What's Really in the Government's UAP Files?

Are aliens visiting Earth? What would that mean for human society? Are we in danger?

The "disclosure" movement, which includes former intelligence officials and sitting members of Congress, is fighting to declassify everything that the government has concealed about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. They say we're already in the process of coming to terms with the truth about extraterrestrial life.

"People say, 'When are we going to have disclosure?' I think you're living through it right now," says former intelligence official Luis Elizondo.

But one former government scientist tasked with examining UAP claims tells Reason that the entire movement is based on a carefully orchestrated web of lies.

"All of them are the same players," says Sean Kirkpatrick. He calls the movement "a conspiracy…to get resources to pursue a storyline and to propagate this storyline."

But the believers accuse Kirkpatrick of orchestrating a government cover-up.

After speaking with skeptics and believers, and poring over the government's most recent document dumps, most UAP images remain blurry, but the bigger picture has become more clear: Government officials have misled the public for decades about the mysterious objects in our skies, hyping aliens when it provided cover for clandestine research, while in other instances discrediting whistleblowers attempting to reveal unusual government programs and alarming encounters to the public. At the same time, a well-funded group of believers in the paranormal has successfully captured the imaginations of influential members of Congress, which has translated into millions of federal dollars funding paranormal research that's yielded few meaningful results.

The following is an attempt to step out of this hall of mirrors and carefully examine what we know—and don't know, maybe can't know with scientific certainty—about what's really out there.

 

Inside the Disclosure Movement

On June 25, 2026, lawmakers, whistleblowers, and scientists affiliated with the disclosure movement gathered in the Senate's Kennedy Caucus Room to talk about UAPs. This is the room where the Watergate hearings took place in 1973, and the event attendees say they're also exposing a massive government cover-up, but with much greater consequences for humanity.

Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, now chairs the board of the Disclosure Foundation. He tells the audience in his opening remarks that the evidence "increasingly suggests" that "some of these craft are of nonhuman origin."

Mellon was the source of the famous "Tic Tac" video published in The New York Times, which showed Navy pilots zeroing in on an unidentified object appearing to zip over the water.

"We saw this little white Tic Tac–looking object, and it's just kind of moving above the white water area," a Navy pilot told 60 Minutes in 2021.

Suddenly, UFOs were a front-page story, and not just in the Weekly World News. The mainstream was taking it seriously.

Asked on 60 Minutes about the object "mimicking your moves," the pilot said, "Yeah, it was aware we were there."

Since then, more government insiders have come forward. They say Washington is hiding recovered wreckage, off-world technology, and the corpses of aliens.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R–Mo.) asked Elizondo during a 2024 House Oversight Committee meeting, "Was anything described as that we have possession of bodies?"

"Yes, yes, we have biologics," Elizondo answered.

Burlison asked whether it was "multiple types of creatures."

"I couldn't answer that," Elizondo said. "I can tell you anecdotally that it was discussed quite a bit when I was at the Pentagon."

In 2017, Elizondo revealed to The New York Times that the government had a secret program to study UAPs. Elizondo's role in publicizing the story made him a hero of the disclosure movement, and he was honored with an award at the Disclosure Forum.

"The truth belongs to the American people," he said during his acceptance speech. "It doesn't belong within classified channels or security containers somewhere in the Pentagon or the CIA."

In an interview with Reason, Elizondo says, "There's a story to be told, and I think people realize that a truth has been kept from them."

Nine years after the Tic Tac video was released, the Trump administration declassified troves of material, causing renewed public interest in UAPs. The newly released documents include videos of strange objects zipping over the ocean, pictures of unusual lights in the sky during the Apollo missions, and internal government memos about flying disc sightings dating back to the 1940s.

Elizondo says the most explosive material, which will establish the existence of extraterrestrial visitors beyond a reasonable doubt, is yet to come.

"The administration is doing the right thing," Elizondo tells Reason. "I think they're dipping their toe in the water before doing a cannonball off the high dive. It's a measured approach, and they're doing it for several reasons. One is probably to socialize the American public to this new reality."

He says the releases mean that "on Capitol Hill, we can have a real conversation with policymakers about the phenomena, about the scientific implications, and equally as importantly, about the national security implications of the fact that we don't have full control over American skies, or at the very least, there [are] anomalous phenomena occurring that we cannot explain effectively."

