Congress Is Back — What Happens Next on UAP Disclosure?
Congress returns with the UAP Disclosure Act waiting on the Senate side, an executive-branch board already standing, and about three weeks before the campaign takes everyone home.
This is the September curtain-raiser, recorded from Los Angeles at the end of summer. The House has passed its provision requiring that the board reviewing the government’s UAP holdings be confirmed by Congress. The question now is whether the Senate attaches its own version of the UAP Disclosure Act to the defense authorization bill — the measure Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds have carried, and which drew a broad group of co-sponsors in 2023. Sheehan’s point about timing is the practical one: the Senate is only in Washington through September, because October belongs to the campaign.
Running against that is a separate effort inside the executive branch. Sheehan describes a task force organized by the deputy White House chief of staff to keep the decision with the agencies — built around the governance board announced in June, whose membership he expects to be drawn from the intelligence and defense agencies with the longest record of withholding. A public argument has broken out over who should staff it, with several familiar names discussed for the role. The dissenting position he highlights is Gary Nolan’s, from the board’s own scientific advisory committee: that the president should release people holding UAP information to speak to Congress and to the public, rather than only to AARO or the White House office.
NPI’s own position sits apart from both. Sheehan argues the membership question is the whole question, and that it belongs to Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 14 — the clause giving Congress authority over the rules governing the armed forces, and with it, he argues, over what is classified and what is released. That is what NPI’s 58-page bill is written to do. He allows that a narrow category of genuinely sensitive material, mostly weapons-related, may warrant temporary protection; he does not accept that it covers the underlying facts. The episode closes with a listener question about whether we are meant to be seeing any of this.
Congress needs to step up and decide that they’re going to appoint a committee that is going to oversee and review all of the information that’s in the hands of any executive branch agency.
What’s discussed
2:11 Full Disclosure from Los Angeles
2:48 Why this week matters
3:01 Congress returns, and the War Powers Act
3:12 What the House has already passed
3:36 The Senate vote ahead
3:43 Schumer, Rounds, and the 2023 co-sponsors
4:13 The fight over UFO disclosure
4:37 A White House task force to keep control
5:03 The UAP Disclosure Act returns
5:16 The governance board announced in June
5:57 Who controls the review board?
6:07 Names floated for chief of staff
6:44 Gary Nolan calls for broader NDA releases
7:08 What the current waiver does and does not allow
8:03 Congress vs. the executive branch
8:28 What NPI supports
8:35 The 58-page bill
8:54 Article I, Section 8, Clause 14
9:38 The race toward the November election
10:01 Mobilizing the disclosure movement
10:53 Essay: who should control disclosure?
11:25 Three weeks to make the case
12:04 What information should stay secret?
12:21 The case for full disclosure
13:31 What the major witnesses already acknowledge
14:09 The next 10,000 years
14:49 Q&A: do our galactic neighbors want us to see them?
16:19 Who is really doing the talking
16:43 Citizen diplomacy
Timestamps open the episode on YouTube at that moment.
Key passages
On where the decision belongs
“This needs to be undertaken by Congress. Congress needs to step up and decide that they’re going to appoint a committee that is going to oversee and review all of the information that’s in the hands of any executive branch agency.”
On the objection he expects
“They are perfectly capable of taking into account any arguments that are going to be made by executive branch agencies about some piece of information … that they need to be concealed at least temporarily.”
On NPI’s position
“That’s what the New Paradigm Institute supports — having Congress assert itself and have control over the members of such a review panel.”
On the constitutional basis
“Congress shall have the exclusive authority to set all rules and regulations governing all the armed forces of the United States. … That means they’re in charge of deciding what information is going to be classified and what information is going to be declassified.”
On the calendar
“Congress is only going to be back in session during this month of September, because as soon as October arrives they’re going to all go back home.”
On the stakes of the window
“Right over this next four-year period, we’re going to be making the decisions about our relationship with this extraterrestrial civilization that are going to affect us for 10,000 years into the future.”
Related from the Learning Library
Should Congress Investigate Skinwalker Ranch? — the previous episode.
Who Really Controls UFO Disclosure? — the first episode in this collection, on the same constitutional question.
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.