Susan Gough, often quoted as Sue Gough, is a spokesperson in Pentagon Press Operations, the office that answers media questions for the Department of War, as the Defense Department has also been styled since 2025. Since at least 2019 she has regularly provided the department's on-the-record statements about unidentified aerial phenomena, and her replies to reporters, researchers and records requesters are the wording that news outlets cite as the department's position on Navy videos, the UAP Task Force, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and alleged secret programs.

One of Gough's earliest widely reported UAP statements came in September 2019, when she confirmed that the three Navy videos released in 2017 and 2018 had been recorded by naval aviators. She described them as "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years." In April 2021 she confirmed that leaked video of what appeared to be a triangular object, filmed from the destroyer USS Russell in 2019, had been taken by Navy personnel. The following month she confirmed that an infrared video of a spherical object recorded aboard USS Omaha in July 2019 was also Navy footage under task force review.

As whistleblower allegations reached Congress, Gough delivered the department's denials. After former intelligence officer David Grusch alleged in June 2023 that the government held recovered craft of non-human origin, she said that AARO "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently." In October 2024, after journalist Michael Shellenberger reported a whistleblower account of a UAP intelligence effort called Immaculate Constellation, she told NewsNation that "The Department of Defense has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called 'IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION.'"

Her role grew more visible in 2026 as congressional demands and official record releases accelerated. When Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs a House task force on federal secrets, wrote to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on March 31 requesting more than 46 UAP videos by April 14, Gough told Liberation Times that "As with all congressional correspondence, the Department of War will respond directly to the author of the letter." After the second tranche of the 2026 UAP files release in May, her reply to journalist Chrissy Newton, given on background for attribution to a War Department official, said the department was "not providing any comment or assessment on the files overall or on any specific file, so that the American people can make up their own minds."

That carefully bounded wording has made Gough a frequent target of disclosure advocates. In May 2026 journalist Ross Coulthart argued that one of her statements was given only on behalf of AARO and "conspicuously" avoided saying whether anyone elsewhere under the Pentagon's control held verifiable information on recovered non-human technology, part of what he called the military's "linguistic sophistry." Because her statements are the department's formal answers, they have become fixed reference points in the UAP record, quoted by supporters and critics alike to establish exactly what the Pentagon has and has not been willing to say.