Who Decides What UAP Records Get Released? Inside the Burlison Amendment
Danny Sheehan walks through the amendment that would put a Senate-confirmed civilian board — not the executive branch — in charge of deciding which UAP records the public gets to see.
Recorded as the House moved toward a floor vote, the episode is about a single piece of legislative machinery: who sits on the body that decides what gets released. Rep. Eric Burlison, who carries the UAP file on the House Oversight Committee’s task force on declassification, had drafted a new version of the UAP Disclosure Act built around a predominantly civilian records review board whose members Congress confirms — the provision the Senate passed in 2023 and the House stripped out. Days earlier, the Pentagon and the acting Director of National Intelligence had announced a governance board of their own: appointed inside the executive branch, answerable only to it, with no congressional confirmation and no oversight.
Sheehan’s account of how the opening appeared is the most concrete legislative reporting in the series so far. With the defense authorization bill carrying supplemental funding for the war with Iran, Democrats in both chambers were voting against it as a bloc, and a handful of Republicans joined them. Five of the seven Republicans on the declassification task force, he says, were withholding their votes specifically to force the review-board amendment into the bill — enough, with the Democratic bloc, to deny the bill a majority. The amendment as drafted leaves the president able to postpone any specific release, but only by letter to Congress explaining why, in both a classified and a publicly releasable version.
The second half turns to the people who have already come forward, and what happened to them. Sheehan traces the pattern from the December 2017 New York Times story through the challenges to Luis Elizondo’s and Christopher Mellon’s security clearances, the leaking of David Grusch’s private medical records to reporters after his July 2023 testimony, and on to whistleblowers he says have been quietly made unemployable. That sets up the question the episode ends on: if the videos were cleared for release and the witnesses were authorized to speak, who exactly is still pushing back — and is the disclosure itself the operation?
Update — the House adopted the amendment
Rep. Burlison’s office announced that the House adopted his UAP disclosure amendment to the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 8800) on July 22, 2026; news coverage dated the approval July 23. It establishes a permanent UAP Records Collection at the National Archives, an independent UAP Records Review Board whose members require Senate confirmation and which holds subpoena authority, and disclosure requirements extending to government contractors. The measure still has to survive reconciliation with the Senate version before it can become law.
Sources: Office of Rep. Eric Burlison · H.R. 8800, Congress.gov
Pursuant to the old principle of the intelligence community — the best way to keep a secret secret is to pretend that you’re disclosing it.
What’s discussed
2:35 The big event in Washington this week
2:44 Three years of trying to attach the UAP Disclosure Act to the defense bill
3:08 How the fight over Iran war funding opened a door
3:26 Both chambers invoke the War Powers Act
4:36 Cutting off the money as leverage
5:27 Burlison, the declassification task force, and a new draft
5:57 A predominantly civilian, congressionally confirmed review board
6:24 The executive branch announces a governance board of its own
8:03 The opening this creates for the House
8:34 The amendment, and the bill it attaches to
10:22 The president’s postponement letter — classified and public versions
11:26 The same task force handling the Epstein documents
12:57 Five of seven Republicans on the task force withhold their votes
14:01 Who they are
14:35 The ask
15:24 An 80-year push to keep it undisclosed
16:20 December 2017 and what the Times published
17:01 Retaliation against Elizondo and Mellon
17:16 Going after Grusch after his July 2023 testimony
18:42 Whistleblowers, blacklisting, and a new organizing effort
19:46 Have the antagonists “not gotten the memo”?
21:16 Or is the disclosure itself the operation?
22:15 What the four tranches actually say
24:07 The exchange with Burlison about a SCIF
25:22 “The gatekeepers still in the US government”
26:02 The legacy program, 1947, and who has been running it
28:16 What NPI is asking listeners to do
Timestamps open the episode on YouTube at that moment.
Key passages
On the competing board
“…appointed by the executive branch departments and answerable only to them, with no oversight by Congress and no need to confirm anybody that’s on that review panel by Congress at all.”
On what the citizen campaign achieved
“All of us who’ve been working on this now for years have succeeded in building enough support among the citizens to give the kind of encouragement to the members of Congress to have five of the seven Republican members of the House Oversight Committee’s task force now join with the Democrats.”
On the longer pattern
“This effort to appoint a totally executive-branch-dominated, military and intelligence community dominated panel to make the decisions as to what they’re going to keep away from the American public about the UFO phenomenon is just the latest iteration of this ongoing effort.”
On what the released material actually says
“The information that’s actually being released officially by the government is still … pretending that they’re releasing information, but pretending that they don’t know what the UFOs are.”
Reading Luis Elizondo’s answer to Rep. Burlison
“Sir, that decision would not be mine. That would be to the gatekeepers still in the US government.”
On who was cleared to speak
“All of these people are being authorized, if you might say, directed to release this information. And yet there appears to be people inside the government structures … who either haven’t gotten the memo … or the people that are pushing back are part of the program to keep this stuff concealed.”
Related from the Learning Library
How Protected Are UAP Whistleblowers? — the previous episode, on how narrow the legal protection actually is.
The UAP Disclosure Timeline — the documented record this legislative fight belongs to.
Pass the UAPDA — NPI’s live campaign to get the disclosure provisions through the Senate.
Write Directly to Congress
The Congressional Disclosure Actions campaign tracks legislative efforts to compel transparency from the U.S. government on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Here, we focus on actions citizens can take to influence elected officials — from supporting UAP legislation to contacting your representative and attending hearings. This is the movement's policy pressure point, and your voice matters.