DISCLOSURE? WHO CARES?

The cast

Rogue’s Gallery

Everywhere else on this site, we argue that Disclosure — whenever it finally arrives, in whatever redacted, footnoted, subcommittee-approved form — will land as a nothingburger. We stand by that. But an argument about the ending is not an argument about the people who got us to the last chapter, and this room is where we set the thesis down for a while.

These twenty-four are a cast. The whistleblower who traded a career for a sworn statement. The journalist who became a conduit and then became the story. The physicist who ran the experiment nobody would fund twice. The debunker who has been right often enough to be resented for it. The elder statesman who has been saying the same eleven sentences since the Ford administration. The rock star. They do not agree with each other. Several of them cannot be in the same room. Some are almost certainly wrong, one or two may be lying, and a few have been vindicated in ways their critics have never quite acknowledged out loud.

"Rogue's Gallery" is affectionate. Take it the way a fond biographer means scoundrel.

House rules

The record, not the ridicule. Anyone can be made to look foolish with a clip reel. We are not interested. Every entry here is written as though the subject will read it, because several of them will.

Claims stay labeled as claims. When someone says a thing, we report that they said it, when, under what oath, and to whom. We do not launder testimony into fact by dropping the attribution, and we do not dismiss it by burying it in scare quotes. If a claim has been corroborated, we say by what. If it hasn't, we say that too.

Corrections welcome. Show us the evidence and we will fix it, promptly and visibly. Dates, titles, clearances, quotations, the precise wording of a denial — all of it is correctable. Send it. Being wrong in public is survivable; staying wrong on purpose is not.

The questions are real questions. We think the answers will disappoint. We do not think the asking was foolish. Those are different positions, and this page depends on the distinction holding.

The four headings

Every figure gets the same four, in the same order, at roughly the same length: Background, The Claim, The Record, The Question. No one gets a fifth section for being credible and no one gets a shorter one for being inconvenient.

That symmetry is the fairest thing we can offer, because it means the format can't take sides — only the evidence in it can, and that is the reader's business, not ours.

No. 01

David Grusch

Former U.S. Air Force officer and civilian intelligence official at the NRO and NGA; 2023 UAP crash-retrieval whistleblower

Background

A decorated U.S. Air Force veteran of the war in Afghanistan with more than fourteen years as an intelligence officer, Grusch served as a GS-15 civilian at the National Reconnaissance Office (Senior Intelligence Officer, 2016-2021) and at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance. He was the NRO's representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019 to 2021 and co-led UAP analysis at NGA from late 2021 until July 2022, and he assisted in drafting the UAP reporting and whistleblower provisions of the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The Debrief, which first published his account in June 2023, reported a 2021 NRO performance evaluation describing him as "an adept staff officer and strategist." He left government service on April 7, 2023.

The Claim

Grusch says that in the course of his official duties he interviewed roughly forty witnesses over four years and "was informed... of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access." He has said the U.S. government possesses intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin and has recovered "non-human biologics"; that these programs have been concealed from congressional oversight; that people have been harmed in order to keep them concealed; and that he has faced retaliation for reporting. He is explicit that his public testimony rests on what cleared insiders told him rather than on anything he saw himself, and says his firsthand knowledge can only be shared in a classified setting. He has also said he viewed documents describing a craft recovered by Mussolini's government in Italy in 1933 and later obtained by the United States. By 2026 his public claims had widened: that the government is aware of "several" kinds of non-human life, and that billions in related spending has been hidden from Congress.

The Record

In May 2022 his attorney, former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III, filed a whistleblower complaint on his behalf. In July 2022 the ICIG found it "credible and urgent" — a statutory determination that a complaint appears credible and warrants transmittal, not a finding that its allegations are true — and forwarded a summary to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the congressional intelligence committees. Grusch testified under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee on July 26, 2023, at a hearing organized by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett. The Pentagon stated that AARO "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate" claims of possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials, and AARO's Historical Record Report of March 6, 2024 found "no empirical evidence" for such programs — while disclosing "Kona Blue," a proposed DHS special-access program premised on reverse-engineering presumed recovered craft, which DHS leadership rejected as "without merit" before it ever operated. Whether Grusch ever spoke with AARO remains disputed: then-director Sean Kirkpatrick wrote on July 28, 2023 that Grusch "has refused to speak with AARO," and said in a January 2024 interview that Grusch "had not come in" before Kirkpatrick's own December 2023 departure; Grusch told NewsNation in November 2023 that AARO had never contacted him and called Kirkpatrick's account a lie. Neither version has been publicly resolved. In August 2023 The Intercept published Loudoun County records describing mental-health episodes in 2014 and 2018; the records referenced post-traumatic stress disorder, and in 2024 Grusch sued the county sheriff for $2.5 million over their release, which he contends was improper. In 2026 NewsNation reported an unnamed source saying the Vatican's archives hold no records of UFO incidents, contrary to the Mussolini-era account Grusch has described.

Where things stand

As of September 2026, Grusch is a private citizen and one of the most prominent public voices in the UAP disclosure movement. He headlined a Capitol Hill press conference with UAP-focused lawmakers on June 9, 2026, where he said the government is aware of "several" kinds of non-human life and called for scrutiny of allegedly hidden spending. In an August 2026 NewsNation interview he urged President Trump to "give us the authorization" to disclose. Later in August 2026 he made further allegations, reported by NewsNation and widely aggregated: that a retrieval program was approved at the White House level in 1954, and that the late Vice President Dick Cheney oversaw a "detainment situation" involving recovered non-human beings. None of these later claims has been independently corroborated. He remains a regular presence in NewsNation's UAP coverage.

The Question: The inspector general routed his complaint to Congress as credible and urgent, his service record checks out, Congress has since legislated UAP records and whistleblower protections, and ODNI issued preliminary UAP disclosure guidance in July 2026 — so the process he set in motion is still moving. Yet three years after his testimony, no physical evidence and no named program have been publicly confirmed, and the office chartered to look reported finding none. Grusch's answer is that the corroboration is firsthand, that he gave it to the inspector general and to Congress in classified settings, and that classification is precisely what oversight has not yet penetrated. The competing reading is that forty accounts can converge on one story without any of them amounting to firsthand proof. Short of declassification, what evidence would tell those two readings apart?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 02

Luis Elizondo

Former counterintelligence officer; AATIP figure

Background

Elizondo studied microbiology and immunology at the University of Miami and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1995, serving in Korea, Kuwait and the United States, and later, as a civilian intelligence officer, running military-intelligence and counterintelligence operations in Afghanistan, South America, and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. From 2008 he worked with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), resigning effective October 4, 2017 in what he described as a protest against excessive secrecy and internal opposition on the UAP issue. His central credential — that he directed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon effort funded from roughly 2007 to 2012 at about $22 million and sponsored by then-Senator Harry Reid — is disputed, and the Pentagon has answered the question both ways. In 2017, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White confirmed to Politico that Elizondo was an AATIP leader. In June 2019, Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood told The Intercept that Elizondo "had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI, up until the time he resigned," and added that he could not confirm White's earlier statement. In a May 2021 letter reported by NBC News, Reid wrote: "As one of the original sponsors of AATIP, I can state as a matter of record Lue Elizondo's involvement and leadership role in this program." The department has never reconciled the two accounts.

The Claim

Elizondo says he took over AATIP as its director in 2010 and ran it from within OUSDI (in the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure he says he was assigned to the program in 2009), and that UAP are a genuine, unresolved national-security problem exhibiting capabilities beyond known technology. In his 2024 book Imminent, which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, he goes further: that the U.S. government has operated a decades-long, compartmented crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering effort involving recovered non-human technology and biological material, withheld from Congress and the public. He describes his own story as that of an insider who resigned in protest and was then subjected to a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out — the substance of a complaint he filed with the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, which alleges among other things Pentagon press statements denying his role after that role had already been officially confirmed.

The Record

The record cuts both ways. Corroborations: the three Navy videos released publicly in 2017, in an effort Elizondo took part in, were authenticated by the Navy and formally released by the Department of Defense in April 2020 as unclassified footage of phenomena that remain officially characterized as "unidentified" — though the Pentagon has separately maintained that the videos were never cleared for general public release, a dispute bound up with the leak investigation that his IG complaint concerns. Harry Reid, the program's original sponsor, affirmed Elizondo's "involvement and leadership role" in a May 2021 letter. His disclosures helped catalyze the congressional interest that produced UAP hearings and reporting requirements, and he testified under oath at a joint House Oversight subcommittee hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth," on November 13, 2024. And when independent researchers showed that an image he had presented was not what he had been told it was, he accepted the correction publicly rather than defending it. Contradictions: Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood stated in June 2019 that Elizondo had no AATIP responsibilities; Garry Reid, then director of Defense Intelligence at USDI, wrote in a memo that Elizondo "aggrandized his role" and that "to the best of my knowledge, [Elizondo] had no job responsibilities related to the AATIP" (Elizondo's 2021 IG complaint alleges a retaliation campaign; the underlying dispute remains unresolved). According to a Wall Street Journal account by Joel Schectman published June 21, 2025, Elizondo told the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office sometime between 2022 and 2023 that files proving the existence of a secret government program were in a locked drawer in his former office; FBI special agents sealed and searched the office several hours later and found nothing of the kind described, and a former supervisor said he had never heard of such a program from Elizondo in their years working together. A "mothership" photo Elizondo presented at a private Philadelphia speaking event on October 29, 2024, said to have been taken from the U.S. embassy in Romania, was traced by John Greenewald and others to a 2023 Facebook post, located hundreds of miles from the embassy, and identified as a light fixture reflected in a window; Elizondo responded publicly, "Looks like we can put this one bed. Excellent work to whoever solved this one and a big thank you!" An image of a purported disc "potentially anywhere between 600 and 1,000 feet in diameter" that he displayed at a May 2025 hearing sponsored by the UAP Disclosure Fund was identified by Mick West, agreeing with Reddit commenters, as a center-pivot irrigation circle. The Pentagon has stated that it "has not found any verifiable evidence that any UAP observation represented extraterrestrial activity nor has the department discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."

