The Senate’s Intelligence Committee Should Investigate the Pentagon’s Over-Classification of UAP
By Kevin Wright
Please note that the following column appeared in the July 21st edition of the Roswell Daily Record and has been republished with permission.
A little more than a week ago, intrepid journalist Matt Laslo caught up with US Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO), a House UAP Caucus member. When Laslo asked Rep. Burlison about the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) – the office charged by Congress with officially investigating UAP – Burlison said the AARO told him that “there’s nothing top secret” about UAP, rather the “only thing that is top secret is any of our technology that might have been involved,” such as “devices that recorded” UAP, “captured footage or there was a radar or whatever, all of that is top secret.” Further, Burlison stated the AARO told him that if the AARO finds “something, we’re gonna make it public, but so long as it doesn’t compromise our technology.”
Congressman Burlison’s remarks to Laslo potentially have enormous implications. If the AARO’s position on the classification of UAP is true, the office would seem to operate within the confines of Executive Order 13526, signed on December 29, 2009, by then-President Barack Obama. Executive Order 13526 is a directive that established a comprehensive system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information. While the order emphasized protecting sensitive information critical to national security, it also underscored a commitment to promoting transparency and accountability in government—a balancing act crucial for a democratic society.
Central to Executive Order 13526 was establishing clear classification criteria, defining three levels of classification: Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential. The explication of these levels by the order ensures that only information genuinely warranting protection for national security reasons is classified, thereby preventing over-classification.
However, if the AARO’s position is that UAP is not necessarily classified, but the technology used to capture UAP is, in the spirit of Executive Order 13526, there would appear to be something seriously off with the classification of visual evidence of UAP.
The Black Vault, operated by John Greenwald, Jr., has filed over 10,000 FOIA requests with various government agencies and published over 3.3 million pages of government files online. An area of interest to the Black Vault is the UAP issue.
According to Greenwald, on September 7, 2022, in response to a two-and-a-half year Freedom of Information Act request for video of UAP, the US Navy “denied the release of all UAP videos” because they were “classified and are exempt from disclosure in their entirety under exemption 5 USC § 552 (b)(1) in accordance with Executive Order 13526 and the UAP Security Classification Guide.” Let that sink in. The US Navy denied the public release of every piece of visual evidence of UAP due in part to Executive Order 13526.
Something isn’t adding up, and it gets even more peculiar. In addition to citing Executive Order 13526, the Navy denied access to any visual evidence of UAP because of the UAP Security Classification Guide.
The UAP Security Classification Guide is a document produced in April 2020 by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF), the predecessor to the AARO. A side note: the Department of Defense (DoD) stood up the UAPTF before its official establishment by Congress. The Classification Guide mandates extreme secrecy and the classification of virtually all UAP data, including any visual evidence of UAP.
As Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, noted, the Secret classification of UAP visual data under the UAP Security Classification Guide would retroactively classify even the Navy’s “Go Fast,” “Gimbal,” and “FLIR1” videos given by Mellon to The New York Times in 2017. As a reminder, the DoD admitted two-and-a-half years after publication that those videos were unclassified. Then there are the videos of UAP released by the US Customs and Border Protection. The release of the Navy’s and CBP’s videos did not damage national security nor reveal sensitive technologies used to capture the UAP on video. But now the DoD claims all visual evidence of UAP should be classified as Secret because of national security.
Furthermore, before the public release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” report in June 2021, the DoD issued talking points about the report. The talking points included the following: “Except for its existence, and the mission/purpose, virtually everything else about the UAPTF is classified, per the signed Security Classification Guide (SCG),” and in anticipation of being asked why the DoD won’t tell the public “anything about UAPs or what the UAPTF is doing,” the canned response was the “DoD does not provide information about operational or intelligence activities that would identify possible US vulnerabilities.”