Mike Gold, who investigated UAPs as part of an independent study group for NASA and sits on the board of the Disclosure Foundation, says many of the people who have appeared at the Disclosure Forum have put their reputations on the line to speak the truth.

"Members of our UAP independent study had their careers threatened," Gold says. "They were threatened that they'll never publish again, that they won't be able to receive tenure, that they'll lose their jobs, not for saying that UAPs are real or that there's a nonhuman intelligence, just for having the temerity to ask the question. And I put it to you, how can we do good science when simply asking the question is reason to have your career threatened?"

"People like Luis Elizondo have all suffered incredibly personally, financially, emotionally, for what they've done," he says.

 

Investigating the Investigators

In 2022, the federal government created an office within the Pentagon to study UAPs. But members of the disclosure movement say it was designed to silence critics with a report that dismissed the overwhelming evidence on weak grounds.

That report was written by Kirkpatrick, the former head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). He says Mellon is dishonest and unqualified.

"Christopher Mellon is neither a scientist nor a career intelligence officer, despite the fact that he likes to throw around his political title," Kirkpatrick says.

Kirkpatrick says the videos that the disclosure movement sees as evidence of extraterrestrial life have mostly pedestrian explanations that are already part of the official record.

"I'm surprised more people haven't caught on to this yet," he says. "Some of those videos have already been resolved and were even briefed out and reported to Congress. They were told to remove the resolution language and put these things out as unresolved so that they could stir up more interest and controversy, which to my mind speaks volumes to their intent, because there's absolutely no reason to do that."

Gold agrees that many of the videos can be explained away. But not all of them.

"You have found something that Sean Kirkpatrick and I absolutely agree on," Gold says. "I think the more intelligence assessments that you release with material like this, the better. As a matter of fact, I think it's actually useful to have the imagery of weather balloons and birds, etc. And there was a little bit of that. Let's take a look at what the prosaic explanations look like and why, and then you may be left with imagery that is more extraordinary."

Kirkpatrick points to videos such as one of a strange shape captured on a jet's camera. Hours after it went viral, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R–Fla.) posted an image of an angelic figure described in the Bible's Book of Ezekiel, though she later denied that it was related. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R–Colo.) said the UAP material reminded her of "fallen angels" and "Nephilim."

Turns out it's probably just a diffraction artifact. This happens when an infrared sensor captures a very bright out-of-focus light source, such as a military flare, producing a geometric pattern determined by the lens shape rather than the shape of the actual object. A closer look at the video shows the object appears to be attached to a parachute.

Another video that stoked excitement showed an object that was "travel[ing] with the wind," based on analysis by U.S. Northern Command. Kirkpatrick says the disclosure movement is disregarding the obvious explanations. His report concluded that there is "no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."

"They're removing the analytic rigor and resolution behind some of those cases to foster more conspiracy and more pseudoscience to distract from all the other things that are going on today," he says.

But disclosure advocates say that Kirkpatrick's explanation for other incidents, such as the famous "gimbal" video, is ridiculous.

"Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick…told me on two separate occasions that the gimbal object was a balloon reflecting sunlight," says journalist and former Department of Defense official Marik von Rennenkampff during a panel discussion at the Disclosure Forum. "A balloon reflecting the sunlight at night, moving against 120 knot winds. That's Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick for you folks."

Luna, who also spoke at the Disclosure Forum but declined to be interviewed by Reason, has also been a harsh critic of Kirkpatrick's work. At a House Oversight hearing on UAP transparency, she said, "The former AARO director known as Sean Kirkpatrick attacked our witness and members on this committee. It should be noted that he is a documented liar and brings into question what his purpose at AARO really was if it was not to follow up on investigations and disclose his findings to members of Congress."

Kirkpatrick says "Luna needs to go back to high school and finish some science classes" and calls her a "threat to national security and public safety."

He's also dismissive of the extraordinary claims of former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who testified before Congress that the government possesses "nonhuman biologics"—in other words, alien bodies.

"Grusch just absolutely refused to come talk to us," Kirkpatrick says. "And I suspect that is largely due in part because he knows that my team and I would have investigated every last sentence he laid out there."

He says Grusch, who did not reply to Reason's interview request, simply doesn't understand the material he's citing.

"This was a mishmash of a number of real programs, aerospace programs, clandestine programs, that had nothing to do with alien technology," says Kirkpatrick. "He certainly didn't have any legitimate reason to have access to some of those programs."