Where things stand

As of September 2026, Elizondo's work continues outside government: a podcast, frequent media appearances, and "Persona Non Grata," which his website describes as "a live touring theatre experience that takes the UAP conversation directly to audiences across the country" — no dates are currently listed, the site showing only "New Dates Coming Soon!" He is featured in and narrates The Age of Disclosure, which premiered at South by Southwest on March 9, 2025 and was released by Amazon Prime Video on November 21, 2025; his own website additionally credits him as an executive producer, a credit not reflected in the film's published production credits. HarperCollins' Mudlark imprint announced a second book, Reckoning: The Unspoken Truth about UFOs and the Urgency of Now, for release in August 2026; its publication has not been independently confirmed, and the book does not appear on his official website.

The Question: The same institution has both confirmed and denied his defining biographical claim and has never reconciled the two answers; nearly nine years of records requests and an inspector general complaint have not produced a document that settles it. What kind of record would settle it — a personnel file, a tasking order, a program roster — and is its absence after nine years better explained by a program run informally and off the books, as he describes, or by a role smaller than the one claimed?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 03

Christopher Mellon

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; a central figure in the modern push for UAP transparency

Background

Mellon holds a B.A. in economics from Colby College and an M.A. in international relations from Yale. He spent roughly two decades in national-security staff work, beginning with Senate positions in 1985 — including about a decade as a professional staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, working for Senators William Cohen, John Chafee and John Warner — and as a legislative aide he participated in drafting the legislation, enacted in 1986 as part of the FY1987 National Defense Authorization Act, that created U.S. Special Operations Command. At the Pentagon from 1997 to 2003 he served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Policy, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, and from November 1999 Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. In February 2003 he returned to the Senate Intelligence Committee as minority staff director, hired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, and left government service later that year. He subsequently taught at Georgetown and worked as a private-equity investor in biotech and information-technology start-ups. From 2017 until the end of 2020 he was national security affairs advisor to To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the UAP-focused venture co-founded by musician Tom DeLonge.

The Claim

Mellon asserts that unidentified anomalous phenomena are a real, documented phenomenon recorded by trained military personnel and multiple sensor systems, and that the U.S. government has under-investigated and over-classified the subject to the detriment of national security and science. He argues the issue belongs in serious congressional oversight rather than the tabloids, and has drafted concrete legislative proposals to that end. He has also said that officials he considers credible have told him of alleged UAP-related retrieval programs — accounts he presents as warranting investigation rather than as proven — while pressing the Pentagon to release its unclassified UAP data.

The Record

Much of Mellon's core account has been corroborated. The Pentagon confirmed that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program had existed after the December 2017 New York Times story he helped bring about, and in the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon he acknowledged that he was the source who passed the Navy footage to reporters. In September 2019 the Navy confirmed the footage was authentic and said it regards the objects in it as unidentified; on April 27, 2020 the Defense Department itself formally released the three clips — FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST. His policy influence is documented: writing in Politico in May 2021, Bryan Bender credited Mellon with having 'effectively drafted' the language calling for a government UAP report — the directive in Senate Report 116-233 accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, under which the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued its June 2021 preliminary assessment. The FY2022 NDAA then directed the creation of a successor office; the Pentagon stood up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in July 2022, and the FY2023 NDAA codified its authorities. On the other side of the ledger: skeptics, among them Mick West, have offered prosaic explanations for the same videos — infrared glare, parallax, instrument artifacts, distant aircraft. AARO's March 2024 historical review of U.S. government involvement with UAP since 1945 reported that it found no empirical evidence that reported sightings represented extraterrestrial technology, or that the government had concealed a reverse-engineering program from Congress — an absence of evidence that cuts against, though it does not disprove, the retrieval-program accounts Mellon has relayed from others. Mellon published a detailed rebuttal in The Debrief on April 12, 2024, under the title 'The Pentagon's New UAP Report is Seriously Flawed.' Separately, journalist Art Levine wrote in The Washington Spectator on July 20, 2023 that at To The Stars Academy's 2017 launch press conference Mellon presented photographic evidence of a UFO that 'turned out to be a party balloon.' Levine attributes the balloon identification to a social-media post by The Black Vault and gives no date, venue or methodology; we have found no independent confirmation of the account and no published response from Mellon, and we note it here as an unresolved allegation rather than an established fact.

Where things stand

Mellon remains publicly identified with UAP transparency. The Galileo Project at Harvard named him a research affiliate in October 2021. He published policy essays at The Debrief through April 5, 2025, the most recent asking whether the administration or a declassification task force would compel the Defense Department to release its trove of unclassified UAP videos. He appears prominently in the documentary The Age of Disclosure, which premiered at SXSW on March 9, 2025 and was released on November 21, 2025 on Amazon Prime Video and in limited theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. We found no public activity by him confirmed later than that release; readers should treat his current affiliations as of this writing (September 2026) as last verified on those dates.

The Question: Mellon moved UAP from tabloid fodder into federal law and formal oversight — so when the office that legislation produced reports that it found no evidence of the extraordinary programs his sources describe to him, which reading should hold: that the oversight he pushed for is working as designed, that it has not yet reached the compartments he says it cannot reach, or that the underlying accounts were never solid? And what result would he himself accept as a genuine null?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 04

Jeremy Corbell

Documentary filmmaker and UAP footage publisher; co-host of Weaponized

Background

Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell (b. February 3, 1977, Los Angeles) worked as a martial arts instructor and a fine artist before turning to UFO subjects. By the standard account of his early life — much of which rests on primary and self-published sources — he holds a ju jitsu black belt, taught ju jitsu and yoga at UC Santa Cruz, developed martial arts and yoga curricula for at-risk youth including juvenile hall programs, and exhibited installations built from salvaged Los Angeles architectural material. He directed the documentaries "Hunt for the Skinwalker" and "Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers" (2018), the latter premiering on Netflix in 2019, where it returned Lazar to public attention and fed the "Storm Area 51" phenomenon. Since January 2023 he has co-hosted the investigative podcast Weaponized with veteran Las Vegas journalist George Knapp, and he fronted the docuseries "UFO Revolution" (TMZ Presents, on Tubi).

The Claim

Corbell's stated position is that UAP are a real and unresolved phenomenon, that the U.S. government holds recordings and information it has not shared, and that his job is to obtain that material from military and intelligence sources and put it in front of the public — his podcast's tagline is "Your curiosity will be WEAPONIZED." He argues the public has a right to see what its own military has filmed. He has historically stopped short of stating what the objects are, though in 2026 coverage of the government disclosure push he has been reported making considerably stronger claims, including that he holds "absolute evidence" of extraterrestrials and a public demand that the government release its files on reverse-engineering and "non-human biologics" or he would release them himself. He has consistently presented Bob Lazar's Area 51 account as credible and worth serious investigation.

The Record

His best-known releases follow a two-part pattern: the imagery is authentic, and its interpretation is contested. In April 2021 Corbell published infrared footage of triangular "pyramid" objects filmed from the USS Russell, and on May 14, 2021 footage of a spherical object filmed from the USS Omaha that appeared to descend into the ocean. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough confirmed that both had been recorded by Navy personnel and that the UAP Task Force had included them in its ongoing examinations — a confirmation of provenance, not a statement that anything anomalous occurred. The Debrief reported, citing Corbell's sources, that a Navy submarine searched unsuccessfully for the Omaha object; the Navy-side comment it published, attributed to Carrier Strike Group 9, said only that "attempts to search the water for wreckage were ineffective." Analyst Mick West argued the triangular shapes are consistent with bokeh — an out-of-focus artifact produced by a triangular lens aperture — and said of the Omaha object, "the simplest explanation is that it's just a plane. It moves like a plane, it acts like a plane." Neither video has been officially identified, and neither has been shown to be fabricated; the dispute is over what confirmed-authentic footage depicts. His Lazar documentary presents Lazar's account sympathetically, and that record cuts both ways: MIT and Caltech have no record of the degrees Lazar claims and the U.S. Air Force has disputed his claimed employment at a Nellis-area facility, while documentation does place him at Los Alamos in the early 1980s — as a technician for a contractor rather than as a physicist employed by the lab. Reaction within the UFO research community has been mixed, and some there have characterized Corbell as a "dupe" of Lazar; that is a characterization by critics, not a finding. One caution for readers weighing any of this: Corbell's Wikipedia biography carries editor maintenance flags — promotional tone (January 2024) and reliance on primary, self-published and unreliable sources (April 2025). Those flags concern the article's sourcing and are not a finding about Corbell's own conduct, but they do limit how much of the standard account of his life can be independently confirmed.

