Disclosure

What disclosure means

The narrow sense is legal. In the records legislation Congress took up in 2023, disclosure means the transmission of government UAP records to public inspection at the National Archives under a presumption of immediate disclosure.¹ The broad sense belongs to the movement. Since the early 1990s organized advocacy has used the word for the awaited moment, or the extended process, in which official institutions state plainly what they have observed, collected, and concluded, up to and including acknowledgment of any non-human intelligence involved.

Both senses meet in the online communities where the subject now lives. A December 2025 survey of online UAP communities describes the subreddit r/UFOs, with millions of members, as the largest general discussion forum for the subject and as a rapid-response mechanism that amplifies news of government hearings and whistleblower testimony.² In a 2026 article in Information, Communication and Society, Marco Bastos and Marisa Duarte analyzed those communities against a timeline of official announcements and hearings, found that direct government engagement measurably eased concern about disinformation, and observed that disclosure is itself "ideologically and politically inflected."³

Named advocates, published documents, and enacted process carry the account of disclosure. Testimony stands as testimony and not as settled fact, and what the unacknowledged files hold stays an open question rather than a premise.

The documented arc of official acknowledgment

The movement's central argument is historical. Official candor about government UFO holdings has arrived before, and it has arrived late, through congressional pressure, reporting, and legislated review.

1947 and 1994: the Mogul acknowledgment

The movement's most cited precedent is Roswell. In 1994, after Representative Steven Schiff of New Mexico pressed the question through the General Accounting Office, the United States Air Force acknowledged that the weather balloon explanation it had issued in 1947 for debris recovered near Roswell was a cover story for Project Mogul, a then-classified program that flew balloon trains carrying acoustic sensors to detect Soviet atomic tests.^4,5 A 1995 Air Force analysis by Weaver and McAndrew concluded that the recovered material was consistent with a balloon device and most likely came from a Mogul flight, and a 1997 report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, addressed witness accounts of bodies by pointing to parachute test dummies from later programs.^4,5 For the movement the sequence sets a double precedent: an official explanation stood for 47 years while concealing a classified program, and congressional pressure with archival review eventually produced a fuller account.⁴

2017: the AATIP story

On December 16, 2017, the New York Times published an account by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean revealing the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a Pentagon effort funded at roughly 22 million dollars between 2007 and 2012 at the initiative of Senator Harry Reid.⁶ Three Navy cockpit videos accompanied the reporting, the Navy confirmed their authenticity in September 2019, and the Pentagon formally released them in April 2020.⁶

2021: the ODNI preliminary assessment

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its unclassified preliminary assessment on June 25, 2021. It covered 144 reports from United States government sources between November 2004 and March 2021 and resolved exactly one with high confidence, a large deflating balloon.⁷ It sorted potential explanations into five categories and recorded aviator narratives describing "disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues."⁷

2022: AARO and the historical review

The Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office on July 20, 2022, with an all-domain mandate, first under physicist Sean Kirkpatrick and, from August 2024, under Jon Kosloski.⁸ AARO opened a public website in 2023 that hosts official reporting channels and released records.⁸ Its Historical Record Report, published on March 6, 2024, reviewed the government record back to 1945 and stated that it found no empirical evidence that any investigated sighting represented off-world technology or that any reverse-engineering program had been concealed from Congress.⁸

2023: the congressional hearing

On July 26, 2023, a national security subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee took testimony from retired Navy commander David Fravor, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, and retired Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch.⁹ Grusch, who had served with the Pentagon's UAP Task Force, testified that the United States has operated a multi-decade program to retrieve and reverse engineer crashed craft, and stated that his testimony rested on interviews with more than 40 witnesses rather than on direct observation.⁹ Graves described a 2014 encounter off Virginia Beach with a dark cube inside a clear sphere and urged Congress to "put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents," and the witnesses called for a safe, transparent, centralized reporting system.⁹ Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough responded that the department had found "no verifiable information to substantiate" the existence of such retrieval programs, past or present.⁹

The UAP Disclosure Act and the records review

On July 14, 2023, Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds announced the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act as an amendment to the annual defense bill, modeled on the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.¹ As introduced, it directed the National Archives to assemble a UAP Records Collection under a presumption of immediate disclosure, allowed postponement only on specific harm findings, created a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed independent Review Board to rule on withholding, and gave the federal government eminent domain over any "technologies of unknown origin" and "biological evidence of non-human intelligence" held by private entities.^1,10 Congress thereby put non-human intelligence into proposed statutory text, not as an assertion that such intelligence exists but as a category the review would test.¹

Conference with the House in December 2023 kept the archive and dropped the enforcement architecture. The enacted provisions, sections 1841 through 1843 of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, directed the National Archives to establish the collection by February 23, 2024 and required government offices to identify and review their UAP records by October 23, 2024.¹⁰ Each record is to be transmitted for public inspection or postponed on a written finding that release would pose a grave threat to military defense, intelligence operations, or the conduct of foreign relations, with notice to Congress within 15 days and periodic review against a 25-year horizon from the record's creation.¹⁰ The independent review board and the eminent domain provision did not survive conference.¹⁰

The National Archives maintains the collection as Record Group 615 and states that records are added and made available online "on an ongoing, rolling basis as they are received from federal agencies."¹¹ Efforts to restore the full act have so far not passed. The Senate agreement on the fiscal year 2026 defense bill, finalized on October 9, 2025, did not include the reintroduced act and retained only a requirement that the Pentagon brief lawmakers on operations since 2004 involving UAP intercepts.¹²

Named advocates and organizations

The movement's public record runs through named people and incorporated organizations.

Steven Greer and the Disclosure Project

The word owes much of its currency to Steven Greer, a physician who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1990 and the Disclosure Project in 1993.^13,14 On May 9, 2001, the project convened a National Press Club conference at which twenty retired military, intelligence, and Federal Aviation Administration officials presented what they described as first-hand knowledge of the phenomenon and called for the release of classified information.^13,14 Greer has described the project as an effort to secure protection for government witnesses otherwise bound by security oaths, and he presents the 2001 conference as the movement's founding public event.^13,14

Christopher Mellon

Christopher Mellon spent a decade on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence from 1999 under the Clinton and Bush administrations, and returned to the committee as minority staff director in 2003.¹⁵ He stated in a 2020 documentary that he had been the source who provided the Navy UAP videos to the New York Times, and from 2017 he advised To The Stars Academy as its national security affairs adviser.¹⁵ Harvard's Galileo Project named him a research affiliate in 2021, and he serves on the board of the Disclosure Foundation.^15,16

Leslie Kean

Journalist Leslie Kean's 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, a New York Times bestseller, assembled named senior witnesses willing to speak on the record.¹⁷ She co-authored the December 16, 2017 New York Times story that revealed AATIP, and on June 5, 2023 she and Ralph Blumenthal published in The Debrief the first account of David Grusch's statements, weeks before his congressional testimony.^6,17

Current organizations: the Disclosure Foundation and Americans for Safe Aerospace

The Disclosure Foundation, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) whose board includes Mellon and Mike Gold, with Jordan Flowers as executive director, states its mission as "advancing the public disclosure and scientific understanding of unidentified anomalous phenomena through policy leadership, legal action, and public education."¹⁶ Its work as of mid-2026 includes congressional briefings, Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification litigation, an open documentation standard called DisclosureOS, an expert letter signed by 29 academics and national security professionals, and a Disclosure Forum convened in the Senate's Kennedy Caucus Room on June 25, 2026.¹⁶ Americans for Safe Aerospace, founded by former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, describes itself as a military pilot led nonprofit focused on UAP as an aerospace safety and national security matter, maintains a confidential reporting channel for pilots, and reports a membership above 30,000.¹⁸

Personal disclosure among experiencers

Alongside the institutional campaign, experiencers use the word in a personal sense: disclosure as the decision to attach one's name to one's own account. Models for the decision sit at the top of the public record, where Kean's book gathered named officials going on the record and the 2023 hearing placed three named witnesses under oath before cameras.^9,17 ODNI's 2021 assessment recorded aviator narratives describing disparagement for observing, reporting, or discussing UAP, and Graves urged Congress in 2023 to put the stigma aside.^7,9

Support structures for going public now exist in layers: confidential channels first, official mechanisms second, public testimony last. Americans for Safe Aerospace offers pilots a confidential reporting path, and AARO's public site hosts official reporting channels.^8,18 For experiencers outside aviation and government the decision is less structured, the formal literature on this personal usage is thin, and the documented record consists chiefly of the public examples above and community discussion, where going public is weighed against professional and social cost.

Research perspectives

Researchers, officials, and advocates read the same record through several perspectives, none mutually exclusive.

Documentation and research record

The documentation sits in five layers: the enacted text of sections 1841 through 1843 with the National Archives' administration of Record Group 615,^10,11 the published official assessments from 2021 through AARO's historical review and annual reporting,^7,8 the congressional record including the July 2023 hearing,⁹ the advocacy archive from the Disclosure Project's 2001 materials to the Disclosure Foundation's current policy briefs,^13,16 and scholarship on the discourse itself, which now includes peer-reviewed analysis of how official transparency reshapes community discussion.³

What the public record cannot yet supply is what the movement most wants: an authoritative account of what has not been transmitted. The public collection shows what has arrived, while what remains in agency hands, under review or postponement, can only be inferred from statutory timelines and congressional oversight.^10,11 The transmission of those files is what will show whether they reveal investigation more extensive than any assessment has described or confirm that what has already been released is substantially the whole record.