Together, the UAP Security Classification Guide and the DoD’s talking points make clear there is a blanket of secrecy that would appear to violate Executive Order 13526. We know this because the Executive Order’s classifying authority clearly states that there is a balance between secrecy and transparency, and only those things that are clearly in the interest of national security should be classified. It is impossible to see how the blanket secrecy of UAP fits within that balance.
There are, in theory, methods to resolve the DoD’s inexplicable secrecy on UAP, as Executive Order 13526 also introduced provisions for challenging information classification. Authorized personnel are empowered to contest the classification status of information they believe has been improperly classified. This internal check is essential for preventing the misuse of the classification system to withhold information from the public unnecessarily. The order’s oversight and accountability mechanisms, notably the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) role, ensure rigorous monitoring and regular reviews of the classification system, adding another layer of transparency.
Public access to information is further supported through the mandatory declassification review process, which allows individuals to request the declassification of specific information, in this case, visual evidence of UAP. This process provides a formal mechanism for public involvement in government transparency, enabling citizens to seek access to information that may have been classified. By facilitating these requests, the order ensures, again in theory, that there is a systematic approach to balancing national security concerns with the public’s right to know.
Executive Order 13526 is not merely about safeguarding national security information; it is a thoughtful attempt to balance the imperative of security with the principles of transparency and accountability. However, the DoD’s refusal, on a continuing basis, to balance national security with transparency requires a remedy beyond the mandates of Executive Order 13526.
For instance, it has been more than a year since the military shot down the intelligence-gathering surveillance balloon sent from China and other unidentified objects in US and Canadian airspace. Except for one image of the Chinese spy balloon from the cockpit of a jet, no other photos or videos of any other objects have been made public. Why? What possible justification exists to withhold any and all pictures or video of the unidentified anomalous objects that were shot down?
In recent years, our government has been quick to show videos from jets, drones, and even satellites. In April 2017, US Central Command showed off its use of the “mother of all bombs,” also known as MOAB, against ISIS in Afghanistan. In March 2023, two days after Russian Su-27 fighter jets dumped fuel on an MQ-9 Reaper drone, causing it to crash into the Black Sea, the Pentagon’s European Command rushed a 42-second full-color video of the incident to the press. Last October, the Pentagon declassified videos of Chinese jets performing “‘coercive and risky’ maneuvers, sometimes within a mere 20 feet of US jets in the Indo-Pacific region.”
When it suits public relations, the DoD rushes to the podium to provide the public with breathtaking photos and videos, unafraid of revealing sources and methods. But when there’s something the DoD doesn’t want us to see, for whatever reason, it classifies information and hides behind a recurring excuse: protection of “sources and methods.” This brings us full circle back to what the AARO told Rep. Burlison: UAP isn’t classified, but the technology of observing UAP is, which refers to sources and methods.
Of course, what the AARO told Rep. Burlison would appear untrue. The UAP Security Classification Guide, the DoD’s talking points, the Navy’s blanket refusal to disseminate any visual evidence of UAP to the public, and more all point to violations of Obama’s Executive Order 13526, which was cited as justification for withholding information.
Asking the DoD to resolve this secrecy issue and apparent violations of classification laws would be akin to asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) recently released the Fiscal Year 2025 Intelligence Authorization Act. One of its provisions requires “a Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena reporting and Federal agency coordination.” That’s a step in the right direction. However, I would argue that the SSCI should investigate the DoD’s absolute refusal to comply with classification laws, focusing on the UAP Security Classification Guide.
The SSCI has subpoena power and doesn’t have a conflict of interest. SSCI has been investigating UAP and knows there is something more to UAP than a foreign adversary’s drone. In fact, SSCI member Mike Rounds (R-SD) recently reintroduced the UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA) as a proposed amendment to the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. The UAPDA again contains stunning language about non-human intelligence, technologies of unknown origin, and biological evidence. The SSCI, as part of the Legislative Branch, is in a perfect position to investigate and force corrections on over-classification issues exercised by the DoD, an Executive Branch department, and serve as a proper Constitutional check and balance on this abuse of power.