Special Report with Bret Baier is the weekday evening news program of Fox News, broadcast live from Washington at 6 p.m. Eastern. Built around the day's developments at the White House, in Congress and in the courts, it combines correspondent reports, a newsmaker interview and the All-Star Panel, a closing roundtable of political journalists. Its format centers on reported Washington news rather than a host's opinion monologue, which sets it apart from the network's prime-time lineup.

The program began under Brit Hume, then Fox's Washington managing editor, and dates to the network's early years. Hume anchored until December 23, 2008. Bret Baier, a former Pentagon and chief White House correspondent who had filled in on Fridays since 2007, became the full-time anchor in 2009. Under Baier, who is also Fox's chief political anchor, the show has served as the network's base for election coverage and interviews with presidents and senior officials.

UFO material has generally entered the program through news hooks. On April 6, 2022, correspondent William La Jeunesse reported on roughly 1,500 pages of previously classified Pentagon documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, including passages on alleged injuries and "unexplained pregnancies" linked to encounters; Mediaite said the segment contained questionable claims. Coverage expanded in 2026 as the federal government began releasing UFO files. The promotional account for The Age of Disclosure announced that director Dan Farah would discuss the film on the show on April 15, and in June the program aired a series titled "Unexplained Encounters." Its June 9 installment drew on newly declassified files to trace the phenomenon to World War II pilots who described being followed by unknown aircraft, and a June 11 installment paired the scientific search for life beyond Earth with military reports of airspace anomalies.

On September 17, 2026, the program reported a new Pentagon waiver allowing current and former service members to report UAP encounters without civil or administrative penalties. On October 12, Baier interviewed Jay Stratton, the first director of the Pentagon's UAP Task Force, on the eve of publication of his memoir Out of the Shadows. In clips posted by the show, Stratton said the government and defense contractors possess "craft of non-human origin," described using a nuclear submarine and a Navy P-3 aircraft as bait to gather UAP data, and said he believed President Trump was still being kept from the full extent of classified UAP evidence. Those are Stratton's claims. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported in March 2024 that it had found no empirical evidence of extraterrestrial technology or of a program to reverse-engineer it.

The 2026 coverage placed federal file releases and former insiders' allegations inside Fox's main evening newscast rather than its opinion hours. Clips from the Stratton interview circulated widely among UFO researchers in the following days, and Baier's questions framed the subject as a matter of national security and government transparency for a general-news audience.