What Happened When the Whistleblowers Spoke?
UAP disclosure depends on people willing to tell Congress what they know, and several who did have described, under oath, what it cost them.
Every serious step toward UAP disclosure has started with a person. A sailor who reported what his ship recorded. An intelligence officer who filed a complaint. A veteran who sat before a committee and answered questions on the record. Since 2023, several of them have told Congress what happened next: security clearances pulled, jobs lost, careers they say were deliberately stalled, and in the most serious accounts, fear for their lives.
This page collects their accounts in their own words, alongside what the record shows and what the law offers them now. NPI works on that last part directly. Its draft statute for UAP whistleblower protection is with the House Oversight task force that held the 2025 hearing.
Not every witness tells the same story. One testified that he was treated fairly. An inspector general’s review of one clearance case did not find reprisal. Those facts are here too. The case for protecting whistleblowers does not rest on every claim being proven. It rests on whether the system gives them anywhere safe to go.
Sources: hearing transcript, July 26, 2023 · Nov. 13, 2024 · Sept. 9, 2025
As I sit before you today, I and many other whistleblowers have no job prospects, no foreseeable professional future in a nation every single one of us came forward to defend.
In their own words
Seven people who came forward, and what the record shows about each.
Grusch served with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and represented the NRO on the Pentagon’s UAP task force. He testified to the House Oversight Committee on July 26, 2023. In his opening statement he explained how it began: “I became a whistleblower through a PPD-19 urgent concern filing in May 2022 with the intelligence community inspector general.” Then he described what followed.
I have suffered retaliation for my decision, but I am hopeful that my actions will ultimately lead to a positive outcome of increased transparency.
When Rep. Tim Burchett asked whether he had faced retaliation, he answered:
Yes. I have to be careful what I say in detail because there is an open whistleblower reprisal investigation on my behalf, and I do not want to compromise that investigation by providing anything that may help provide somebody information. But it was very brutal and very unfortunate. Some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally, to be quite frank. Yes.
Asked by Rep. Jamie Raskin how he accounted for the treatment of colleagues who came forward, he gave it a name: “I call it administrative terrorism.” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna asked whether he had experienced incidents that put him in fear for his life. “Yes, personally. Yes.”
He declined to give specifics in open session, citing the open investigation. In January 2026 the Defense Department’s Inspector General released a redacted reprisal report on an unnamed complainant whose timeline and subject matter, according to The Black Vault, overlap with Grusch’s public filings. It concluded that the complainant’s protected disclosures “were not a contributing factor” in the initial decision to revoke the complainant’s security clearance in 2022. The clearance was restored on appeal in January 2023.
Sources: hearing transcript, July 26, 2023 · DoD Inspector General report (via The Black Vault)
Elizondo testified on November 13, 2024. In his last government position, he told the committee, he managed a special access program on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council.
A small cadre within our own government involved in the UAP topic has created a culture of suppression and intimidation that I have personally been victim to, along with many of my former colleagues. This includes unwarranted criminal investigations, harassment, and efforts to destroy one’s credibility.
He said many who had given classified testimony to the Defense Department and the intelligence community’s inspector general were targeted afterward.
Many of us have subsequently been targeted by this cabal with threats to our careers, our security clearances, and even our lives. This is not hyperbole but a genuine fact, and this is wrong.
He named no individuals in open session and asked several times to continue in a closed setting.
Sources: hearing transcript, Nov. 13, 2024 · Elizondo written testimony
Gallaudet testified on November 13, 2024. In January 2015, as Commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, he received an email on the Navy’s secure network from the operations officer of U.S. Fleet Forces Command during a predeployment exercise off the East Coast. Its subject line read “URGENT SAFETY OF FLIGHT ISSUE,” and attached to it was what is now known as the Go Fast video.
The very next day, that email disappeared from my account and those of the other recipients without explanation.
Asked by Rep. Burchett why the incident was never discussed again, he said he was speculating. He believed the email and video were part of a special access program, and that the officer “could not share that openly with the recipients of the email, and, therefore, the email was pulled from everybody’s account.”
He also described a 2024 meeting with AARO: “what I thought would be a 90-minute meeting just to meet with leadership turned out to be an hours-long influence operation on me.” Later in the same hearing he made a point of adding that AARO had new leadership and had asked to meet again: “I take that as a good-faith effort. And we will see where that goes.”
Sources: hearing transcript, Nov. 13, 2024
Borland served as a geospatial intelligence specialist in the Air Force from 2010 to 2013. He testified on September 9, 2025.
Because of my direct knowledge of the reality of certain legacy UAP programs, my professional career was deliberately obstructed, and I have endured sustained reprisals from government agencies for over a decade.
Since my IC IG complaint, I have been prevented from assuming prior employment and can confirm I am still blacklisted from certain agencies within the intelligence community.
He met with AARO in March 2023 and, by his own account, held back sources and methods information to protect the people involved. His complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general was, to the best of his understanding, “determined credible, not urgent.” When Rep. Nancy Mace asked whether he was scared for his safety, he called it “a complicated question.” The threat he described was legal: “if I say the wrong word, technically, I can be charged with espionage.” Then:
I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job.
Sources: hearing transcript, Sept. 9, 2025 · Borland written testimony
Nuccetelli spent 16 years on active duty as an Air Force military police officer. He testified about incidents at Vandenberg Air Force Base between 2003 and 2005, one of which he witnessed himself.
