executive-branch release outside AARO's own reporting cycle; Mellon offered a now-familiar caution — “data alone is not disclosure” — pointing to the absence of metadata, coordinates and sensor parameters that would let outside researchers actually verify what they were looking at.[31] Ryan Graves put the same point more bluntly: “ambiguous imagery without that surrounding data is hard for pilots, researchers, or the public to evaluate responsibly.”
Further tranches followed roughly every few weeks through the northern summer. The executive-branch apparatus around PURSUE grew a scientific layer in June 2026: Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb announced a thirteen-member UAP Science Advisory Council, reporting to a UAP Governance Board that ODNI had stood up jointly with the FBI and Department of Defense to support Trump's transparency directive, with a mandate to help AARO assess unclassified sighting data rather than to generate or release records of its own.[38]
It is, in substance, a fourth iteration of the same dynamic running through this entire six-year record — an official acknowledgement that something worth investigating exists, calibrated to satisfy a transparency demand without handing over the material that would let anyone outside government judge it for themselves, and entirely dependent on one president's continued interest rather than on any law Congress has yet been able to pass.
It is an official acknowledgement that something worth investigating exists, calibrated to satisfy a transparency demand without handing over the material that would let anyone outside government judge it for themselves.
Before the November 2024 hearing's implications had fully settled, a separate and largely unrelated episode pulled the same congressional machinery in a new direction. Beginning in mid-November 2024, residents across New Jersey and, soon after, New York, Pennsylvania and other north-eastern states began reporting large numbers of unexplained drone sightings, mostly at night.
By mid-December the volume had grown sharply — the FBI told Congress it had logged more than 3,000 public tips — and on 18 December 2024 the FAA imposed temporary flight restrictions over parts of New Jersey. The congressional response moved on a familiar track: Senators Schumer, Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Andy Kim sent a joint letter to the FBI, DHS and FAA demanding an urgent briefing, and the House Homeland Security Committee followed with a hearing on 12 December 2024, “Unexplained Sighting: DOJ, FBI, CBP Witnesses Testify on Ongoing Threats Posed by Drones,” which focused less on the objects' identity than on the government's limited legal authority to detect or intercept small drones over civilian airspace.[32]
The Congressional Research Service subsequently summarised the gap in a public brief on drone encounters and calls for new counter-UAS authority.[33] A joint statement from the FAA, DHS, FBI and Department of Defense concluded that the great majority of reported sightings were attributable to lawful commercial, hobbyist and law-enforcement drones, along with conventional aircraft and, in some cases, stars mistaken for lights, a finding President Biden echoed publicly on 17 December 2024 when he said there was “nothing nefarious” behind the activity.
The episode belongs in this record not because AARO or the UAP disclosure framework had jurisdiction over it — the drones were, definitionally, identified flying objects of terrestrial origin, outside AARO's UAP mandate — but because it showed how thin the boundary has become, in Congress's own handling, between “unidentified anomalous phenomena” oversight and ordinary domestic drone-security policy: the same members, the same committees and, in some cases, the same witnesses moved between the two topics within weeks of each other, using much of the same institutional language AARO's founding legislation had used four years earlier.
AARO itself noted the overlap in its FY2025 annual report, which flagged a sharp year-on-year rise in drone sightings near nuclear infrastructure specifically, treating it as a counter-UAS policy question that sits adjacent to, but distinct from, the anomaly-resolution mission Congress originally chartered the office to perform.
On the administrative side, the FAA formalised its UAP reporting relationship with AARO more concretely in 2025, issuing Notice N 7210.970 on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Activity on 25 September 2025, giving air traffic controllers a standardised procedure for logging and forwarding UAP reports rather than routing them ad hoc through pilot deviation or safety channels, as had been the case since the FAA data-sharing arrangement first began feeding AARO's 2023 caseload.[34]
That single procedural notice — unglamorous compared with a disclosure act or a televised hearing — is arguably one of the more durable outputs of the entire six-year process: it converts what used to be an informal, relationship-dependent flow of pilot reports into a standing bureaucratic procedure that will keep generating data for AARO's caseload regardless of which administration or Congress is in office, in the same way the FY2023 NDAA's mandatory-reporting requirement converted a norm into a legal obligation.