Where things stand

As of September 2026 Corbell is active and close to the center of the year's UAP story. The Weaponized feed's most recent episode is #120, "NHI Extracting Our Souls — Whitley Strieber on 70 Years Of Contact," published June 18, 2026, in a run that began in January 2023. He is the subject of "Sleeping Dog," directed by Michael Lazovsky and released digitally on May 12, 2026, assembled from hundreds of hours of his personal video archive. The film arrived during a Trump administration push to release government UAP files and a congressional demand, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, for 46 UAP videos by an April 14, 2026 deadline that the Department of War missed; press reports say eight of those 46 videos appear in the documentary ahead of any official release. He continues to press publicly, and now more insistently, for U.S. government UAP disclosure.

The Question: The Pentagon confirmed in 2021 that his two best-known leaks were genuine Navy recordings; an independent analyst proposed ordinary explanations for both; and no official identification of either has followed in the five years since. What should a reader do with a record shaped like that — and if the prosaic explanations hold for the cases that have been examined, does the remainder of his archive still contain something genuinely unexplained? Separately, and more practically: does publishing first and vetting in public accelerate disclosure, or spend the credibility that disclosure depends on?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 05

George Knapp

Las Vegas investigative journalist; broke the Bob Lazar story; one of the longest-serving mainstream reporters on the UFO beat

Background

Knapp holds a bachelor's degree in communication from the University of West Georgia and a master's in the same field from the University of the Pacific. He joined Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS-TV in 1981 and has spent most of his career there as an anchor and investigative reporter, with an interlude from 1991 to 1995 at Altamira Communications, a public relations firm whose clients included advocates for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a subject he had covered as a reporter. His non-UFO investigative work is heavily decorated: two KLAS-TV investigations he worked on, "Crossfire: Water, Power and Politics" and "Desert Underwater," won Peabody Awards, and he has received five regional and two national Edward R. Murrow Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, twenty-four Pacific Southwest regional Emmys, and nine Associated Press Mark Twain Awards. He co-authored "Hunt for the Skinwalker" (2005, with Colm Kelleher) and "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon" (2021, with Kelleher and James Lacatski, the former AAWSAP program manager), and has long been a frequent host of the radio program Coast to Coast AM.

The Claim

Knapp's core position is journalistic rather than experiential: that UFOs/UAP are a legitimate news story the mainstream press has wrongly treated as untouchable, and that governments have quietly studied the subject while denying it. On Bob Lazar, whom he put on air anonymously in May 1989 and under his own name that November, Knapp does not claim to have proven the story; he argues he found corroborating traces that cut against blanket official denials, chiefly a 1982 Los Alamos phone directory listing and a June 1982 Los Alamos Monitor article describing Lazar as a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. He maintains that the events reported at Utah's Skinwalker Ranch by the Sherman family and by Robert Bigelow's NIDS researchers were genuinely anomalous and worth scientific study.

The Record

On Lazar: MIT and Caltech say they have no record of his attendance, and Los Alamos officials said they hold no employment records for him. Knapp's phone-directory find was real, though later reporting indicated Lazar worked there as a contractor's technician rather than a staff physicist, and Terry England, who wrote the 1982 Los Alamos Monitor article, said in 2021 that he had taken Lazar's self-description at face value and had not checked his credentials, which weakens the documentary half of the corroboration. Element 115, first synthesized in 2003 and named moscovium, has only isotopes that decay within a few hundred milliseconds, not the stable form Lazar described. On Skinwalker Ranch: skeptics including Robert Sheaffer note that NIDS itself acknowledged difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication, and that owners who lived on the property for roughly sixty years before the Shermans reported nothing unusual. On the other side of the ledger sit substantial vindications. In December 2017 the Pentagon confirmed the existence of AATIP, which grew out of the roughly $22 million AAWSAP effort that Harry Reid initiated at Bigelow's urging, with appropriations support from Senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, and that was contracted to Bigelow's BAASS. That confirmed the broad arc Knapp had reported for years. The further claim that Skinwalker Ranch was itself a study site under the contract rests chiefly on the 2021 book Knapp co-wrote with the program's own manager, so it corroborates him only in part. Knapp and photojournalist Matt Adams obtained and published Reid's 2009 letter about the program, and in 2021 the Pentagon confirmed that Navy UAP imagery he and Jeremy Corbell brought forward had been recorded by Navy personnel, while drawing no conclusion about what it showed. The Peabodys and duPont attached to his work were earned on conventional investigative stories rather than on UFO reporting, and in 2020 Rolling Stone called him "the John the Baptist of the UFO movement."

Where things stand

As of September 2026 Knapp remains active. He is still listed at KLAS-TV and among Coast to Coast AM's hosts, and the Weaponized podcast he co-hosts with Jeremy Corbell posted new episodes through at least June 18, 2026. He hosted the Netflix docuseries "Investigation Alien" (November 2024) and attended the July 2023 congressional hearing on UAP.

The Question: Knapp has repeatedly been right that secret programs existed, while the specific extraordinary claims he transmitted remain unproven. The open question is whether the access that lets him break real stories is compatible with fully adversarial scrutiny of the sources who supply them, and what threshold of corroboration he holds an extraordinary claim to before putting it on the air. He has spent nearly four decades as both the field's most trusted conduit and one of its few credentialed reporters; those two roles pull in different directions, and he has rarely been asked at length how he reconciles them.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 06

Ross Coulthart

Australian investigative journalist; NewsNation correspondent who conducted the first televised interview with UAP whistleblower David Grusch

Background

Born in Australia on 30 August 1962 and raised partly in New Zealand, Coulthart took a law degree at Victoria University of Wellington and began reporting at the New Zealand Herald in 1982. He spent roughly three decades in mainstream Australian current affairs — Nine's A Current Affair, the ABC's Four Corners, Nine's Sunday and 60 Minutes, and Seven's Sunday Night — and his awards are documented rather than self-asserted: a 1996 Logie for Most Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs for "The Prisoners Who Waited," on corruption in Aboriginal legal services; a 2002 gold medal at the New York Film Festival with Max Stahl for an investigation into impunity for violence in East Timor; and the 2008 Gold Walkley with Nick Farrow for "The Butcher of Bega," an investigation into a doctor's alleged malpractice. He is generally described as a five-time Walkley winner (the Gold plus four others), and he was a joint winner of the 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History for Charles Bean. Since 2021 his work has centered on UAP: the book In Plain Sight (2021), the documentary The UFO Phenomenon (2021), the Need to Know podcast with Bryce Zabel from 2022, and a role at NewsNation, which announced in November 2023 that it had signed him as a special projects correspondent — he had already reported for the network before that formal appointment.

The Claim

Coulthart's stated position is not that he has proven aliens exist, but that multiple security-cleared insiders have told him the United States and allied governments recovered craft and materials of non-human origin, and have concealed the effort inside unacknowledged special access programs shielded from congressional oversight. He frames this as a secrecy-and-accountability story rather than a science story: the question he says he is pursuing is who authorized the withholding and under what authority, not the nature of any occupants. He argues that the burden of proof properly rests with the government that holds the records, and he has said his sources' accounts are testimony he has assessed for credibility rather than evidence he can place in a reader's hands — a distinction his critics say his on-air framing does not always hold to. He also maintains that his conventional investigative career — corruption, intelligence agencies, medical malpractice — used the same confidential-source methods that critics only object to here.

The Record

David Grusch's allegations were first published by The Debrief on 5 June 2023; Coulthart's NewsNation interview, aired days later, was the first televised account, and on 26 July 2023 Grusch repeated his allegations under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee. The underlying claims of recovered non-human craft remain unverified. In August 2023 the ABC's Media Watch questioned the evidentiary basis for his cover-up reporting, and in December 2023 Australian Skeptics gave him its 2023 Bent Spoon Award for what it called uncritical journalism. Also in August 2023, Coulthart described The Intercept's reporting on police records of two mental-health incidents involving Grusch as the product of an intelligence-community leak; The Intercept documented that the records were public law-enforcement records obtained under a routine Virginia freedom-of-information request to the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office, not leaked. In a July 2023 interview on the Project Unity channel he said a recovered craft was "so big they had a building put over it in a country outside of the United States of America," and declined to name the location; no such site has been identified. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office concluded in its March 2024 historical-record report that it found no empirical evidence of extraterrestrial technology and no evidence of a reverse-engineering program concealed from Congress, while separately confirming that a proposed program, Kona Blue, had in fact been put forward inside the Department of Homeland Security and rejected there as without merit — a partial corroboration that such efforts were at least contemplated. His January 2025 Reality Check broadcast with former operative Jake Barber, featuring night-vision footage of an "egg"-shaped object and claims of "psionic" interaction, drew sustained skeptical technical analysis; the footage has not been independently authenticated, and Barber's Skywatcher group and its claims likewise remain unconfirmed by official sources.

Where things stand

A note on currency: the publicly available record we could confirm for this card runs through mid-2025, and nothing later could be independently verified. As of that record, Coulthart is with NewsNation as its senior special investigations correspondent, presents Reality Check, and continues the Need to Know podcast with Bryce Zabel; he renewed public calls for UAP disclosure around World UFO Day in July 2025 and remains a regular speaker on the UAP conference circuit, including Contact in the Desert. Any 2026 developments — further Pentagon file releases, conference appearances, or follow-up on the Skywatcher group — are not asserted here because we could not confirm them.