As for Elizondo, Kirkpatrick says that they spoke several times, but he couldn't get him to sign off on his official summary of events.

"That's not true at all," Elizondo says when I ask him about it.

"I was happy to sign, but he was supposed to type them up and have them in a written format," Elizondo says. "Let's not forget, I actually testified under oath to the American people with a penalty of perjury and jail time. So, if somebody has a history of fibbing here…I think it's pretty obvious who that is."

Kirkpatrick's report concluded that claims of a cover-up are "the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence."

But Elizondo says Kirkpatrick's report was "full of errors." Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) made similar criticisms during a November 2024 hearing, saying the report "has stoked suspicions AARO is unable or, perhaps, unwilling to bring forward the truth about the government's activities concerning UAPs."

Elizondo told the committee during that same hearing, "Most Americans would be shocked to learn that the Pentagon's very own public affairs office openly employs a professional psychological operations officer as the singular point of contact for any UAP-related inquiries from citizens and the media….And it turns out that that individual was also working with former leadership of AARO at the time as well."

Elizondo is referring to Susan Gough, who handled UAP public inquiries for the Pentagon. Her LinkedIn shows that while she worked for military intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, she advised the government on "psychological operations." While at the U.S. Army War College, she authored a paper during the war on terror arguing that America needs a "national psychological strategy" concentrated on "long-term attitude and behavior changes."

According to Rep. Tim Burchett (R–Tenn.), who wrote the bill to shut down Kirkpatrick's office, the report was intended to mask the truth.

"I think it's a cover-up," Burchett said on The Joe Rogan Experience. "I think there's something else out there. These people have kept this stuff secret. Here's another thing. I was in one meeting with a guy, and I said, 'What about the president on this?' And he said, 'The president's on a need-to-know basis.' Now that's a federal employee saying that he or she has information that the president is not allowed to see. And I just was aghast, man."

But Kirkpatrick says Luna, Burchett, and other UAP-interested members of Congress failed to ever seek him out for a briefing while he served in AARO. They called him back for one after he retired.

"That was when they decided that they wanted to have a briefing," he says. "And it was just absolutely a dog-and-pony show. It was ludicrous…which I would expect in the public eye, but in a classified setting, I would at least expect them to have spent a few minutes trying to understand the detail behind every one of these resolved cases and why it was what it is and why some of the stories are what they turn out to be as not alien technology."

 

Aliens, Apparitions, and Government Money

Kirkpatrick says the disclosure movement is also corrupted by its pursuit of taxpayer dollars, which goes back decades.

Congress earmarked $22 million for a company created by UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow to study advanced aerospace threats between 2008 and 2010 at a Utah compound called Skinwalker Ranch. Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) secured the funding after a Defense Intelligence Agency scientist reported witnessing a floating apparition at the ranch. Bigelow, who has since donated tens of millions to Donald Trump and Republican candidates, was at the time one of Reid's friends and a major donor.

Bigelow, who declined our interview request, told Las Vegas journalist George Knapp, author of a book about Skinwalker Ranch, that he met with Trump in early 2026 and asked him to publicly confirm the existence of aliens.

"I said [to Trump], 'And this is what I want you to say, Mr. President: A nonhuman intelligent presence has been on Earth for a very long time using spacecraft and with performances completely beyond our capabilities and our human physics.' And that's it. To say nothing else. That's it. That's all, because what this is is disclosure, and it's actually confirmation, and the two are welded together," Bigelow said.

Kirkpatrick's report says the federal money that went to Bigelow's company was approved to study "breakthrough technologies" but was inappropriately diverted to examine "shadow figures…creatures…remote viewing and human consciousness anomalies" as well as hiring "psychics to study 'inter-dimensional phenomena' believed to frequently appear at that location."

"Now you've got somebody who has access to some funding, which they misuse within the context of this program to go off and do their own investigations of not only alien technology, but paranormal events and sightings and whatnot," Kirkpatrick says.

But Kirkpatrick's critics say he can't be trusted and that he lied to Congress when he testified that he didn't remember attending a presentation about Skinwalker Ranch. Later, the owner produced a photograph of him attending a presentation on the topic.

Kirkpatrick says it happened "a decade ago or more" and that he doesn't recall it being about Skinwalker Ranch. He says when the topic came up, he advised them that "it was not credible" and "not a thing that we should spend time or energy or money on."

