Kent Heckenlively is an American attorney, science teacher and author whose 2025 book Catastrophic Disclosure: The Deep State, Aliens, and the Truth, written with documentary director Michael Mazzola, brought him into UAP media. Before turning to UFOs he was best known for books questioning vaccine safety, and in 2026 his claims about a coming presidential UFO order circulated widely in UAP media while he wrote about the congressional push to declassify UFO records.

According to his publisher, Heckenlively worked for a U.S. senator while a student at Saint Mary's College and attended Golden Gate University Law School, where he wrote for and edited the law review and spent summers at the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco. With former research scientist Judy Mikovits he wrote Plague (2014) and Plague of Corruption (2020), the second with a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and on his own he wrote Inoculated (2016) and The Case Against Vaccine Mandates (2021). Neurologist Steven Novella of Science-Based Medicine described him in 2017 as a longtime anti-vaccine writer. His other co-written books include Google Leaks (2021) with Zach Vorhies, This Was CNN (2022) with James O'Keefe and Cary Poarch, The Great Awakening (2023) with Alex Jones and Twilight of the Shadow Government (2024) with Kevin Shipp.

Catastrophic Disclosure, published by Post Hill Press, shares its title with a disclosure-movement term for an uncontrolled revelation of non-human intelligence. By the publisher's description, it covers an alleged UFO crash in 1945, about a month after the first atomic test at Trinity, the recent congressional disclosure hearings and documents the authors say support nonhuman visitation, material from the UFO report archive of Steven Greer, and Mazzola's trip to Nazca, Peru, to examine mummified bodies the authors say show signs of genetic manipulation.

In May 2026 Heckenlively told Real America's Voice that he believed President Trump could soon sign an executive order on UAP disclosure that might lift nondisclosure agreements and require records to be turned over, citing a memorandum described in his book as having been given to Trump early in his second term. Researcher Joe Murgia, relaying the claims, said he was "VERY skeptical" and noted that no such order existed at the time. In another interview that week Heckenlively said Roswell may not have been the first UFO crash and that "everything that I have seen suggests that [UFO crashes] are real." When a commentator linked him to Greer through Mazzola, he replied that Greer was "not a fan of mine" and considered him too skeptical.

In October 2026 Rep. Eric Burlison promoted Heckenlively's next book, The Book of Secrets, about the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Burlison said he had given the author extensive interviews over a year and a half, that Heckenlively had also spoken with Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, and that he "always seemed committed to getting the facts right"; he added that a chapter about him in Catastrophic Disclosure had been a fair portrayal. The two books have taken a writer long associated with vaccine skepticism into a new role as a chronicler of the congressional disclosure effort, with direct access to the legislators leading it.