The Trump administration's return to office in January 2025 changed the institutional backdrop without materially altering AARO's statutory footing. Legislatively, the 119th Congress picked up almost exactly where the 118th had left off. Schumer, Rounds and Gillibrand refiled a near-identical version of the disclosure legislation — again including the eminent-domain and independent review board provisions stripped from the 2023 version — first in 2024 and again as Senate Amendment 3111 to S. 2296, the FY2026 defence authorization bill, filed 29 July 2025.[35]
On the House side, Representatives Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna introduced the UAP Whistleblower Protection Act, H.R. 5060, aimed specifically at protecting federal personnel who report on the use of taxpayer funds for UAP-related research,[36] while Burchett separately introduced the broader UAP Transparency Act, H.R. 1187.[37] Neither had been signed into law as of July 2026, following the same track as the 2023 and 2024 versions of the Disclosure Act: introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, attached to a must-pass defence bill, and awaiting a conference process that has twice already narrowed the underlying ambition down to a records-management exercise.
The freshest test of the pattern arrived only days before this piece was written, and on the House side rather than the Senate's. Representative Eric Burlison filed his own Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2025 as a floor amendment on 29 August 2025.[39]
On 30 June 2026, the House Rules Committee approved the rule for floor debate on the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act on an 8–4 party-line vote without separately advancing Burlison's amendment, leaving out a proposal that would have set up a centralised UAP records collection at the National Archives, a 300-day deadline for agencies to transfer records, and an independent nine-member review board with subpoena authority.[40]
Burlison then voted against his own party's procedural rule to keep the measure alive and, by his own account, spent the following weeks contesting objections raised by House Armed Services and House Judiciary Committee staff — “we had to fight staffers, really staffers, people that are unelected, who kept throwing every excuse in the book,” he said afterward.[41]
On 22 July 2026 the House adopted a revised version of the amendment as part of H.R. 8800, the Fiscal Year 2027 NDAA: it would create a permanent UAP Records Collection at the National Archives, establish an independent UAP Records Review Board subject to Senate confirmation with subpoena authority to decide what UAP-related material is released or withheld, and extend disclosure requirements to government contractors holding relevant records for the first time.[42]
Public reporting on the adopted text did not describe an eminent-domain clause of the kind stripped from the 2023 version, though whether that is a deliberate change or simply an omission in how the amendment has so far been summarised is not clear from the coverage available at the time of writing. The measure must still clear a Senate companion process and a conference committee — the same two stages at which the 2023 and 2024 versions were narrowed — before it could reach the President's desk later in 2026, which makes it, as of this writing, the live edge of the exact pattern this piece has traced.
Laid end to end, the congressional UAP record since 2020 supports neither a “total cover-up” reading nor a “nothing to see here” reading with much confidence. What it shows instead is a consistent, almost mechanical pattern: real, durable oversight institutions have been built and have survived multiple changes of administration and party control of Congress, while every provision that would have given an outside body the power to compel disclosure over the executive branch's own classification judgment has been removed before final passage.
That gap is precisely where the Grusch-versus-AARO disagreement still sits, three years after the hearing that made it famous: a federal office stating under its own name that it has found no evidence of a retrieval-and-reverse-engineering programme, against a federal employee's sworn claim that one exists, with no independent body empowered to adjudicate between them and no disclosure mechanism that would resolve it without both sides' voluntary cooperation.
A federal office states it has found no evidence of a retrieval-and-reverse-engineering programme; a federal employee swears under oath that one exists. No independent body is empowered to adjudicate between them.
Whether the pending 2025–2026 bills — including the Burlison amendment the House has just passed — break that pattern or repeat it a third time will not be settled until the Fiscal Year 2027 NDAA reaches the President's desk later in 2026.
For readers assessing what any of this legislative architecture might offer as a template, our companion pieces on India's path to UAP leadership on domestic strategy and the threats India faces from UAPs both draw directly on the US model — a chartered office, a mandatory reporting channel, an annual public report — as the most exportable part of it, distinct from the disclosure fight that keeps stalling in Washington.
That distinction matters for India specifically: the institutional capacity described above is the part of the American record that has actually survived six years of political turnover intact, whereas the compelled-disclosure mechanisms are precisely the part that keeps failing — a reasonable planning assumption for any government considering its own version of this architecture is to expect the former to be achievable and the latter to remain contested for years. Anyone with a first-hand UAP sighting relevant to India can submit it through our report form; our explainer on defining UAPs and their capabilities goes further into the substance behind the numbers cited here.