Congress hunts for illegal UFO programs as the media shrug

Over the last week, a flurry of coverage focused on the historic unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) transparency measures that President Biden will sign into law shortly.

But the reporting ignored or glossed over a stunning development, The most powerful member of the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), suggested publicly that elements of the U.S. government are illegally withholding UAP information from Congress. Schumer, citing “multiple credible sources,” made his extraordinary comments on the Senate floor last week.

Given the decades-long stigma associated with UAP, it seems that only a significant amount of credible evidence would convince normally cautious, risk-averse politicians, let alone a Senate majority leader, to level such a stunning accusation in public.

The underlying allegations, which the mainstream media have studiously and curiously avoided, are shocking.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) joined Schumer and a bipartisan group of four other senators to co-sponsor the UAP Disclosure Act. In a rare colloquy with Schumer on the Senate floor, Rounds doubled down with yet more remarkable commentary, noting that the UAP Disclosure Act originally included “a requirement…for the government to obtain any recovered UAP material or [“non-human“] biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed Rounds’ extraordinary comments in a July interview. According to Rubio, “We have people that have very high clearances both today and in the past who did really important work for our government, or continue to do important work for the government, who have come forward with some claims about the U.S. having in the past recovered exotic materials, and then reverse-engineered those materials to make advances in our own defenses and technologies.”

In an interview last week, Rounds asked a seemingly rhetorical question: “Was there actually something found at some point in the past that helped us to develop some of our technologies? That remains to be seen, or at least remains to be disclosed.”

Moreover, as Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated in June, new protections enacted by Congress resulted in “all sorts of [UAP whistleblowers] coming out of the woodwork.” These individuals, Gallagher said, are telling congressional investigators that “they’ve been part of this or that [UAP] program,” resulting in “a variety of pretty intense conversations.”

In short, key legislators are sounding the alarm on an extraordinary story. And the silence from the mass media is deafening.

As Schumer noted on the Senate floor last week, “the United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and additionally it breeds mistrust.”

Echoing the Senate majority leader’s allegation that elements of the U.S. government have withheld important UAP information from Congress illegally, Rounds stated that “we are lacking oversight opportunities, and we are not fulfilling our responsibilities.”

Intriguingly, according to Rounds, “There is, we believe, information and data that has been collected by more than just the Department of Defense, but by other agencies of the federal government as well.”

Rounds’ statement is noteworthy because the U.S. Air Force (and, more recently, the U.S. Navy) was historically the only government entity overtly involved with the UAP issue. But as former intelligence official and UAP whistleblower David Grusch has alleged, the CIA has been actively involved with retrieved UAP materials. Moreover, a bombshell Daily Mail story, citing multiple anonymous sources, suggests that a particular CIA office coordinates the retrieval of crashed or abandoned UAP of “non-human” origin.

Intriguingly, in the early 1950s, the parent organization of that particular CIA office developed and enacted a sweeping, government-wide policy to debunk all UAP sightings, no matter how credible, with the objective of reducing “public interest in ‘flying saucers.’”

Shortly after the implementation of the CIA policy, the number of UAP cases categorized by the U.S. Air Force as unidentified or “unknown” plummeted from around 20 percent to only 3 percent. The U.S. government’s newly dismissive attitude toward all UAP sightings, courtesy of the CIA, left countless credible witnesses angry and humiliated.

A remarkable 1971 document written by the then-head of the nuclear branch of Australia’s Joint Intelligence Organization only deepens the mystery of potential CIA involvement with UAP. The report alleges that the same CIA division noted above, then called the Office of Scientific Intelligence, studied “UFO reports with the intention of determining the UFO propulsion methods.” With Congress now hunting for unreported UAP reverse engineering programs, the full document makes for particularly intriguing reading.

Given all of the smoke surrounding the CIA’s potential involvement with UAP, the remarkable commentary from Schumer, Rounds and their colleagues is only trumped by the language in the UAP Disclosure Act.

The bipartisan legislation, for example, referred to “non-human intelligence” two dozen times, defined “legacy programs” as UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering efforts and required the government seizure of recovered UAP, “technologies of unknown origin” and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” previously transferred to private contractors.

Most of this extraordinary, Senate-passed language, however, was stripped during negotiations with the House. House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) reportedly led the charge to water down the bipartisan Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act.

Schumer, palpably frustrated on the Senate floor, blasted Turner’s apparent obstruction as an “outrage.” Both Schumer and Rounds have vowed to continue fighting for the remarkable language “killed” by the House. Last week, Rounds suggested that key measures stripped from the original legislation may eventually be enacted.

Despite the intense, seemingly baseless pushback from the House, Biden is set to sign legislation requiring that all U.S. government agencies turn over records related to UAP, “technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence” to the National Archives. That, in and of itself, is a remarkable development.

Once signed, the legislation will also cut off funding for UAP programs that have not been reported to Congress, a provision unlikely to make it to Biden’s desk on a whim. Of note, the legislation targets the same arcane funding loophole described under oath in congressional testimony by UAP whistleblower Grusch. Yet true to form, the media ignored or missed this intriguing development.

Ultimately, as Rubio has noted, one of two extraordinary realities is true. Either dozens of high-level government officials with top security clearances are “crazy,” or a “vast web” of UAP whistleblowers is slowly revealing “the biggest story in human history.”

But you wouldn’t know any of that from following mainstream media coverage of the UAP topic. It is high time for the Fourth Estate to start doing its job.

Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense.