Martin Heinrich is an American Democratic politician who has represented New Mexico in the U.S. Senate since January 2013. An engineer by training, he sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Appropriations Committee, and since January 2025 he has been the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He entered the UAP record in July 2023 as one of the senators who joined Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds in proposing the UAP Disclosure Act.

Heinrich was born on October 17, 1971, in Fallon, Nevada, and earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri in 1995, later taking graduate courses at the University of New Mexico. After moving to Albuquerque he worked as a contractor on directed-energy technology at the Phillips Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, now part of the Air Force Research Laboratory, and served in AmeriCorps with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He was executive director of the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation from 1996 to 2001, led the Coalition for New Mexico Wilderness and founded a public affairs consulting firm in 2002.

His elected career began on the Albuquerque City Council, where he represented the 6th district from 2004 to 2008 and served a term as council president. In 2006 Governor Bill Richardson appointed him New Mexico's natural resources trustee. He won the state's 1st congressional district in 2008 and served two House terms, including on the Armed Services Committee, before winning the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Bingaman in 2012. He was re-elected in 2018 and in 2024, when he defeated Nella Domenici with about 55 percent of the vote. In the Senate he helped secure the Río Grande del Norte and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks national monuments, worked on the 2015 extension of renewable energy tax credits and chaired the Joint Economic Committee from 2023 to 2025.

On July 14, 2023, Chuck Schumer and Rounds announced the UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the defense authorization bill, joined by Heinrich, Marco Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand and Todd Young. Modeled on the 1992 JFK assassination records law, it proposed a UAP records collection at the National Archives, a presumption that its records would be released, an independent review board and federal eminent domain over recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence held by private parties. "The American people deserve transparency," Heinrich said in the announcement, adding that the federal government "needs to be able to explain what is happening in our skies." The version enacted that December kept the records collection but dropped several of the strongest measures, including eminent domain.

Heinrich has spoken little about the subject in public since then. In May 2026, after Schumer wrote that UFO disclosure was "starting to change," the researcher Joe Murgia urged Schumer, Gillibrand and Heinrich to "come out of UFO hibernation" and speak up for the legislation. His place in the UAP story rests on that 2023 proposal, which drew a senator with an engineering background, early work at a New Mexico Air Force laboratory and a seat on the intelligence committee into one of the most far-reaching congressional attempts so far to open government UAP records.