The Question: Coulthart built a decorated career on confidential sources whose claims were eventually testable against records, courts, and inquiries — and he is now applying the same method to a subject where, by design, the corroborating records are the thing being withheld. What should a reader do with reporting that is methodologically consistent with a journalist's best work but structurally unverifiable, and how long is it reasonable to keep the question open before the absence of confirmation begins to weigh against the claim?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 07

Steven M. Greer

Emergency physician turned disclosure organizer; founder of CSETI and the Disclosure Project

Background

Steven Macon Greer, born 1955 in Charlotte, North Carolina, earned a B.S. in biology from Appalachian State University in 1982 and an M.D. from the James H. Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University in 1987, and was licensed to practice in Virginia in 1989. He worked as an emergency room physician and retired from medicine in 1998 to work full time on UFO/UAP disclosure; in the early 1970s he trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher and served as director of a meditation organization. Biographical material published by his own organizations also describes him as a former chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Caldwell Memorial Hospital in North Carolina and a lifetime member of the medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha; the degree, school, and license appear in independent sources, while those additional titles appear in his own biographical material. He founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) in 1990 and the Disclosure Project in 1993.

The Claim

Greer holds that an unacknowledged, compartmented black-budget program inside government and defense contractors has concealed for decades not only the reality of extraterrestrial visitation but — more importantly, in his framing — the energy and propulsion physics derived from it, and that releasing those technologies, not merely admitting aliens exist, is the actual point of disclosure. He maintains that the visitors are not hostile, that a substantial share of modern sightings are human-built reverse-engineered craft ("alien reproduction vehicles"), and that the real danger is a manufactured false-flag "alien threat" narrative used to justify weaponizing space. His 2021 film "The Cosmic Hoax: An Exposé" states the position as three counter-assertions: that we do know what UAP are, that humans can and do build craft that maneuver that way, and that the UFOs are not a threat. He also teaches that ordinary people can initiate contact themselves through the CE-5 protocols — CSETI's published guidelines describe light, sound, and thought as the modes of contact, with "thought – specifically consciousness" as the primary one — and presents this as a repeatable diplomatic and scientific practice rather than a passive vigil.

The Record

The May 2001 National Press Club event is a matter of record: Greer assembled twenty retired Air Force, FAA, and intelligence officers who spoke on camera under their own names, and it drew same-week coverage from ABC News, BBC News, Fox News, The Washington Times, and Wired News. It is generally described as the largest on-record gathering of insiders the field had produced to that point, and it remains the achievement most often credited to him. His broader thesis that the U.S. government held undisclosed UAP data and that witnesses were constrained from discussing it moved toward the mainstream after AATIP became public in December 2017 — the Pentagon confirmed in May 2019 that the program had investigated unidentified aerial phenomena — and after the congressional UAP hearings that followed, though Greer himself characterizes that post-2017 official narrative as a disinformation campaign rather than a vindication. Cutting the other way, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published Volume I of its Historical Record Report on March 6, 2024, reporting that it found no empirical evidence of extraterrestrial technology, no concealed program to reverse-engineer such technology, and no UAP program withheld from Congress — a direct contradiction of the claim at the center of Greer's case. The one artifact he has submitted for independent laboratory examination resolved to something ordinary: the six-inch Atacama specimen presented in his 2013 film "Sirius" was sequenced by a team including Stanford's Garry Nolan and reported in Genome Research on March 22, 2018 as a human fetus, female and of Chilean ancestry, carrying variants associated with skeletal development, Nolan's earlier preliminary analysis having already found no evidence of extraterrestrial origin; a September 2018 team led by bioarchaeologist Siân Halcrow went further and disputed the claimed skeletal anomalies themselves as normal development and post-mortem change, while also raising ethical objections. Chilean authorities examined whether the remains had been removed from the country lawfully, and researchers including Nolan supported repatriation. Robert Sheaffer, writing on his Bad UFOs blog in 2012 and 2013, criticized the resolution of Greer's photographs, his account of having been offered $2 billion to stop investigating, and — at a 2013 Joshua Tree conference — a security detail Sheaffer described as armed men with "Black Ops security" on their shirts and guards in yellow hats stationed in front of the exits during the lecture. Variety's Owen Gleiberman called the 2020 film "Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun" "fantasy propaganda," and The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore, while judging it "far too impassioned in its nuttiness to be a purely cynical sham," observed that decades of summoning had never yielded a good photograph. At his June 12, 2023 return to the National Press Club, Greer announced — in his own organization's press release, which remains the source for the figures — an archive of over 5 terabytes said to contain testimony from more than 700 military, intelligence, and corporate whistleblowers and to document 119 crash-retrieval events, along with plans for a civilian RICO lawsuit. No independent audit or verification of the archive's underlying documents has been publicly reported.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Greer is active and running a full calendar: his 2026 documentary "CE5: The New Frontier of Contact," which he directed, was released digitally on March 3; he marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 2001 press conference with a "25 Years of Disclosure" event in Washington, D.C. on May 8-9, 2026; he held a small-group retreat in Hot Springs, Virginia on May 23-28; and he held a "CE5 in the Blue Ridge" conference in Afton, Virginia on July 24-26. He continues to publish a podcast — episode 23, "Navigating the Post-Disclosure World," posted August 25, 2026 — alongside the Disclosure Project intelligence archive, a membership platform, a CE-5 contact app, and a new-energy lab his site describes as still in development. His events page currently states that there are no upcoming events scheduled.

The Question: Greer has put more insiders on the record under their own names than almost anyone else in the field, and the broad question he pressed for decades — whether the government held UAP data it was not disclosing — is now the subject of official inquiry, even as the Pentagon's own historical review rejects the reverse-engineering claim at the core of his case. The one specimen he offered for outside testing was resolved by an outside laboratory, and the 2023 archive has not been opened to comparable scrutiny. So: what would a test of the CE-5 protocols look like that Greer himself would accept as capable of failing? And what independent review of the 700-plus testimonies would he agree to in advance and treat as binding, whichever way it came out?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 08

Tom DeLonge

Blink-182 co-founder; founder, chairman and CEO of To The Stars Inc.

Background

Born December 13, 1975 in Poway, California. He co-founded Blink-182 in 1992 and Angels & Airwaves in 2005, and his company's SEC filings credit him with music sales of more than 25 million records worldwide across the two bands. He holds no scientific or technical degree and does not claim one; published accounts state he was removed from Poway High School in the second half of his junior year and spent a semester at nearby Rancho Bernardo High School. To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science was incorporated in Delaware as a public benefit corporation on February 13, 2017, co-founded with physicist Harold E. Puthoff and James Semivan, who retired from the CIA's Directorate of Operations after 25 years as an operations officer and was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service; the company amended its name to To The Stars Inc. on November 30, 2021. DeLonge has served as its founder, chairman, president and CEO throughout, co-authored the Sekret Machines book series, and directed the 2023 feature Monsters of California.

The Claim

DeLonge's position is that unidentified aerial phenomena are real and physically anomalous, that they have been studied inside the U.S. government far more seriously than the public was told, and that a non-human origin is a legitimate open hypothesis rather than a settled conclusion. He does not present himself as having proved any of this; his stated role is to build a credible private platform — staffed with former defense, intelligence and aerospace officials — that can carry the subject into the mainstream without the constraints a government office faces. He argues that story, music and film reach audiences that classified briefings and academic papers never will, which is why To The Stars was built as a media company with a science division rather than as a laboratory. He frames the objective as institutional legitimacy and government transparency, not as personally proving extraterrestrial visitation.

The Record

To The Stars published the Navy infrared videos now known as FLIR1 and Gimbal in December 2017, alongside the New York Times report of December 16, and GoFast on March 9, 2018. In September 2019 the Navy confirmed the videos were authentic and made by naval aviators, describing them as part of 'an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years'; the Department of Defense formally released the same footage on April 27, 2020. Independent analysts, notably Mick West, have proposed conventional explanations: that Gimbal shows infrared glare from a distant jet with the apparent rotation an artifact of the camera gimbal, and that in GoFast parallax makes an object at roughly 13,000 feet — plausibly a balloon — appear far faster than it is. The Pentagon has endorsed no explanation and the incidents remain officially unresolved. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works corroborated part of DeLonge's account, stating that multiple members of its team met with him to explore his vision for a documentary, 'as we would with any individual or organization interested in telling the story of Skunk Works,' and that he attended a Skunk Works employee event, while saying it ultimately decided not to participate. Asked in 2019 about his account of being flown out to meet a specific person at NASA's Ames Research Center, NASA told The War Zone that it had checked several centers and had no record of issuing him a visitor badge, including at Ames; the outlet noted that this 'doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen.' In July 2019 the company purchased a set of metamaterials for $35,000, describing them as samples 'reported to come from advanced vehicles of unknown origin.' Under its 2019 Army CRADA the samples were analyzed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the company's own annual report states that in April 2024 ORNL concluded the material was terrestrial in origin and did not meet the theoretical requirements to function as a terahertz waveguide. The same filing notes that the ORNL report 'did not offer a firm conclusion as to the origin and purpose of the Materials,' that the company sent its scientists Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis to the laboratory in September 2024, and that their February 2025 memorandum held the material 'still an unknown quantity' — before concluding that neither document 'reveal[ed] any form of proof of exotic ... origin, but it did not absolutely rule it out either.' The CRADA ended in 2024. Its three highest-profile national-security figures left within weeks of one another: Christopher Mellon resigned from the advisory board in November 2020, Steve Justice resigned as chief operating officer in December 2020, and Luis Elizondo was laid off with severance in December 2020; the company's own filing for that year states that 'in 2021, as we shift to an entertainment focus, we are assessing the future of this program.' Financially, the first Regulation A+ offering ran from September 29, 2017 to September 28, 2018 and raised $1,370,230 against a $50 million maximum, and two later Reg A offerings raised roughly $818,000 and $113,500. The annual report for fiscal 2025, filed April 29, 2026, shows revenue of $1,539,822 (down 17% year over year), a net loss of $225,736, an accumulated deficit of $58,275,723 — the bulk of it historical non-cash stock compensation, including $29.5 million recognized in 2017 and $9.2 million in 2018, rather than investor cash spent — continued going-concern language, and $752,033 of principal owed on a convertible note to DeLonge, who has continued to lend the company working capital, including $100,000 of advances in 2025.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026 he remains founder, chairman, president and CEO of To The Stars Inc., headquartered in Encinitas, California and operating essentially as a media and consumer-products business: in fiscal 2025 merchandise accounted for 93% of revenue and books 5%, the merchandise including limited-edition Fender Starcaster guitars, a guitar pedal, hot sauce and apparel. Its annual report was filed with the SEC on April 29, 2026 with going-concern language intact. The adult animated series Breaking Bear, greenlit by Tubi in 2022 and previewed at New York Comic Con in October 2025 with a cast including Brendan Fraser and Sarah Michelle Gellar, is expected by the company to be released in 2026, though it cautions the timing is not within its control. Legendary Television's option on the Sekret Machines novels expired on March 30, 2025 when Legendary elected not to proceed with a television series; the company has since transitioned the property to a feature film adaptation and drafted a revised screenplay. He continues with Blink-182, which released One More Time... in 2023, issued the deluxe One More Time... Part-2 in September 2024, toured through 2025, and whose members said in spring 2025 that they were working on a new album. Angels & Airwaves has released no new studio album since Lifeforms (2021).

