For most of my life, disclosure was something the UFO community predicted. This year it became something with a filing system. Government UAP records are now being published on a rolling schedule under a February executive order, and just this month came a directive freeing former employees and contractors from their non-disclosure agreements if they bring what they know through official channels. A process like that is run by people, and since the next six months of this story will be shaped by a fairly small cast, I thought it was worth setting out who they are.
The Congressional engine room
The legislative groundwork is older than the current push. Marco Rubio was writing UAP reporting requirements into intelligence legislation from the Senate Intelligence Committee as far back as 2020, work that helped create the reporting pipeline everything since has flowed through, and the late Harry Reid had been quietly securing funding for Pentagon UAP research a decade before that. Rubio has been noticeably quieter on the subject since becoming Secretary of State, but his presence in the administration means the current process is overseen in part by someone with a genuine legislative history in it, which is not nothing.
The pressure today comes from the House. Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee has been the loudest voice on this subject in Congress since he co-organised the July 2023 hearing that put whistleblower testimony on the public record. He is completely unembarrassed by a topic that ended careers a generation ago, which is precisely what made him effective back when almost nobody else would touch it, and he has said the classified briefings he has received would leave the country "unglued" if their contents were public.
(Image Credit: U.S. House of Representatives, public domain)
Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida chairs the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which makes her the person holding the formal machinery. It was Luna who set the Pentagon an April deadline to hand over 46 specific UAP videos held by the government (a deadline the Department of War missed), and she has made it clear she is prepared to reach for subpoena power if the footage stays buried. She is also reported to be working with the White House on protections for witnesses, which connects directly to this month's directive.
Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri has been the one openly discussing compelled testimony, noting that a single committee motion could put subpoenas in front of witnesses the government has kept behind classification walls. Of the three House names, his is the approach I find most interesting to watch, because subpoenas are the point where polite requests stop.
They are not alone in the building. Representative Jared Moskowitz of Florida has kept the effort visibly bipartisan, a detail that matters more than it sounds given that a purely partisan disclosure push would not survive a change of administration. In the Senate, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who co-sponsored the original UAP Disclosure Act with Chuck Schumer, has said he intends to revive legislation specifically protecting whistleblowers who come forward about recovered technology, while Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, co-founder of the Senate's UAP caucus, is the person who fought to fund AARO in the first place and has kept Democratic engagement alive through every news cycle since.
The scientist with a government mandate
The most significant structural change of 2026 is that the government asked a scientist to help. Professor Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who has spent years arguing that the subject deserves rigorous data rather than ridicule, was tasked in June by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, together with the White House, the Pentagon and the FBI, to establish and chair a new UAP Science Advisory Council. The council reports to a UAP Governing Board spanning those same agencies, launched its public website on 1 July, and has already requested more than fifty items of information about past incidents and possible related materials.
Loeb's framing is careful and worth absorbing: unknown does not mean extraterrestrial, but unknown should not be explained away without evidence either. The community contains people who find him visionary and people who find him maddening (sometimes the same people, in the same week), but a standing scientific council answering to the White House is something this field has never had before, and I would rather have it than not.
Inside the Pentagon itself sits Dr Jon Kosloski, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. AARO earned its complicated reputation in the community over several years of underwhelming responses to Congress and even downright skepticism under Sean Kirkpatrick, but it is now one of the named channels through which witnesses can come forward, and its recent case reports (including the FBI-documented "mother orb" incident from October 2023) are among the more remarkable documents in the released files. Whatever we thought of the office two years ago, it is part of the process now, and clawing back some credibility.
The veterans who carried the subject here
Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's earlier UAP programme, has been on the record since 2017, when the now-famous Navy gun-camera footage first reached the public. Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has spent those same years working the corridors where policy actually gets made, which is slower and less visible than television and probably mattered more. And David Grusch, the intelligence officer whose sworn 2023 testimony about crash retrieval programmes remains the hinge point of the modern era, is the reason the word whistleblower sits at the centre of this story at all. This month's directive exists because Grusch demonstrated, at considerable personal cost, what it takes to speak without that protection.
The media layer
Disclosure has always depended on people willing to report it seriously. The modern era arguably begins with Leslie Kean, whose December 2017 New York Times story, co-written with Ralph Blumenthal, revealed the Pentagon's secret UAP programme and made the subject reportable again for every journalist who followed. George Knapp has been reporting it since before it was reportable, going back to the Bob Lazar story in 1989, and his WEAPONIZED podcast with filmmaker Jeremy Corbell has become the venue where legislators now float their next procedural moves. Ross Coulthart's interviews have produced some of the era's most consequential on-record statements and reach a genuinely mainstream audience.
Then there is the amplification layer, which is where the numbers get serious. Joe Rogan puts UAP witnesses and researchers in front of the largest podcast audience on the planet, and his interest has normalised the subject for millions of people who will never read a Congressional transcript. Jesse Michels of American Alchemy hosts the long-form conversations with scientists and insiders, and Shawn Ryan's interviews with military witnesses reach an audience inclined to take those witnesses seriously by default. It is fashionable to be sniffy about podcasts, but this is where the cultural shift actually happened, one three-hour conversation at a time. And beneath the giants sits a layer of dedicated niche shows that do the unglamorous weekly work of keeping the community informed, among them Andy McGrillen's That UFO Podcast, whose interviews with researchers and witnesses have quietly built one of the more trusted archives in the space. The big platforms create the bright lights moments, but it is these shows that hold the audience together between them.
Why the list matters
Everyone above is pulling on the same thread from a different direction, and what strikes me, having followed this subject since long before it had hearings and file releases, is how unlikely this cast would have seemed even five years ago. A Secretary of State with a UAP legislative record. A Harvard astrophysicist chairing a scientific council that reports to the intelligence community. Sitting members of Congress threatening subpoenas over withheld footage, on the record, by name.
The witnesses are hopefully now being freed to speak, and the files keep coming. If you have been paying attention as long as some of us have, you will understand why that sentence still feels strange to write.
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