Politico is an American political and policy news organization headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia. It was launched on January 23, 2007, as The Politico by former Washington Post journalists John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, with financing from banker and media executive Robert Allbritton, and shortened its name in 2009. German publisher Axel Springer completed its acquisition of the company in late 2021 for more than $1 billion. Politico covers Congress, the federal government, lobbying and policy in the United States and abroad, publishes long-form work through Politico Magazine, launched in 2013, and runs a Brussels-based European edition.

Politico entered UAP history in December 2017, when Bryan Bender published "The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs" alongside The New York Times' report on the same effort, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Bender, who served as the outlet's senior national correspondent and defense editor, wrote its Morning Defense newsletter and edited Politico Space, made the subject a recurring national-security beat. In April 2019 he reported that the Navy was drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs, and in June 2019 that senators had received a classified briefing on the sightings. In June 2020 he covered a Senate push to make the government's UFO reports public, quoting former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon, and in May 2021 he wrote about how Harry Reid and others brought the subject into the mainstream.

Politico followed the subject as the Pentagon built the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. It reported in August 2023 that the office's legally required public reporting website was tied up in Pentagon red tape, in November 2023 that director Sean Kirkpatrick would step down, and in March 2024 that the office's historical report described a once-proposed program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft while rejecting the claims behind it. Bender has since left journalism for government affairs work and joined the advisory board of Americans for Safe Aerospace.

In September 2026 Politico Magazine published a long report on the UAP Science Advisory Council led by Avi Loeb. According to the article and accounts of it, the council had received no meaningful data from the government months after its creation, sources described the CIA as the agency most resistant to releasing UAP material, and Loeb was giving the council until the end of 2026 before reassessing. Ben Schreckinger, a former Politico national political correspondent and author of a book on the Biden family, turned to UFO reporting in 2026 as an independent journalist, launching Paradigm News after leaving the company.

Politico's UAP reporting is notable for treating the subject as a Washington oversight story built on briefings, legislation, budgets and agency resistance rather than on claims about what the objects are. Bender's December 2017 article, published alongside the Times, is one of the two reports that opened the modern disclosure era, and the outlet's 2026 coverage carried that approach into the federal disclosure effort.