The Question: By 2023 the subject DeLonge set out to legitimize had congressional hearings, a standing Pentagon office and draft disclosure legislation. The specific evidence his own company advanced, meanwhile, has not resolved in his favor: the videos remain officially unexplained but have drawn plausible conventional explanations, and the materials came back terrestrial. Is he best understood as the catalyst who made an unserious topic serious, or as someone whose contribution was access and attention rather than evidence — and does that distinction matter if the institutional change arrived either way?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 09

Bob Lazar

Area 51 / S-4 claimant since 1989; scientific-supply retailer

Background

Robert Scott Lazar was born in Coral Gables, Florida, and attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles. He was present at Los Alamos in 1982: a laboratory phone directory of that year lists him alongside Kirk-Mayer, a staffing contractor, and a June 1982 Los Alamos Monitor front-page story on a jet-powered car he had built described him as "a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility." The Monitor's writer, Terry England, said in 2021 that he had taken that description at face value without checking it. The laboratory has said it holds no employment records on Lazar, and later reporting describes his role there as a contractor's technician rather than a staff physicist. The master's degrees Lazar says he holds from MIT (physics) and Caltech (electronics) are not reflected in either institution's records, and critics note that he was enrolled at Pierce during part of the period he says he was at MIT. Lazar says his records were deliberately expunged. He owns and operates United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies, a materials and chemicals retailer.

The Claim

Lazar says that in late 1988 he was hired — interviewed through the contractor EG&G, paid through Naval Intelligence — to work at a facility he calls S-4, at Papoose Lake south of Groom Lake, as one of a small group assigned to back-engineer the propulsion system of nine craft he was told were not built by humans. He describes a reactor fueled by a stable isotope of element 115 that produced an amplifiable gravitational field, focused to distort space ahead of the craft. He says he went public in 1989 because he believed the secrecy was indefensible and because he feared for his safety after being caught bringing friends to watch a test. He does not claim to have met extraterrestrials, and has consistently said he can testify only to what he was shown and told, not to where the craft actually came from.

The Record

The setting has been partly vindicated: the CIA acknowledged Area 51 in declassified documents, and the JANET contractor shuttle he described is documented — though neither speaks to S-4 or its contents. Supporters cite two specifics as narrow hits. The door reader he described in 1989 resembles the Identimat hand-geometry system, which used light-sensing cells to measure finger length and went out of production in 1987; and element 115, unsynthesized when he named it, was first created in 2003 and named moscovium in 2016. Both cut two ways: 115 was already a numbered slot on the periodic table, Identimat was a commercially marketed product rather than obscure knowledge, and every isotope of 115 yet produced decays in well under a second, contradicting the stable-isotope claim. Against him, MIT and Caltech located no records; a professor he named, William Duxler, taught at Pierce College rather than Caltech; EG&G said it had no records of him; and the Air Force disputed his claimed Nellis employment. A W-2 obtained by reporter George Knapp shows a small payment and an address researchers have linked to Naval Intelligence; its authenticity has been argued both ways without resolution. Lazar pleaded guilty to felony pandering in 1990 and was sentenced to 150 hours of community service, mandatory counseling, and restrictions on contact with brothels. United Nuclear pleaded guilty in 2007 to three counts under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act for shipping restricted chemicals later used in illegal fireworks, and was fined $7,500 and placed on three years' probation; the FBI searched the business in 2017 in connection with a Michigan thallium poisoning investigation in which Lazar was not named as a suspect. Tom Mahood, a retired engineer who investigated the case in detail, concluded the academic claims are fabricated and proposed that the S-4 story grew out of a real April 1989 security incident. A 2026 Skeptic essay by Émile Kinley-Gauthier argued instead that both the "fabulist" and the "sincere but mistaken" readings leave real gaps. Supporters emphasize that his account has changed little across thirty-seven years of retelling; critics dispute both the consistency and what it would prove. No physical evidence has ever been produced.

Where things stand

"S4: The Bob Lazar Story," directed by Luigi Vendittelli and Christopher Matteau and narrated by Lazar himself, was released on Prime Video on April 3, 2026; George Knapp, Gene Huff, Mario Santa Cruz, and Joy Lazar appear in it. Around the release he sat for long-form interviews, including Jesse Michels' American Alchemy and Chris Ramsay's Debriefed (recorded in April 2025, published in April 2026), in which he said he is running experiments in a home laboratory intended to reproduce effects he says he observed at S-4. He continues to operate United Nuclear and maintains his account unchanged.

The Question: If the credentials cannot be substantiated and the Los Alamos work was a contractor technician's, what accounts for the durability of a story his supporters say has barely shifted in thirty-seven years? And if the account is substantially true, why has every thread of corroboration stopped at the perimeter of the setting — the base, the shuttle, the era's hardware — and never once reached inside it?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 10

Avi Loeb

Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard; founder and director of the Galileo Project

Background

Abraham "Avi" Loeb was born in Beit Hanan, Israel, on February 26, 1962. He took part in the Israel Defense Forces' Talpiot program while serving at 18, and earned his BSc (1983), MSc (1985), and a PhD in plasma physics (1986), all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He held a long-term fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1988-1993) before joining Harvard's astronomy faculty in 1993 and receiving tenure in 1996; he has been the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science since 2012. He chaired Harvard's Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, founded its Black Hole Initiative in 2016, and has directed the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics since 2007. He is a prolific author in mainstream cosmology — first stars, galaxy formation, black holes — with hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and eight books, and has chaired the advisory committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative.

The Claim

Loeb's position is methodological before it is substantive: the hypothesis that some interstellar objects or unidentified aerial phenomena are manufactured rather than natural should be assigned a nonzero prior and then tested with instruments and data, not ruled out in advance by consensus. He argues that astronomy has the telescopes, sensors, and analytical tools to settle such questions empirically, and that the field's reluctance to point them at anomalies is a sociological failing rather than a scientific one. He generally frames his specific proposals — 'Oumuamua as a possible lightsail, IM1 as possibly manufactured, 3I/ATLAS as worth checking for technosignatures — as hypotheses to be falsified by better data, and he founded the Galileo Project explicitly as a way to generate that data independently rather than wait on government disclosure.

