UFOs and the National Security State is a two-volume history by American author and historian Richard Dolan that traces how United States military and intelligence agencies handled UFO reports from 1941 to 1991. Working from declassified records, press reports and other primary and secondary sources, Dolan argues that those agencies took the phenomenon seriously while restricting what the public could learn about it, and that secrecy is the organizing fact of the subject's history. The first volume covers 1941 to 1973 and the second 1973 to 1991.

Volume one first appeared in 2000 from Keyhole Publishing, subtitled An Unclassified History, and Hampton Roads published a revised edition in 2002 as Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941–1973. According to its publisher, it covers UFO activity reported at more than fifty military bases, incursions into restricted airspace, the Roswell controversy, the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, the Condon Committee report and the civilian anti-secrecy movement of the 1950s and 1960s, ending with the "closing of the door" under the Nixon administration. Volume two, The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973–1991, followed in 2009 with a foreword by journalist Linda Moulton Howe. Its more than 600 pages take in sightings near sensitive military sites in the United States and Britain, black-budget programs, abduction reports, animal mutilations, the MJ-12 documents and the Gulf Breeze case.

The books are a history written from a disclosure-oriented position. They rest on real documents, but their central conclusion, that a deliberate and continuing cover-up shaped official handling of the subject, goes beyond what the released records state on their own. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reached the opposite conclusion in March 2024, when its review of the historical record from 1945 onward reported no empirical evidence that sightings represented off-world technology or that any program held extraterrestrial craft or artifacts.

Dolan promoted both volumes again in March and April 2026, describing them as "40 years of research" built on primary sources and noting that they were "published before congressional UAP acknowledgment." Television writer and producer Bryce Zabel, Dolan's co-author on A.D. After Disclosure (2010), wrote in April 2026 that he had read both volumes twice and that the first led him to contact Dolan, beginning their friendship and collaboration. The series remains one of the most detailed chronological arguments for a UFO cover-up, and a reference point as federal agencies released their own UFO files in 2026.