How the search for UFOs went mainstream: A tale in 5 moves

For many Americans, the news that Congress was holding hearings about a possible secret UFO program was a stark surprise.

The hearings on Wednesday appear to inject a dose of science fiction into the usual business of Congress — as well as a note of bipartisanship that, for the contentious House Oversight Committee, is almost as remarkable as the claims that the Pentagon may be hiding alien spacecraft.

But it has taken nearly two decades of sober, bipartisan legislative work to get to the point where the search for UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) is politically mainstream.

From the mysterious videos that started it all, to the 2007 foundation of a secret UAP-hunting program, to the 2021 passage of a UAP whistleblower law, to the military’s own acknowledgment of hundreds of unexplained phenomena, here are five moves by lawmakers and government officials that helped take the hunt for UAP into the public square.

The Pentagon collects UAP videos

In 2020, the Pentagon released unclassified videos that seemed to show U.S. fighter pilots tracking a mysterious craft with capacities far superior to their own.

The Defense Department said it was “releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as “unidentified.” 

The first of the videos was shot in November 2004, when a U.S. Navy fighter pilot encountered what appeared to be a strange aircraft soaring over the Pacific. The mysterious object — which the aircraft carrier USS Princeton had been tracking for weeks — appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, nearly twice as high as the maximum flight ceiling for the F-18 fighter jets sent to investigate, then plummeted down to 20,000 feet.

The pilots sent to check it out reported seeing an oval craft about 40 feet long hovering above the sea, causing the water to boil, they told The New York Times more than a decade later.

“It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Commander David Fravor told the Times, adding that he was “pretty weirded out.” The object zoomed off into the distance, covering 60 miles in less than a minute — about three times the speed of the F-18’s tailing it — before disappearing.

Teased by other sailors and aviators that night, Fravor recalled telling a fellow pilot that he was confused by what he had seen. The craft “had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s. I want to fly one.”

When the Pentagon released Fravor’s video, along with two others recorded in 2015, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) offered qualified praise.

“I’m glad the Pentagon is finally releasing this footage, but it only scratches the surface of research and materials available,” Reid wrote on Twitter. “The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications. The American people deserve to be informed.”

Senators set up a secret UAP surveillance program

Reid’s interest was more than casual: In 2007, after seeing Fravor’s video himself, the senator was a major driving force behind the creation of a secret — or at least unpublicized — program to gather and vet accounts and videos of UAP.

“After that project became public, Senators, Congressmen, committees, and staff began to pursue this issue and uncovered a vast web of individuals and groups with ideas and stories to share,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Reid’s successor as majority leader, recounted in a recent statement. 

Reid worked closely in this effort with two other senators, The New York Times reported: Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Reid later told the Times that the meeting “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had. Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’”

Stevens, Reid later told New York Magazine, was interested because he had a UAP encounter of his own. As Reid recounted, Stevens told him: “I was in my airplane alone and off to my left was an object. I could see it. It was so close to me. I would veer up, down, sideways. Wherever I went, it was there. I was starting to get low on fuel, went and landed, and went to the air-traffic controller. I said, ‘Was there anybody up in the air with me?’ The guy said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’” 

This, Reid explained, was the problem with UAP: Sightings were relatively common, but pilots didn’t want to report them, “because it would hurt them in their promotions and make them look like goofballs.” 

Many of the early contracts in the nascent Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program went to an aerospace entrepreneur named Robert Bigelow, who had a UFO interest of his own — and a family history to boot. His grandparents had once seen “something in the air. This so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description.” As part of the $22 million program, Bigelow led an effort to consolidate reports and footage of UAP.

In his interview with New York in 2018, Reid expressed frustration that the press hadn’t done more with the considerable public data this partnership had generated. “We have hundreds and hundreds of papers, pages of paper, that have been available since this was completed. Most all of it, 80 percent at least, is public. You know something? The press has never even looked at it. Not once. That’s where we are. I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it.”

”It’s my belief you guys kind of want to be spoon-fed,” Reid added. “You don’t want to do any work on your own.”

UAP task force is established

The military was paying attention. In the budget signed in 2020, then-President Trump included funding for a successor to the program Reid had started: the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. (The term UAP has since been broadened to refer to unidentified anomalous phenomena.)

This task force was created “to improve [Defense Department] understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs,” the agency wrote in a 2020 memo. “The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

“The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern,” the agency wrote.

One notable feature of the Pentagon memo was its use of the term UAP — a replacement for the more commonly recognized UFO, or Unidentified Flying Object. That more familiar phrase had been “skunked” by its long association with cranks, Merriam Webster noted at the time.

This represented a nearly 20-year voyage of that word from the fringes of semantics to the heart of the Senate. “Aside from UAP’s more encompassing description, this term avoids the heavy cultural baggage attached to UFO, whose initial association with extraterrestrial origins, however true or untrue it may prove upon final analysis, sets up a narrow and inflexible framework for honest scientific research,” semiotician Mark Rainer wrote in the journal Etcetera in 1999.

In 2021, the UAP task force released its first report, which concluded that its findings would likely fall into “five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. [government]  or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” (The report offered no speculation as to what that ‘other’ explanations it considered.)

In the 2022 edition, the military revealed that it had uncovered a total of 510 UAP reports since the Reid program was spun up — and 119 since the 2021 report. 

The report suggested that in at least one way, Reid’s program had successfully changed the climate around UAP data: The rising frequency of reports was in part a result of “the reduced stigma,” it said.

Congress creates protections for whistleblowers

The UAP task force generating those reports was the one to which now-whistleblower David Grusch was assigned as a liaison from the National Reconnaissance Office, a lesser-known cousin to offices like the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2019. (In 2021, Grusch became a co-lead at the task force.)

In July, Grusch told NewsNation that in his capacity as a senior member of that program, he became aware of a secret UAP crash retrieval program — but was “refused access to it.”

When he first heard of the program, “I thought at first I was being deceived, and that it was a ruse,” he said. “But people started confiding in me, they approached me. I have plenty of current former senior intelligence officers that came to me  — many which I knew almost my whole career — that confided in me that they were a part of a program. They named the program. I’ve never heard of it. And they told me, and they provided me documents and other proof that there was in fact a program that the UAP task force was not read into.”

Grusch has not provided any hard evidence for these allegations.

Scientists told The Hill that there was no way to evaluate those claims on their own merits.

But thanks to a 2022 law, Grusch is legally protected for making them. That law offered protections to officials making “authorized disclosures” about unidentified anomalous phenomena, and protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. 

Senators call for UAP disclosure

For many in Congress, limited protections for whistleblowers releasing unclassified information don’t go far enough. As the Senate debates the mammoth annual military funding bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a bipartisan group of senators is pushing a bill that would make the Pentagon cough up its UAP records — and create a public clearinghouse of that data at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Under the legislation, federal records concerning UAP “should carry a 10 presumption of immediate disclosure and all records should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history of the Federal Government’s knowledge and involvement surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomena.”

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) all co-sponsored the bill.

“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said in a statement accompanying the legislation. 

“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. I am honored to carry on the legacy of my mentor and dear friend, Harry Reid and fight for the transparency that the public has long demanded surrounding these unexplained phenomena,” he added.