# Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act

The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act (UAPDA) was a series of bills passed by the United States Congress and signed into law on December 22, 2023. The law mandated the National Archives and Records Administration assemble a UAP Collection of unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) data. The UAPDA was introduced as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024.

## Background

On January 12, 2023, the Pentagon's Office of the Director of National Intelligence's (DNI) report found that 171 UAP reports were "uncharacterized", concluding the sightings "continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat". From January 28 to February 4, 2023, a high-altitude balloon originating from China flew across North American airspace, including Alaska, western Canada, and the contiguous United States.
On February 4, the United States Air Force shot down the balloon over American territorial waters off the coast of South Carolina. The military revealed that three similar Chinese balloons had penetrated North American airspace in the prior years, but top American military officials had not been alerted because they had been classified as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). In 2022, the DNI said that there had been at least 171 reports of unexplained aerial phenomena in the United States, and the United States Intelligence Community had been unable to determine their precise nature. The commander of United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), General Glen VanHerck, said that United States failure to detect and identify all such incursions is "a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out". In response, the United States changed the sensitivity of its radar detection systems, which enabled it to detect additional UFOs.

## UAP Disclosure Act

The bill was introduced in July 2023 by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Mike Rounds of South Dakota. Schumer described the bill as having been modeled on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The bill was attached as a 64-page amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (NDAA), with Marco Rubio of Florida and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, co-sponsoring the amendment. The UAPDA has been called directly in the legislation passed into Federal law part of a "controlled disclosure campaign," and defines such a campaign for government disclosure of known UFO, UAP, and non-human intelligence related topics.
The House of Representatives approved their version of the 2023 NDAA with the UAPDA attached on July 14, 2023. The NDAA with the UAPDA for 2024 was passed on December 22, 2023.
With enactment of the 2023 NDAA, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Archivist of the United States were ordered to "commence establishment of a collection of unidentified anomalous phenomena." The "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Records Collection will consist of 'copies of all Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects).'" The law mandated that detailed records and materials of non-human intelligence origins "shall be transmitted to the National Archives in accordance with section 2107 of title 44, United States Code." In 2024, the National Archives and Records Administration and major Washington, D.C. area law firms such as Covington & Burling began advising and directing clients and government agencies to begin compliance with the enacted UAPDA requirements. On February 6, 2024, the National Archives and Records Administration formally notified all United States government records administrators to begin their mandated compliance with UFO/UAP disclosure requirements.

## Reactions to the 2024 UAPDA

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was supportive of UFO and UAPDA related transparency . "If we had found a UFO, I think the Department of Defense would tell us because they’d probably wanna request more money. I’d love to see what other facts and information we have. I’m very supportive of letting the American public see what we have," he said on Fox News. Senate Majority Leader Schumer remarked, "The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public." It was reported in The Hill that Member of congress Anna Paulina Luna said the UAPDA faced resistance from others members of Congress. The Hill reported that additional resistance to the UAPDA came via Senator Mitch McConnell, House members Mike Rogers and Mike Turner, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Senator Marco Rubio stated, "We’ve taken some important steps over the last few years to increase transparency and reduce stigmas, but more needs to be done. This is yet another step in that direction, and one that I hope will spur further cooperation from the executive branch." Of the weakened version of the UAPDA passed for 2024, House Representative Tim Burchett stated, "We got ripped off. We got completely hosed. They stripped out every part."

## Future laws and a UAP Review Board

The initial proposal for the UAPDA included plans for a UAP Review Board, with specific professional qualifications and requirements for each member to be eligible, and each member would then require confirmation in the United States Senate to access UAP Records Collections generated by legal requirements. Additionally, the UAP Review Board would be required under law to be composed of specific professionals by their experience and training, to consist of one each: current or former national security official; current or former foreign service official; one scientist or engineer; one economist; one professional historian, and one sociologist. Among other provisions in the UAPDA were strong protections for whistleblowers.
The UAP Review Board would have subpoena power to access classified information, which is governed by executive order of the President, and restricted data controlled by the United States Department of Energy as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The UAP Review Board, examining all materials without restriction, would determine whether a given asset or piece of information shall be made public for disclosure, or postponed further, with the presumption of defaulting to public disclosure of any materials if discovered. The President would then act upon the UAP Review Board's guidance, and all materials would be mandated for public disclosure within twenty-five years of the passage of the UAPDA, unless the President detailed to the Congress why that given item should remain restricted, with threats to national security as an eligible reason for delaying disclosure. Disclosure of specific items could also be delayed in accordance with privacy laws for private individuals and their personal information. Additionally, under the UAPDA, no private non-governmental parties or private citizens would going forward be allowed to keep or maintain any UAPDA-covered assets if they possessed them, and all such materials would be seized by the Federal government of the United States under eminent domain.
The timeline for the UAPDA would mandate the President and Senate establish the UAP Review Board within 90 days. Following that, similar to the previous format of the concept in the Intelligence Authorization Act, all parts of the United States government and private parties would be required to turn over all UFO/UAP data to the Review Board within 300 days. The UAP Review Board would then have 180 days to review all data, and then must release their findings to Congress within an additional 14 days.
After bill emerged from United States congressional conference committee, which is composed of both House and Senate members who modify bills passed respectively by the House and Senate to synchronize them for a final vote to forward the proposed law to the United States President, a modified and reduced in power version of the UAPDA was attached and made live as part of the NDAA for 2024. Two reportedly key provisions were ultimately removed from the final reconciled version of the UAPDA that passed for 2023 and enactment in 2024. For the 2024 cycle, that included the UAP Review Board itself, as well as the eminent domain provisions. According to the New York Times, the Defense Department objected to some UAPDA measures, saying a "person familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to describe them noted that the Defense Department also had pushed back forcefully on wider measures" in the proposed law.
In the summer of 2024, the full UAPDA with all prior required powers that did not survive passage on the first attempt was again introduced to Congress for a second consecutive year, to be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025.

## Extraterrestrial conspiracy theories

Beginning with the 1947 flying disc craze, reports of unidentified flying objects have been linked in the popular imagination with spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials. This was partly fueled by civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold's story of witnessing disc-shaped objects which headline writers dubbed "Flying Saucers". By the mid-1950s, Donald Keyhoe's book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy alleged that elements in the government were conspiring to cover up knowledge of extraterrestrial spaceships, as reported by aerospace historian Curtis Peebles in his 1994 book, Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth.
Jim Semivan is a Central Intelligence Agency veteran who cofounded To The Stars Inc., a company involved in the promotion of UFOs and other fringe science.. Semivan told USA Today, "It is unlikely the U.S. Government nor any other government that has UAP-related research programs knows exactly how to selectively release information on UAPs. You can't just say, 'UAPs are real and we are not alone;' the questions would never stop... the people would demand more information. It is all or nothing.".
Skeptical investigator Mick West questioned the act, posting to social media: "Here's the problem. The UAP Disclosure Amendment seeks to set up a process for documenting UAP based on six observables. Yet no clear evidence has ever been shown that such a thing exists. @DoD_AARO EXPLICITLY said they have no such evidence. So what's the basis? Talk? Stories?"