The UAP Disclosure Act

The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act (UAPDA) was an amendment to the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act, introduced in July 2023 by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Mike Rounds. Modeled on the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act, it is widely described as the most ambitious UAP legislation ever drafted.

The 64-page amendment was developed with input from the disclosure advocacy community and carried Harry Reid's legacy by Schumer's own account. It passed the Senate as part of the NDAA, then met House resistance in conference committee in December 2023.

The full text defined "non-human intelligence," "technologies of unknown origin," and "legacy program" in proposed federal statute for the first time. Its provisions: a nine-member presidential Records Review Board with authority to compel declassification on a presumption of disclosure; a government right of eminent domain over any recovered technologies of unknown origin or biological evidence of non-human intelligence held by private persons or entities; and a centralized records collection at the National Archives with a 25-year automatic disclosure horizon. The version enacted stripped the review board and eminent domain clauses, leaving the records collection requirement and a directive that agencies transmit UAP records.

The text is public law history: the full amendment is in the Congressional Record; the enacted remainder is in the FY2024 NDAA.

The Act's definitions section is the closest the U.S. government has come to writing crash retrieval into law, and its gutting became the disclosure movement's central grievance. Schumer's floor statement blamed classified-program equities. The 2026 PURSUE releases function, politically, as the executive branch's answer to the demand the Act embodied, without the independent review board its authors considered the point.

Skeptics observed that legislating definitions for things not shown to exist put the cart before the evidence, and that the eminent domain clause implied congressional certainty no hearing had established. Advocates answered that the language was conditional by design (records "if any exist") and that the opposition's ferocity was informative. Both camps agree the conference fight revealed where the resistance lives; they disagree about why.