The Record

Loeb and Shmuel Bialy proposed in 2018 that 1I/'Oumuamua's non-gravitational acceleration could be explained by radiation pressure on a thin artificial sail — a proposal prompted in part by the absence of any detected coma or cometary activity. The field has largely converged on natural explanations involving volatile outgassing, and the sail hypothesis is not accepted. On the 2014 Pacific fireball CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1), Loeb and Amir Siraj argued in a 2019 arXiv preprint for an interstellar trajectory; the paper met years of resistance in review, in part because the uncertainties on the government's velocity measurement were not public. On April 7, 2022, a U.S. Space Command memo signed by chief scientist Joel Mozer stated that the velocity estimate was sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory, and the paper was accepted by The Astrophysical Journal later that year — a case where he was ahead of his critics, though those uncertainties were still never released. His 2023 Pacific expedition recovered metallic spherules; the resulting chemical-classification paper (Loeb, Stein Jacobsen, Roald Tagle and 28 colleagues, January 2024) was accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Chemical Geology, while a companion recovery note appeared in Research Notes of the AAS, which the AAS describes as non-peer-reviewed. The interpretation is contested. Patricio Gallardo argued in October 2023 that the composition is consistent with anthropogenic coal-ash contamination; Steve Desch and colleagues argued in 2023-2024 that the beryllium-, lanthanum- and uranium-rich spherules are terrestrial microtektites derived from laterites; Peter Brown and Jiri Borovicka argued in The Astrophysical Journal in 2023 that the CNEOS velocity uncertainties are underestimated and do not support an interstellar classification; and a March 2024 study in Geophysical Journal International led by Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins concluded that the Manus Island seismic signal used to localize the search was ground vibration from a passing truck, placing the likely entry point roughly 170 km from the area searched. Loeb responded that his team relied on CNEOS satellite data rather than the seismometer and would have surveyed the same site regardless. On the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey in Chile, a paper with Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl exploring an artificial-origin scenario described itself as "largely a pedagogical exercise." Penn State astronomer Jason Wright argued in August 2025 that Hubble imaging — in which no nucleus signal could be separated from the surrounding coma dust — sets an upper limit of about 2.8 km on the nucleus radius for an assumed albedo of 0.04, contradicting Loeb's inference of a much larger body. JWST found a coma dominated by carbon dioxide, consistent with a natural comet, though with a CO2-to-water ratio of 8.0 +/- 1.0, among the highest measured in any comet. Loeb has also co-authored conventional observational papers on the same object, including a January 2026 study with Mauro Barbieri of its rare near-opposition alignment. The Galileo Project, founded July 26, 2021 on roughly $1.8 million in initial philanthropic funding, has published instrumentation and methodology papers; as of early 2026 no peer-reviewed Galileo paper had reported a definitive identification of an anomalous object.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Loeb remains the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard and directs the Galileo Project, whose own reporting describes several ground-based observing systems in development, including Phase 1 testing of its SkyWatch passive radar at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an eight-camera all-sky infrared array; his February 2026 posts included calls for project volunteers. In June 2026 he was named chair of a newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, created at the request of the White House, which works with the FBI, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but which has no budget and no access to classified material. He continues to publish astrophysics papers — including several 2026 papers on 3I/ATLAS with Mauro Barbieri and Toni Scarmato — and to post frequent commentary on Medium.

The Question: On IM1's interstellar trajectory, Loeb held a position most meteor specialists rejected and later obtained a confirmation from U.S. Space Command — one that remains disputed, because the uncertainties behind it were never published. The interpretations he has built on top of that claim have not been accepted by the field. How should a discipline weigh a scientist whose most contested calls are also the ones it declined to test itself — and how should it price the cost of chasing anomalies that dissolve against the cost of a field that declines to look?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 11

Garry Nolan

Stanford pathology professor; UAP materials researcher and Sol Foundation co-founder

Background

Garry P. Nolan holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professorship in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is listed as active faculty. He took a BS in biology from Cornell and a PhD in genetics from Stanford in 1989, then did postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate David Baltimore at MIT from 1990 to 1993. His mainstream record is substantial and independently checkable: several hundred peer-reviewed papers, dozens of US patents, and co-founding roles in biotech firms including Rigel, Nodality, BINA Technology (acquired by Roche in 2014), and Akoya Biosciences, which commercialized his CODEX single-cell imaging technology. The exact counts differ slightly between sources — his Stanford faculty profile lists over 350 research articles and 50 US patents, while his Sol Foundation bio lists over 350 articles and 40 patents — but the underlying career is not in dispute. He received the Department of Defense's inaugural Teal Innovator Award in 2012 and the Hans Sigrist Prize in 2021.

The Claim

Nolan's position is that the UAP question is an ordinary empirical problem that scientists have declined to work on, and that his job is to generate data on physical samples and human medical cases rather than to prove a conclusion. He has said he analyzed roughly ten to a dozen alleged UAP-associated material samples, that most were unremarkable, and that two 'seem to be not playing by our rules' — notably a magnesium fragment associated with the 1957 Ubatuba, Brazil case, which he says was 'way off. Like 30 percent off the ratios' expected for magnesium found anywhere on Earth. He treats that as an unexplained result rather than as proof of anything. Separately, he says that at the request of members of the intelligence community he examined brain imaging from military and government personnel with unusual health conditions, and reports finding unusually dense connectivity between the head of the caudate and the putamen; he describes these individuals as having had UAP-related exposures, and is explicit that the work concerned medical effects rather than validating the experiences. On the larger question he is unusually blunt about his personal odds — asked by a moderator at the SALT iConnections conference in New York in May 2023 for the probability that intelligent non-humans have visited Earth, he answered '100 percent' — while pairing that with statements that he is 'happy to be proven wrong in all of this' and that he is 'careful NOT to come to a premature conclusion.'

The Record

Nolan's highest-profile anomalous-materials investigation cut against the UFO community: given the small Atacama specimen that ufologists promoted as alien, a whole-genome study he co-authored, published in Genome Research in March 2018, concluded it was a human fetus carrying variants the authors associated with skeletal development. That study drew its own criticism — in September 2018 an international team led by bioarchaeologist Sian Halcrow, writing in the International Journal of Paleopathology, disputed the skeletal-anomaly interpretation, stating that the observations 'represent normal skeletal development in the fetus,' and faulted the ethics of studying the remains; the critics did not dispute that the specimen was human. Chilean authorities separately investigated whether the specimen had been removed from the country illegally. Nolan's group responded that they never handled the skeleton and worked from a bone sample of roughly one cubic millimetre, acknowledged the ethical concerns, and supported repatriation. On materials, he co-authored a 2022 paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences (vol. 128, with Jacques Vallee, Sizun Jiang and Larry Lemke) on instrumental and isotopic methods for characterizing unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics. But no peer-reviewed publication has established that any sample he examined is of non-terrestrial origin, and the striking Ubatuba isotope result has not been independently replicated in the published literature — Nolan himself has noted that a second fragment attributed to the same event showed ordinary terrestrial ratios. The brain-imaging work is in a similar position: he has described it in interviews and talks, including a resemblance to what was later called Havana syndrome, but no peer-reviewed publication of those imaging results was located. Provenance and chain of custody for privately held samples remain the standing objection, one Nolan himself raises. Institutionally he has moved closer to government: he co-founded the Sol Foundation with anthropologist Peter Skafish on August 15, 2023 and serves as Executive Director of its board, and in June 2026 he was named — at the White House's request, per public reporting — to the newly created UAP Science Advisory Council chaired by Avi Loeb. That council is an external advisory body working with unclassified data, not a government agency; it reports to the administration's interagency UAP Governance Board, and its roster also seats the prominent skeptic Michael Shermer.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Nolan remains active Stanford faculty and Executive Director of the Sol Foundation's board, and in July 2026 he presented results from new advanced testing of alleged UAP materials in a Sol Forum interview; the specifics of those results were not published in peer-reviewed form as of this date. Since June 2026 he has also served on the UAP Science Advisory Council, the advisory group chaired by Avi Loeb that works with unclassified data and reports to the government's interagency UAP Governance Board.

The Question: A scientist with a long and independently verifiable mainstream research record has reported two sets of results — the isotope anomalies and the imaging findings — that have circulated for years through interviews and conferences without appearing as replicated, peer-reviewed papers, in part because of provenance and patient-privacy constraints he says he did not create and cannot unilaterally resolve. What would it actually take to move that work into the literature where it could be confirmed or falsified, and if the answer is that it cannot get there, what should a careful reader do with it in the meantime?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 12

Diana Walsh Pasulka

Religious studies professor; ethnographer of UFO belief among scientists and technologists

Background

Pasulka holds a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, an M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University, whose religion department's alumni page lists her degree year as 2003. She is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and chaired its Department of Philosophy and Religion from 2015 to 2019. Her books are "Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture" (Oxford University Press, 2014), "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology" (Oxford, 2019), "Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences" (St. Martin's Essentials, 2023), and "The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny" (St. Martin's Essentials, July 28, 2026); she co-edited "Posthumanism: The Future of Homo Sapiens" with Michael Bess and "Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural" with Simone Natale. She has also worked outside the academy: her consultancy on the first "Conjuring" film appears both in her own bio and on her Wikipedia page, and her bio adds a consulting-producer credit on the Netflix series "Encounters" and an appearance in the J.J. Abrams docuseries "UFO."

The Claim

Pasulka does not claim to know what UFOs are, and has said her training is not to adjudicate whether the phenomenon is real or false. Her argument is that belief in nonhuman intelligence is functioning as a religion in formation — with its own revelations, relics, saints, and heresies — spreading through digital media rather than through institutions, and that this belief is held not only at the cultural fringe but by credentialed scientists, engineers, and technology entrepreneurs who keep it private. Interviewing her for Vox, Sean Illing characterized the work as "not so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture." In her later work she moves further toward interpretation, treating UFOs, artificial intelligence, and life-extension research as one entangled story about how human consciousness is being reshaped, and taking seriously — as Jacques Vallée does — the possibility that whatever is behind the phenomenon is pursuing an agenda of its own rather than humanity's interests. Reviewers of "The Others" describe an argument that goes further still, including the claim that digital media is eroding the human capacity for religious experience.