The witnesses to this event were threatened and intimidated afterward. They were told to keep quiet and think about what they were reporting.
AARO followed up with him and later told him “that they were unable to locate any records, that the records had been destroyed by the Air Force.” He noted that an Air Force records request had confirmed the service destroys police records on a three-year schedule.
Sources: hearing transcript, Sept. 9, 2025
Brown wrote the report on a program he called “Immaculate Constellation,” which journalist Michael Shellenberger presented at the November 2024 House hearing without naming its author. Brown identified himself as the author in April 2025 on the WEAPONIZED podcast. He was not a witness at these hearings.
Speaking on WEAPONIZED in March 2026, he said he lost his job in the 2025 federal staffing cuts: “I was a DOGE casualty along with other people in my office. It was a very convenient way to ensure my exit.” He described meeting a team at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had offered a UAP whistleblower protection program, and said its questions focused on “what information I had access to that led me to that conclusion. What compartments and subcompartments I was reading.” An ODNI official told Liberation Times that holding a conversation in a secure facility does not by itself mean whistleblower protections apply.
His conclusion, from the same interview:
There is no organized help for UAP whistleblowers whether that be from Congress or from private initiatives.
Sources: WEAPONIZED, March 18, 2026 (20:41) · 47:23 · 1:29:00 · Liberation Times, March 27, 2026
Wiggins is an active-duty Navy operations specialist and senior chief petty officer. Aboard USS Jackson in February 2023, he and his shipmates recorded an object that appeared to emerge from the ocean off Southern California. Rep. Jared Moskowitz asked him how he had been treated since.
I have had no pushback at all. I have not had anyone reach out to me or try to, you know, dissuade me in either direction, militarily speaking. So, I was treated fair, and I appreciate the Navy itself with assisting me with coming here to being able to testify.
His request to Congress was about the people who come after him: “Sailors need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers.”
Sources: hearing transcript, Sept. 9, 2025
What the pattern looks like
The harm described is rarely dramatic. It is administrative.
Across these accounts, the pressure arrives through ordinary machinery: a clearance review, a job that disappears, a reporting channel that asks more questions than it answers. Grusch explained why that works. Careers in national security depend on a clearance and a reputation, he told the committee, and “when you threaten that flow … a lot of people back off.”
Rep. Luna said the same fear keeps others silent:
We have heard from a number of whistleblowers, specifically military pilots, that the reason for not coming forward publicly is out of fear that speaking out would cost them their flight status and potentially their careers.
Joe Spielberger of the Project On Government Oversight, testifying at the same hearing, described the structural problem. National security whistleblowers, he said, “have to rely on internal administrative processes that go through agency inspector generals,” the same agencies they may be reporting on. He singled out “retaliation through abuse of the security clearance process,” which can cripple a whistleblower’s “ability to seek legal counsel and defend themselves against retaliation.”
At the first of these hearings, in 2023, Rep. Raskin offered a promise worth holding Congress to: “there would be bipartisan rejection of any attempt to vilify, demonize, or engage in other reprisals against our witnesses and people who are telling the truth from their perspective.”
Sources: hearing transcript, July 26, 2023 · Sept. 9, 2025
What protection exists now
More than in 2023, and every route still runs through the executive branch.
Since December 2022, a disclosure made through AARO’s own reporting channel has been released from nondisclosure agreements and protected from reprisal by statute. In July 2026 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued preliminary guidance letting current and former personnel make UAP disclosures to designated representatives of AARO or the PURSUE task force. In September 2026 the Department of War waived the civil and administrative enforcement provisions of nondisclosure and special access agreements for disclosures made to PURSUE representatives.
Each of these routes leads to an executive-branch office. None is a protected path to Congress, and none gives a national security whistleblower an independent place to take a retaliation case. NPI’s episodes on how protected UAP whistleblowers really are and on what would actually protect them go into the detail, and If AARO Exists, Why Does UFO Disclosure Need a New Law? covers what AARO can and cannot do with what it is told.
Sources: 50 U.S.C. § 3373b · DLA Piper on the ODNI guidance · DefenseScoop on the September waiver
What would change it
Enforcement, and someone in their corner.
NPI’s draft statute is deliberately narrow. It covers UAP whistleblowers specifically, and it creates a private right of action, not only against whoever retaliates but against any official who knew a retaliation was planned, was in a position to stop it, and did not. It has been provided to the House Oversight task force.
The witnesses are also building their own support. Borland, Brown and Nuccetelli now run Vanguard, which says it “protects and empowers UAP whistleblowers from the national security community” with “legal defense, medical help, career transition, and a community who has their back.” (Brown describes Vanguard as a nonprofit; NPI has not independently verified its status.)
Stand with them
Whistleblower protection moves when lawmakers hear about it from the people they represent. Citizens for Disclosure volunteers carry these accounts into meetings with members of Congress and their staff, and ask them to act.
Citizens for Disclosure is NPI’s volunteer network, with local and state chapters. It’s free to join, no donation required, and our team will help you find your place in it.
Related
- How Protected Are UAP Whistleblowers, Really? · Full Disclosure, episode 3
- What Would Actually Protect a UAP Whistleblower? · Full Disclosure, episode 5
- If AARO Exists, Why Does UFO Disclosure Need a New Law? · Core Learning Tool
- Who Changed Their Mind About UFOs? · Core Learning Tool
- Join Citizens for Disclosure · Take action
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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.