Avril Haines is an American lawyer and national security official who served as director of national intelligence from January 2021 to January 2025, the first woman to hold the job. During her tenure the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the government's first unclassified assessment of unidentified aerial phenomena and began producing annual UAP reports with the Pentagon. In June 2026 she was named president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Haines was born in New York City in 1969 and grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. After high school she spent a year at the Kodokan judo institute in Tokyo, then earned a physics degree from the University of Chicago in 1992. She briefly began doctoral work in physics at Johns Hopkins before she and her husband bought a Baltimore bar and turned it into an independent bookstore and café. She earned a law degree at Georgetown in 2001, clerked for Judge Danny Boggs of the Sixth Circuit, worked in the State Department's legal adviser's office and served as a deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Joe Biden.

In the Obama White House she was deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, then became the first woman to serve as deputy director of the CIA, from 2013 to 2015, and as deputy national security adviser, until January 2017. Out of government she directed Columbia World Projects at Columbia University and worked for the consulting firm WestExec Advisors. The Senate confirmed her as intelligence director on January 20, 2021, by a vote of 84 to 10.

Congress had directed her office, working with the Pentagon, to report on UAP, and on June 25, 2021, her office released the Preliminary Assessment. It reviewed 144 reports from 2004 to 2021, mostly from Navy personnel, identified only one with confidence, as a large deflating balloon, and said the phenomena probably lacked a single explanation. The January 2023 annual report, produced with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, counted 510 reports as of August 2022, with 171 still uncharacterized. Her office also handled David Grusch's complaint: Grusch has said that after the Intelligence Community Inspector General found his 2022 disclosure credible and urgent, a summary went to Haines and to both congressional intelligence committees.

Haines remains a reference point in later disputes. In June 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported that she had been briefed on the Pentagon's findings about "Yankee Blue," a purported hazing practice in which personnel were told of a fictitious alien-technology program. Freedom of Information Act searches requested by John Greenewald located no briefing materials prepared for her, and in 2026 he called the account unproven. Writer Jason Jorjani, citing two unnamed sources, has claimed that she steered a phased disclosure plan, a claim circulated on social media without documents. Her documented UAP role is institutional: her office produced the first official public accounting of military UAP reports and received the whistleblower complaint that preceded Grusch's 2023 testimony to Congress.