UAP Disclosure Act

The UAP Disclosure Act began as Senate Amendment 797 to the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2024, submitted on July 13, 2023 by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer with Mike Rounds, Marco Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Todd Young and Martin Heinrich as cosponsors. Rounds called it "closely modeled" on the 1992 JFK assassination records law. It would have created a UAP records collection at the National Archives and an independent nine-member Records Review Board, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, to review records and recommend which to release or postpone. Its findings said government UAP records "should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure" and asserted that "credible evidence and testimony" pointed to records never declassified. Records were to be released within 25 years of creation unless the president certified a continuing harm, and the government was to exercise eminent domain over "any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence" held by private persons or entities.

The Senate placed the text in its version of the defense bill, which it passed on July 27, 2023. The House-passed bill had no counterpart, and conference negotiators cut it back. The law signed on December 22, 2023 kept, in sections 1841 to 1843, a records collection at the National Archives, a duty on agencies to identify and transmit their UAP records, and grounds for postponing disclosure. It dropped the review board and the eminent-domain clause. On the Senate floor on December 13, Rounds listed both losses, and Schumer called it "really an outrage that the House didn't work with us" on the board, warning that declassification would stay largely with "the same entities that blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades." The surviving framework became the UAP Records Collection.

The sponsors kept refiling the full text, adding a clause that repeals the 2023 subtitle so the board-based system would replace it. Rounds and Schumer submitted it as Senate Amendment 2610 to the fiscal 2025 bill on July 11, 2024, and Schumer, Rounds and Gillibrand filed it as Senate Amendment 3111 to the fiscal 2026 bill on July 29, 2025. Both were ordered to lie on the table and never received a vote. The final laws signed on December 23, 2024 and December 18, 2025 carried narrower UAP measures, among them a Government Accountability Office review of the Pentagon's UAP office and briefings on UAP intercepts by NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, but no review board.

In 2026 the House passed the Act for the first time. Representative Eric Burlison, joined by Republicans Eli Crane, Anna Paulina Luna and Nick Begich and Democrats André Carson and Jared Moskowitz, offered it as amendment No. 315 to H.R. 8800, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027. The text repeals the 2023 subtitle, carries records already gathered into a rebuilt collection, brings back the 2023 bill's Senate-confirmed nine-member board and its subpoena power, keeps the 25-year deadline, revives the eminent-domain clause and authorizes $20 million for fiscal 2027. The Rules Committee made it in order, and on July 22, 2026 it was adopted by voice vote as part of a package of amendments. Later that day the House passed H.R. 8800 by 216 to 212. Burlison's office presented the measure as support for the administration's PURSUE records program.

The Senate has not taken up the House bill. Its Armed Services Committee's own version, S. 4784, reported in June 2026, contains no UAP disclosure language, and it stalled on the floor after a 50 to 46 vote on July 14 fell short of the 60 needed to begin debate. H.R. 8800 was received in the Senate on September 14, and as of October 23, 2026 no further action had been recorded on it. When Ask a Pol's Matt Laslo told Gillibrand in August that the Act was in the House bill but apparently not the Senate's, she replied, "I'll look into it." Whether the review board and eminent-domain clause become law depends on the final negotiated defense bill, the same stage at which the 2023 version lost them.