Gold worked for Bigelow's parent company at the time of the contract, but says he wasn't involved in the branch that worked at Skinwalker Ranch. But he says research classified as "paranormal" can be defensible.

He appeared recently on a YouTube channel that explores whether Bigfoot is real or not and said that while UAP researchers are often "embarrassed and are hesitant to talk about other aspects of the phenomena, including potential Bigfoot sightings," that "it's important for paranormal researchers to pool their resources, get out of the stovepipes, and start working together with the potential that there are through lines, that there's connections or synergies from all paranormal research that I believe deserves to be looked into." 

"We have to be careful, follow the scientific process. Let's not begin, 'Well, Bigfoot or cryptid, so it's gotta be nonsense,'" Gold tells Reason. "Show me the data and then let's work backwards from that rather than ad hominem attacks on something that we don't have full information on transparency [about]." 

When I ask him if that's what is happening now or if the investigatory bodies have been captured by alien enthusiasts, he's dismissive.

"I will assure you that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not been captured by people who believe in aliens and are driving them to look at aliens," Gold says. "I assure you that Tulsi Gabbard has not been captured by alien advocates and is [not] pushing aliens. I assure you Pete Hegseth has not been captured by aliens and is not pushing aliens."

But Kirkpatrick says believers in the paranormal do wield outsize influence.

"[Christopher Mellon] is very proud of the fact that he helped write a lot of the language and law that I had to go deal with," Kirkpatrick says. "He has his own motivations that are absolutely well-documented; they have nothing to do with actually finding the truth."

But Mellon says in his critique of the AARO report that Kirkpatrick labels cases where there are just not enough data "fully solved" and floods case files with poor data to "drown out and conceal" what's genuinely unexplained, while discounting eyewitness reports as "not credible." He also argues Kirkpatrick is wrong to limit himself to "today's science to deny as 'not credible'" eyewitness testimony and traces of UAPs that "may represent an advanced technology."

Kirkpatrick counters that the scientific method is wholly adequate to investigate the possibility of an advanced civilization. 

"The scientific method has led us to the discovery of new science all the time," he says. 

For example, he says he asked NASA scientists to consider how an intelligent civilization would find Earth and get here.

"It's been proposed that some of these advanced propulsion systems are anti-gravity-like or gravitational wave riders and warp drives, and that's great. OK, we know what the theoretical physical signatures would be. There would be gravitational anomalies; there would be magnetic anomalies. So then I went to the scientific community and said, 'All right, of all of our gravitational wave sensors, have we seen any gravitational wave anomalies that match these signatures? And has anything we've ever seen have a timestamp that corresponds to a sighting of a UAP?' The answer is no."

 

Explaining the Mysterious Lights Above

There is credible evidence of strange phenomena in our skies. It's just not clear that it's a sign of extraterrestrial life.

The Biden administration shot down an apparent Chinese surveillance balloon over South Carolina in 2023. Drones of undisclosed origin swarmed Langley Air Force Base for 17 days. Between 2024 and 2026, similar incursions occurred near bases in California, New Jersey, and Louisiana.

Gold agrees that a lot of these cases can be attributed to foreign adversaries, but perhaps not all of them.

"The stigmatization of the UAP issue is putting us in grave danger as we dismiss many cases of anomalous phenomena, which are very likely adversarial drones," says Gold. "There's potential for something extraordinary occurring here, but yes, there's a potential and the likelihood that much of this is adversarial drones, and the two are interwoven, which is why we need to wake up as a nation, protect our skies, protect space as well, take this issue seriously. Let us not let a lack of imagination turn into a lack of freedom."

Kirkpatrick says the primary task of his office at the Department of Defense was to look for foreign incursions in American airspace, and that its investigations were derailed by alien enthusiasts.

"The real goal out of AARO was to prevent technological surprise from an adversary," he says. "Do you want to wake up one day and find that China's been flying drones over the United States? So really, this was a hunt for adversary threats in American airspace, in their space base, in their undersea. And we uncovered a few things that pointed in that direction."

He thinks the true believers are a distraction from that core national security mission.

"You're not doing justice to those national security men and women who have dedicated the last few years trying to address what Congress asked them to do, which is what pisses me off the most. That they are being denigrated for no good reason other than Luna the snowflake doesn't like the answer, or Burchett, who can't understand science, doesn't like the answer because it doesn't conform to what they want. What they want is a big conspiracy."