The Record

"American Cosmic" grew out of several years of ethnographic fieldwork, was published by a university press, and was reviewed in mainstream outlets. Her central empirical observation — that accomplished scientists and technology figures privately take the subject seriously — is consistent with what became public afterward: university-affiliated research programs and sustained congressional attention to the subject developed along the lines her book suggested. The sharpest published criticism comes from within the mainstream press. Reviewing her work in The New York Review of Books on April 18, 2024, Nathaniel Rich quoted her statement that "As a scholar of religion... I am trained not to weigh in, one way or the other, on the truth or falseness of believers' claims," and argued that the book instead reads as "a conversion story, to be precise, the genre in which a nonbeliever experiences a divine revelation and, having seen the light, becomes an evangelist." Rich also retold an episode Pasulka herself published: she was blindfolded and driven to a purported crash site in New Mexico, where a companion Rich describes as a Stanford biologist recovered an object resembling shrapnel and later concluded in his own lab that such objects contain no earthly materials and violate the laws of physics. In Rich's account, "Pasulka accepts his explanation"; no peer-reviewed publication of such an analysis was located. Separately, researchers writing in self-published venues have argued that her pseudonymous key informant "Tyler D." is Timothy E. Taylor, whom they describe as a contractor connected to the space-shuttle program who moved into biotechnology; comparing his account in her books with his own memoir, "Launch Fever," they argue his achievements were presented as more singular than the underlying record supports. Neither Pasulka nor the man named has confirmed the identification, those critiques have not been tested in peer review, and no one has alleged that Pasulka fabricated material — the dispute concerns her credulity toward sources, not invention. She has continued to use the pseudonym in her later work.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, her July 2026 publisher biography describes her as a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and her own site lists continuing podcast appearances, lectures, and course offerings. Her fourth book, "The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny," was published by St. Martin's Essentials on July 28, 2026, and is her most explicitly interpretive work to date; both the publisher's listing and her own site bill it as a New York Times bestseller.

The Question: Ethnographers of religion routinely gain access by taking believers seriously on their own terms, and Pasulka has said her training is not to adjudicate whether the phenomenon is real. She also, by her own published account, allowed herself to be blindfolded and driven to a site whose provenance she had no way to check — and then relayed a companion's extraordinary lab conclusion about what was found there. Does that kind of access reach an understanding of this milieu that a more detached observer could not, and what should a reader use to tell where the ethnography ends and the participation begins?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 13

Leslie Kean

Independent investigative journalist; co-author of the 2017 Pentagon UFO story and the 2023 Grusch story

Background

Independent investigative journalist, educated at the Spence School and Bard College, who began her working life as a photographer at Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology and moved into journalism through reporting on political prisoners in Burma, co-authoring "Burma's Revolution of the Spirit" (1994) with Alan Clements, and working at KPFA in Berkeley, where she contributed to "Flashpoints." She is the author of the 2010 New York Times bestseller "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" (foreword by John Podesta) and "Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife" (2017), which Netflix adapted as a six-part series released January 6, 2021, directed by Ricki Stern for Break Thru Films. Her own bio and her publisher credit her with winning a five-year Freedom of Information Act suit against NASA over the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident, settled in her favor, and with organizing a 2007 Washington press conference on official UFO investigations with filmmaker James Fox. Her credentials are not themselves in dispute; the disputes attach to her sources.

The Claim

Kean's stated position is that she does not know what UAP are and does not claim to. Her argument is that a residue of cases resists conventional explanation, that credentialed firsthand witnesses — pilots, generals, officials — have described them on the record, and that this makes government secrecy about the subject a legitimate accountability beat rather than a belief system. Her method, as she describes it, is to bring named and credentialed sources into mainstream print and let readers weigh them, explicitly setting aside the material she considers unverifiable. She applies the same framing to survival of consciousness after death: that the evidence is strong enough to deserve serious investigation, not that the question is settled.

The Record

On December 16, 2017 she, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper reported in the New York Times that the Defense Department had run the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, funded at about $22 million across roughly 2007 to 2012; the Pentagon confirmed the program's existence, and the Navy in 2019 acknowledged the accompanying videos as genuine Navy footage showing objects that remain unidentified — the core scoop held. The article's account of Luis Elizondo running AATIP has never been resolved on the public record: Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told Politico in 2017 that he was a leader with responsibility for the program; a June 2019 statement from Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood to The Intercept said he "had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI, up until the time he resigned"; an internal memo by Defense Intelligence director Garry Reid said Elizondo had "aggrandized his role" and had "no job responsibilities related to the AATIP"; Senator Harry Reid wrote to NBC News in 2021 affirming Elizondo's "involvement and leadership role"; Elizondo filed his own Inspector General complaint alleging a coordinated effort to discredit him, and no public Inspector General findings have settled the conflict. Her 2010 book's central recommendation was that the United States create an official body to study the phenomenon; such a body now exists, though not by her doing — the Defense Department stood up the UAP Task Force in 2020 and established AARO in July 2022 under a mandate in the FY2022 defense authorization act. On June 5, 2023 she and Blumenthal published David Grusch's account in The Debrief after the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post declined it; Grusch stated in the piece that he had been informed of the alleged programs in the course of his official duties but had been denied access and had not personally observed recovered craft, the Intelligence Community Inspector General had found his complaint credible and an urgent concern, and he testified before House Oversight on July 26, 2023. AARO stated it had "not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims" of recovered off-world technology, and its March 2024 Historical Record Report found no empirical evidence of such a program — while confirming that a real reverse-engineering proposal, "Kona Blue," had been drafted and rejected by DHS. Former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick argued in Scientific American in 2024 that the claims trace to circular reporting among a small interconnected group and to misinterpretation of legitimate classified U.S. programs, and said Grusch had declined to be interviewed by AARO; Grusch disputes his account. The 2021 Netflix series drew mixed reviews: The Daily Beast's Nick Schager called its evidence "pseudo-scientific, anecdotal, and/or outright fanciful," and Live Science's Stephanie Pappas faulted it for conflating untestable belief with testable scientific claims, while The Independent's Micha Frazer-Carroll wrote more favorably about its treatment of death anxiety and its inclusion of psychological explanations.

Where things stand

She is still reporting the beat. On January 30, 2026 she and Blumenthal published a piece in The Debrief on Brazil's 1996 Varginha case reaching Capitol Hill as the incident turned thirty, writing in it that "there is no question that the Varginha case lacks hard data" — no photographs or video, physical evidence, official documentation, or medical records. She lectured on "The Reality of UFOs/UAP" at CUNY's Ralph Bunche Institute on May 6, 2026. Her site lists her as a contributing producer on both seasons of the docuseries "UFOs: Investigating the Unknown" — made for CNN, later carried by National Geographic and streaming on Hulu and Disney+ — and says she is developing a play, "A New Kind of God," with William Youmans.

The Question: Kean's standard — publish what credentialed, named people are willing to say on the record, and let the reader weigh it — has produced a confirmed scoop that changed federal policy and also claims that years of official investigation have not corroborated. The open question is what a reporter owes the public when a source is genuinely credible and genuinely secondhand: whether printing the testimony is the honest move, or whether a serious byline lends secondhand accounts a weight the underlying evidence has not yet earned.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 14

Ryan Graves

Former Navy F/A-18F pilot; founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace

Background

Graves grew up in Baldwinville, Massachusetts, and graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He joined the Navy in 2009 and served over a decade, flying F/A-18F Super Hornets with Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 ("Red Rippers") and completing two deployments in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve; he was working as a naval flight instructor in Mississippi when the New York Times broke its 2017 UAP story. His organization's biography gives his rank as Lieutenant. After leaving the Navy he worked on military autonomy applications at BAE Systems FAST Labs. He founded the 501(c)(3) Americans for Safe Aerospace, established in 2023, and chairs the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' UAP committee, which AIAA lists as its Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Integration Committee and of which it names him first chair. His engineering credential is documented.

The Claim

Graves argues that unidentified objects are appearing routinely in American military and civil airspace, that trained aircrew are grossly under-reporting them because of professional stigma and the absence of any protected reporting channel, and that excessive classification keeps the supporting sensor data from scientists and the public. He is agnostic about origin, and states the case as a disjunction: "If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, it is a concern for safety of flight." He does not claim the objects are extraterrestrial, and his asks are procedural — accurate reporting, an empowered and unbiased investigative authority, and public release of data for outside study. He is not neutral about performance, however: he testified the objects accelerated to Mach 1, held position against hurricane-force winds and outlasted his aircraft with no visible lift, control surfaces or propulsion, and told a Pennsylvania committee in June 2026 that "the physical presence of these objects is established, and the conversation is no longer about whether they exist."

The Record

Graves testified under oath before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on July 26, 2023, alongside David Grusch and David Fravor, in the first public congressional UAP hearing to feature military pilots. He described his squadron detecting unknown radar tracks off Virginia Beach after a radar upgrade, corroborating them on infrared, and a near-miss in Warning Area W-72 in which a pilot reported a dark gray cube inside a clear sphere; a squadron safety report was submitted, and he testified there was no official acknowledgment. In April 2020 the Department of Defense released and authenticated the GIMBAL and GO FAST videos and stated that the objects in them remain characterized as "unidentified" — confirmation that the footage is genuine and unresolved, though not an endorsement of any anomalous interpretation. Graves' own testimony is what links GO FAST to his operating area: he relayed secondhand an account attributed to Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet describing a classified 2015 email titled "Urgent safety of flight issue" that attached the GO FAST video and raised near-miss concerns in the warning area off Virginia Beach. That account rests on Gallaudet's recollection and has not been independently documented. On the contradicting side, Mick West's frame-by-frame analysis argues the GIMBAL object is infrared glare from a distant jet's engine exhaust and that its apparent rotation is an artifact of the camera's own de-rotation mechanism; Graves' documented answer is not to the glare model directly but that the released clip is not the underlying evidence, and that the full GIMBAL video and the radar data recorded by his squadron are classified Secret or above and unavailable to the outside analysts he says should evaluate them. Two details differ between his accounts and have not publicly been reconciled: his 2023 testimony dates the detections to 2014 and places the two jets "only 100 feet apart," while his June 2026 written testimony dates the exercise to 2012 — describing it as a pre-deployment exercise involving the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group — and puts the jets within 150 feet of each other. The 2026 filing also adds a figure absent from the 2023 account, that the object came within fifty feet of the lead aircraft.

