Edward Snowden is a former Central Intelligence Agency employee and intelligence contractor who in 2013 gave journalists thousands of classified National Security Agency documents describing government surveillance programs. He describes himself as a whistleblower; the U.S. government charged him under the Espionage Act. In discussions of UFOs he is cited mainly for his statements that, during years of broad access to classified systems, he found no sign that the government was hiding aliens.

Born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Snowden worked for the CIA from 2006 to 2009, then as a Dell contractor assigned to NSA work, including at the agency's regional operations center in Hawaii, and briefly in 2013 for Booz Allen Hamilton. In early June 2013 he gave documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and Ewen MacAskill, whose first stories revealed a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over Americans' phone records and the PRISM program. On June 21, 2013, the Justice Department charged him with two counts under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property, and his passport was revoked. After more than a month in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport he received temporary asylum in Russia in August 2013, gained permanent residency in 2020 and was granted Russian citizenship on September 26, 2022. In 2015 a federal appeals court ruled that the Patriot Act had not authorized the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' calling records, and in 2016 he became president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

His memoir, Permanent Record, published in September 2019, states that as far as he could tell, "aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven't contacted U.S. intelligence." Promoting the book on The Joe Rogan Experience that October, he said he had gone "looking on the network" and that, despite "ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military," he "couldn't find anything." He added a qualification: "if it's hidden, and it could be hidden, it's hidden really damn well, even from people who are on the inside."

He returned to the subject on February 13, 2023, after U.S. fighters had shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon and three further unidentified objects over North America. "it's not aliens / i wish it were aliens," he posted, calling the episode "the ol' engineered panic" that kept national security reporters on balloons rather than "budgets or bombings." The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said there was "no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity" in the shootdowns.

Snowden remains the best-known example of an intelligence insider who took classified material public, and UFO commentators continue to invoke him. In June 2026 journalist Ross Coulthart warned that unless someone in government showed leadership there could be "catastrophic disclosure where an Edward Snowden type leak occurs," and in October 2026 a UAP commentator recirculated the 2023 balloon post, asking whether Snowden was "still quite so certain." The comparison is drawn most often with David Grusch, who took his allegations of hidden crash-retrieval programs to the intelligence community's inspector general and, in 2023, to Congress rather than releasing documents himself.