Pentagon Is Illegally Hiding Secret UFO Program From Congress, Whistleblowers Allege

One of Congress’ most important responsibilities is oversight of the executive branch in general and the military and Intelligence Community (IC) in particular. The first article of the United States Constitution specifies this responsibility. This role ensures that powerful governmental entities operate within the bounds of the law, uphold democratic principles, and remain accountable to the American people.

This responsibility extends to classified programs like Special Access Programs (SAPs). By law, the Department of Defense (DOD) must notify the “Gang of Eight” (the chairpersons and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate) and/or the relevant congressional committees about their existence.  

The National Security Act of 1947 requires that covert operations and Compartmentalized Access Programs (CAPs) by intelligence agencies, including the military intelligence community, be reported to Congress. Specifically, the President must provide a written finding that justifies covert action and submit it to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

While the military and IC may limit the amount of detail shared with Congress, the Constitutional and legal responsibility remains. Sunshine remains the best disinfectant. Readers are, of course, welcome to disbelieve the whistleblowers and the evidence they provide of UAPs. I do not claim to know what they are.

There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the government is not being transparent about what it knows about UAPs and that elements within the military and IC are in violation of their Constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations.

Over the last four days, a Pentagon spokesperson repeatedly promised to respond to Public’s questions but did not do so. We will update this article with their response should they decide to provide one.

— Michael

There is no evidence that any non-human or extra-terrestrial intelligence has visited Earth, according to a May 2024 report by the office the Pentagon created in 2022 to study unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly called UFOs.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office AARO “assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part,” the report concluded, “the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

The former Director of AARO has since resigned his position and has repeatedly dismissed and ridiculed the topic, claiming that talk of the phenomenon is due mainly to a small group of individuals in the grip of a rumor-based religion.

But critics say that AARO’s 63-page history of the US government’s investigation into UAPs since the end of World War II was riddled with factual errors and poor referencing, including to Wikipedia. And the document was missing historical information that appeared in the 117-page “UAP Timeline” document created by a former or existing US government intelligence officer that Public published last year.

Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush, wrote a lengthy rebuttal, concluding, “this is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service.”

And major political figures, including Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, have vouched for the credibility of UAP witnesses and whistleblowers.

“I’ve interviewed solid people,” said former president Donald Trump in September, “great pilots for the US Air Force, et cetera, they’ve seen things that they cannot explain.”

Trump has said repeatedly that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. In 2020, during a podcast with his son, Donald Trump, Jr., Trump said, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”

In June of this year, Trump said that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. “I have access,” he said, “and I speak to people about it. I’ve had actually meetings on it. And they will tell you there’s something going on.”

In 2021, former CIA Director John Brennan said, “I think some of the phenomena we may be seeing continue to be unexplained and might be some type of phenomenon that results from something that we don’t yet understand and could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

The same year, the current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, said UAPs could constitute human intelligence (NHI).

In 2023, a high-ranking former intelligence officer named David Grusch testified to Congress that the US government had retrieved spacecraft of nonhuman origin and bodies, which US government insiders told Public was accurate.

In July 2022, the Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded that Grusch’s complaint that “elements” of the IC had withheld or hidden UAP-related information from Congress “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program” was both “credible” and “urgent.”

At the time, Charles McCullough III, the first Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, who the US Senate had confirmed for his job in 2011, represented Grusch.

That does not mean that extraterrestrial beings occupy or are operating the UAPs, nor that the US government and military contractors are hiding crashed alien spacecraft or bodies, as some former astronauts, former IC officers, and former military leaders claim.

There are other explanations for UAPs. Current dominant alternative theories, including those put forward by AARO, are that UAPs are some kind of natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand, like ball lighting or plasma. They could also be part of some new US or foreign government weapons program, such as drones, aircraft, balloons, CGI hoaxes, or birds.

Other UAP skeptics say that some combination of government disinformation and social contagion, like the Satanic panic of the 1980s or the Salem witch trials, among UAP believers in the US military are driving the phenomenon.

Is it possible that the Pentagon and CIA are still playing disinformation games with the American people to cover up unacknowledged programs? Or that intelligence and security agencies, as well as politicians, are creating a UAP hoax to frighten the public? And is it possible that whistleblowers are fabricating parts or all of their testimony?

The US Air Force allegedly used disinformation against a UFO buff in the past to cover up a weapons program. Something similar could be happening today.

However, no available evidence supports that theory. And so, while this possibility should not be ignored, for it to be true, it would require a complicated conspiracy with unclear motivations.

As Senator Rubio noted last year, “Most of [the UAP whistleblowers] have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So, you do ask yourself: What incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification – these are serious people – have to come forward and make something up?”

Rubio also said that individuals in “high clearances and high positions within our government” with “firsthand knowledge” of UAPs were “fearful of harm coming to them.”

Grusch and other UAP whistleblowers say the government retaliated against them and tried to stop them from going public.

Last year, Senator Gillibrand said, “There’s a lot of fear and so I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it. I don’t know if we’ll ever get the information about Special Access Programs that are ‘need to know,’ only that Congress has not [been] read in on. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.”

The training and experience of many UAP witnesses and whistleblowers, including in the US IC and military, undermine facile dismissals of all these individuals as cranks and grifters.

In 2021, John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence under former President Trump, said that UAP demonstrated “technologies that we don’t have and, frankly, that we are not capable of defending against.” And, Ratcliffe said, U.S. intelligence analysts had “high confidence” that foreign adversaries were not behind the famous “Tic Tac” UAP that four Navy Pilots encountered over the water.

Last October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the DOD published their 2023 Annual Report on UAPs. It said that “many reports from military witnesses do present potential safety of flight concerns, and there are some cases where reported UAP have potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability.”

Finally, many videos and photographs cannot be easily dismissed, and people have reported similar UAPs before drones, aircraft, and CGI existed or were widespread.

And now, existing and former US government officials have told members of Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing a significant body of information about UAPs, including military intelligence databases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft.

One of these individuals is a current or former US government official acting as a UAP whistleblower. The person has written a report that says “the Executive Branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without Congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades.”

Furthermore, these individuals have revealed the name of an active and highly secretive DOD “Unacknowledged Special Access Program,” or USAP. The source of the document told Public that the USAP is a “strategic intelligence program” that is part of the US military’s family of long-standing, highly-sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP ‘problem.’”

Public is revealing its name here for the first time.