The record and open questions

Documented: The institutional history runs from the Disclosure Project's founding in 1993 and its May 2001 press conference through the December 2017 New York Times report, the 2021 ODNI assessment, the 2022 creation of AARO, the 2023 hearing, and the UAP records provisions enacted that December. The Air Force's 1994 Mogul acknowledgment stands as documented precedent that an official explanation concealed a classified program for 47 years. Every published official review to date states that it has found no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Reported: Congressional testimony from 2023 describes retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, presented by the witness as resting on interviews with other officials, and the Pentagon states it has found no verifiable information supporting the account. Witnesses and experiencers describe official engagement beginning to ease the cost of speaking, and forum research measures effects consistent with those descriptions.

Open questions: What the records still in agency hands contain, how many will be postponed and on what findings, and whether a future Congress restores the review board are the live procedural questions. Whether any released record will alter the published official conclusions is the substantive one, and the answer will come from the files themselves. They could corroborate parts of the 2023 testimony, or they could show that the published assessments already describe the whole of what governments hold. Either way, the records review the law created is the instrument built to settle it, and that work is now underway.

Frequently asked questions

What does disclosure mean in the UFO and UAP community?

Disclosure names the expected formal acknowledgment by governments of what they know about unidentified anomalous phenomena, together with the movement working to bring that acknowledgment about. In current United States law it has a narrower meaning, the transmission of government UAP records to a public collection at the National Archives under a presumption of immediate disclosure. Experiencers also use the word in a personal sense for the decision to go public with one's own account.^1,11

Has any government acknowledged UAP?

Yes, as a category of unresolved observations. The United States Navy confirmed the authenticity of three UAP videos in 2019, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a preliminary assessment in 2021, and the Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022. Official acknowledgment currently extends to the phenomena as real, unresolved observations, while published reviews state they have found no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology.^6,7,8

What is the UAP Disclosure Act?

The UAP Disclosure Act is legislation introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds in July 2023 and modeled on the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Its surviving provisions, enacted in the fiscal year 2024 defense bill, direct government offices to review their UAP records and transmit them to a public collection at the National Archives, with postponement allowed only on specific harm findings. The original amendment's independent review board and eminent domain provisions were removed before passage, and later attempts to restore the full act have not passed.^1,10,12

Who are the leading disclosure advocates?

Steven Greer's Disclosure Project, founded in 1993, convened the May 2001 National Press Club conference that carried the movement to wide public attention. Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, provided the Navy UAP videos to the New York Times and serves on the board of the Disclosure Foundation. Journalist Leslie Kean co-authored the December 2017 New York Times story on AATIP and the June 2023 article that brought David Grusch's account forward. Ryan Graves leads Americans for Safe Aerospace, a pilot-led reporting and advocacy organization.^13,15,17,18

What would disclosure change for experiencers?

The documented answers concern records and stigma. Enacted law already directs UAP records into a public collection at the National Archives, so continued releases let experiencers and researchers compare accounts against official files. Official engagement has also begun to ease the documented stigma around speaking, a change noted in the 2021 ODNI assessment and measured in later forum research. Whether fuller releases would corroborate particular experiencer accounts is a genuinely open question, since the contents of records not yet transmitted are exactly what the review process exists to establish.^3,7,10,11

Sources and further reading

1. Wikipedia. "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_Anomalous_Phenomena_Disclosure_Act
2. New Space Economy. "Top 10 Online Communities for UAP Discussion." December 10, 2025. https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2025/12/10/top-10-online-communities-for-uap-discussion/
3. Bastos, Marco, and Marisa Duarte. "Between Disclosure and Conspiracy: The Transparency Effect on r/UFO and r/UAP Subreddits." Information, Communication and Society, published online March 29, 2026. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/37038/
4. Wikipedia. "Roswell incident." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident
5. Wikipedia. "Project Mogul." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
6. Wikipedia. "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Aerospace_Threat_Identification_Program
7. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." June 25, 2021. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
8. Wikipedia. "All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office
9. NPR. "Whistleblower testifies U.S. salvaged 'non-human biologics' from UFO crash sites." July 27, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190390376/ufo-hearing-non-human-biologics-uaps
10. Covington & Burling LLP. "Implications of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Amendment in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)." Inside Government Contracts, January 2024. https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2024/01/implications-of-the-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-uap-amendment-in-the-2024-national-defense-authorization-act-ndaa/
11. National Archives and Records Administration. "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records." https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps
12. The Disclosure Era. "UAP Disclosure Act Stalls Again: UAPDA Excluded from FY2026 Defense Bill." https://www.thedisclosureera.com/articles/uap-disclosure-act-stalls-again-uapda-excluded-from-fy2026-defense-bill
13. Wikipedia. "Disclosure Project." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_Project
14. The Well News. "The Truth Is Out There, If Only The Government Would Disclose It." https://www.thewellnews.com/spotlight/the-truth-is-out-there-if-only-the-government-would-disclose-it/
15. Wikipedia. "Christopher Mellon." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Mellon
16. Disclosure Foundation. "Advancing UAP Transparency." Accessed July 2026. https://disclosure.org/
17. Wikipedia. "Leslie Kean." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Kean
18. Americans for Safe Aerospace. Organization website. Accessed July 2026. https://www.safeaerospace.org/