Gold believes his current employer, Redwire, which provided cameras on the latest Artemis moon mission, can help solve the mystery.

"With UAPs, we're using cellphones and cockpit cameras to study," he says. "We need to transition to more scientific equipment that's more standardized so we can learn more about the phenomena. We're going to have a lot more data coming in. And most of this will be done via commercial companies. So you won't have the government necessarily as a barrier between this information going out to the public and the scientific community."

 

Escaping the Hall of Mirrors

Will the next dump of documents, photos, and videos prove or disprove whether alien intelligence is visiting Earth? There's a lot of anticipation.

But as more information comes to light, it's crucial to remember this long history of ufology in America, where state actors spread alien mythology when it served their interests and discredited witnesses when it didn't.

In the 1980s, an Air Force colonel visited a local Nevada bar and handed out pictures of flying saucers to cover up a stealth fighter being tested at nearby Area 51, which likely seeded much of the UFO mythology in the area.

Kirkpatrick's investigation also discovered that Air Force officers were told about a secret program called Yankee Blue to reverse-engineer recovered alien technology. But Yankee Blue didn't exist.

It was "essentially a hazing ritual for their new officers as they come in to tease them and see if they figure out that, 'Hey, this program I'm about to brief you on isn't a real program, but we're going to tell you it's the alien program, right? And so we're gonna see what your response is,'" Kirkpatrick says. "And some of them catch on, and some of the ones that don't, that kind of sits in their brains."

The Trump administration has toyed with the public as much as anyone, releasing a cheeky AI image of the president walking with an alien, and creating an aliens.gov domain that links to apprehensions of illegal immigrants.

Elizondo says he's confident the administration is close to making the type of disclosure that will convince most Americans that nonhuman intelligence has visited planet Earth, though he says there will always be doubters.  

"I think we're getting close to that already, but you're never going to get 90 percent of the American public to agree on anything," says Elizondo.

To accelerate the process, the disclosure movement is demanding better whistleblower protections through the proposed UAP Transparency Act.

But even more important than legislation is the information environment. In a digital age where documents leak, FOIA requests pile up, and congressional hearings are livestreamed, the government is losing its ability to control the narrative. On the flip side, fabulists and frauds are more easily exposed and fact-checked through community notes and AI assistants. That's all a good thing for real disclosure without spin.

The risk is that this deluge of information, ambiguous video, and secondhand reporting about spectacular hidden material creates more confusion without analysis to accompany it.

The vast majority of alleged UAP sightings were balloons or satellites. Some were camera artifacts, and others were optical illusions. Others may have been American drones or those of a foreign adversary. Or they were unusual weather phenomena. To date, there's no strong evidence that alien craft have visited Earth. The evidence that we've seen suggesting that possibility doesn't withstand scientific scrutiny.

But it's rational to keep an open mind about the small number of truly unresolved, mysterious sightings in our skies and the sworn testimony of military and scientific professionals who insist that they've seen something not of this world.

Gold is right that we shouldn't mock or dismiss sincere efforts to examine the full range of possibilities through rigorous scientific inquiry and more advanced sensors. Astronomer Avi Loeb's Galileo Project at Harvard is one example of that sort of grounded approach to the question.

Loeb, now a government adviser on UAPs who appeared at the Disclosure Foundation event, wrote this summer, "Whether UAP are non-human made is not a philosophical debate. It should be settled by high-quality scientific data."

The key is to follow those data, wherever they take us.

 

Music Credits: Synthology by MAIKY via Artlist /Ganymede by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist /Space Journey by Piotr Hummel via Artlist/Discovery by We Dream of Eden via Artlist/Aurora Waves by Theatre of Delays via Artlist/The Void by Stephen Keech via Artlist/Deepest Dive (Instrumental version) by Tiko Tiko via Artlist/Textures (Instrumental version) by Okaya via Artlist /Outer Limits by Theatre of Delays via Artlist/No Time by Mattia Vlad Morleo via Artlist/New World by Ian Post via Artlist/Symmetry by Theatre of Delays via Artlist

Photo Credits: Chuck Kennedy/MCT/Newscom/Dean Derhak CC BY-NC-ND 2.0/Jonathan Alpeyrie/SIPA/Newscom/David Becker / ZUMA Press Wire / Newscom, imageBROKER / Norbert Eisele-Hein / Newscom, Samuel Corum, Pool via CNP / Polaris / Newscom