Where things stand

As of his most recent verifiable public activity in mid-2026, Graves remains Founder and Executive Director of Americans for Safe Aerospace and chairs the AIAA's UAP committee. His advocacy has shifted noticeably toward state and local policy — reporting protocols for local law enforcement, UAP training for critical-infrastructure security, and public-communication frameworks. He submitted written testimony to the Pennsylvania House Communications and Technology Committee on June 25, 2026, making those three asks. His organization reports related results elsewhere: New Jersey legislation it supported was signed on January 13, 2026, establishing a state-funded center to study unidentified aerial phenomena; Connecticut's HB5422, directing a University of Connecticut study, cleared the Appropriations Committee on April 2, 2026; and a UAP task force bill was introduced in Vermont in January 2026. At the federal level the protected reporting channel for commercial aircrew that he has sought since 2023 was still the subject of advocacy rather than law as of his June 2026 filing.

The Question: Graves has built an unusually disciplined case that stops at "unidentified" and asks for procedures rather than conclusions. But the evidence he says would settle the matter — the full GIMBAL footage and his squadron's radar tapes — is classified, so the public is asked to weigh a record it cannot inspect, while the one artifact anyone can examine, the released GIMBAL clip, has a mundane competing explanation he does not accept. What finding would persuade him that a given case had been explained conventionally? And if the data were released and largely resolved that way, would the reporting protections he seeks — which he argues matter for flight safety whatever the objects turn out to be — still be worth building?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 15

David Fravor

Retired U.S. Navy commander; flight lead and best-known eyewitness of the 2004 Nimitz "Tic Tac" encounter

Background

Fravor retired from the U.S. Navy in 2006 as a commander. His published biographies state that he served roughly 24 years in the U.S. military, about 18 of them as a Navy strike-fighter pilot; that he enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy two years later; and that he is a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN). In November 2004 he was the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), the "Black Aces," embarked on USS Nimitz — a role the Navy has never disputed. He flew five deployments beginning with Operation Desert Storm, and he lives in New Hampshire. No dispute about his service record has surfaced in the public reporting.

The Claim

Fravor says that on November 14, 2004, about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, he and three other aircrew in two F/A-18Fs visually observed, in daylight, a smooth white object roughly the size of his aircraft — no wings, no markings, no exhaust plume, no rotor wash — hovering over a disturbance in the water, and that it appeared to react to his approach before accelerating out of sight. He does not claim to know what it was, and he distinguishes between what he saw and what caused it; on 60 Minutes in 2021 he said of the object, "I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains." He has also said its performance was "well beyond the material science and the capabilities that we had at the time, that we have currently or that we're going to have in the next 10 to 20 years." In a December 19, 2017 ABC News interview — his first extended public account — he went further: "I can tell you, I think it was not from this world." His stated ask of Congress is narrower and institutional: "What concerns me is that there's no oversight from our elected officials on anything associated with our government processing or working on craft believed not from this world."

The Record

The Department of Defense formally released the FLIR1 video along with two others on April 27, 2020, saying it did so to clear up misconceptions about whether the circulating footage was real, and stating that the phenomena in the videos remain characterized as "unidentified." The department has never endorsed any explanation of what they show. Alex Dietrich — the pilot of the second F/A-18F, a lieutenant in 2004 and a lieutenant commander when she went public in 2021 — has corroborated the visual sighting in interviews while cautioning: "Just because I'm saying that we saw this unusual thing in 2004 I am in no way implying that it was extraterrestrial or alien technology or anything like that." Radar and combat-systems operators from the cruiser USS Princeton have said the Aegis system tracked unidentified contacts in the days beforehand; published accounts range from several days to about two weeks. The dramatic figure Fravor relayed under oath — objects descending from above 80,000 feet in less than a second — rests on those operators' recollections rather than on anything he observed, and no radar recording supporting it has been released publicly. Then-Lt. Chad Underwood, the weapons systems officer who recorded the video roughly ninety minutes after the visual encounter, never saw the object with his own eyes and has explicitly declined to vouch for the footage's most famous element, the final leftward acceleration: "I did not actually see the object aggressively accelerate to the left, as the video shows, to actually prove that… I can't confirm that the object aggressively accelerated that way." Skeptical analysts, most prominently Mick West, argue that FLIR1 is consistent with a distant conventional aircraft and that the apparent final acceleration is largely an artifact of a late field-of-view change and a 1x-to-2x zoom doubling an existing leftward drift; that analysis addresses the video, not the four aircrew's naked-eye observation, a distinction Fravor himself has drawn. Fravor testified that no formal investigation followed, that no one interviewed the crew, and that recordings were not collected; no 2004 investigative record has been made public. The June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment concluded that UAP reports "probably lack a single explanation" and could in some cases involve sensor error or observer misperception, without resolving this one; the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, in its March 2024 historical review, reported finding no empirical evidence that any U.S. government UAP investigation has involved extraterrestrial technology or a concealed reverse-engineering program.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Fravor is retired in Windham, New Hampshire. He appears as an interviewee in Dan Farah's documentary The Age of Disclosure, which premiered at SXSW on March 9, 2025 and was released on November 21, 2025 on Amazon Prime Video alongside a limited theatrical run. He has not testified before Congress again since the July 26, 2023 hearing of the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, and no new evidence resolving the 2004 encounter has been made public since; his account continued to be widely republished and re-aired in national media through 2026.

The Question: One of the most extensively documented UAP cases in American public life rests on four trained observers whose accounts have stayed consistent for two decades, on a short infrared clip whose most dramatic moment the man who shot it declines to confirm, and on radar data that has never been released. What standard of evidence should a fair-minded person apply to testimony that is credible, mutually corroborated, and not independently verifiable on the public record — and does the thinness of that record say more about the object or about an institution that did not investigate at the time?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 16

Sean Kirkpatrick

Physicist and career intelligence officer; first director of the Pentagon's AARO

Background

Sean Michael Kirkpatrick earned a BS in physics (1991) and a PhD (1995) from the University of Georgia, where his doctoral work under William Dennis concerned nonequilibrium acoustic phonon dynamics in praseodymium-doped fluorides. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1995 and held a National Research Council fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1996 to 1997. His federal career runs through the Air Force Research Laboratory (1997-2003); the CIA (2003-2007, first as a program manager assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, then as a staff scientist in the Directorate of Science and Technology); the Defense Intelligence Agency (2007-2010); the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, as space control portfolio manager (2010-2012); DIA again as Defense Intelligence Officer for Scientific and Technical Intelligence (2012-2016), having been promoted into the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service in 2012; deputy director of intelligence at U.S. Strategic Command (2016-2017); director of national security strategy at the National Security Council (2017-2018); deputy director of intelligence at U.S. Space Command (2019-2021); and DIA's Missile and Space Intelligence Center before his appointment to AARO. He served as the first director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office from July 20, 2022 to December 1, 2023. He holds two U.S. patents and is listed by the University of Georgia's Department of Physics and Astronomy as an adjunct assistant professor of physics.

The Claim

Kirkpatrick's position is that AARO, with the access Congress gave it, found no verifiable evidence that the United States possesses, has recovered, or has reverse-engineered non-human technology — and, in his framing, that absence is itself a finding rather than a cover story. He holds that the overwhelming majority of UAP reports resolve into ordinary objects, sensor and parallax artifacts, and classified American programs. He told Newsweek on January 25, 2024 that nine in ten of the cases of pilots seeing UAPs that were referred to AARO turned out to be caused by parallax, and that between 2 and 5 percent of the reports AARO investigated had sufficient data but remained "truly anomalous" and worth continued study with better sensors. He argues the crash-retrieval narrative is largely circular reporting traceable to a small, interconnected set of sources, and that some sincere insiders were misled by real but entirely terrestrial government activity — writing in Scientific American that many of the allegations "derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues." He has also said plainly that "the best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens and I could have rolled them out, but there's none," and in March 2023 he co-authored a manuscript with Avi Loeb on the physical constraints such craft would face. His stated objection is to the evidentiary standard being used, not to the hypothesis being asked.

The Record

AARO's congressionally mandated Historical Record Report, Volume 1 — the review conducted under his direction and published in March 2024, after his departure — concluded that no official UAP nondisclosure agreements were located, that several interviewees' claims reflected misunderstandings of non-UAP activities, that materials alleged to be exotic were assessed as ordinary terrestrial alloys, and that U.S. aerospace and classified programs likely accounted for some portion of historical sightings. Christopher Mellon published a detailed critique in The Debrief on April 12, 2024 alleging factual errors and omissions: a wrong date for the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 23 rather than June 24, 1947), a wrong end date for Project Blue Book (1969 rather than January 1970), an undercount of Blue Book pages (some 65,778 against an actual total he puts near 130,000), no mention of the 2004 Nimitz incidents, and a claimed 1969-2009 investigative gap that he says reflects AARO's failure to record the history rather than a real gap; he also noted that the Director of National Intelligence did not sign the report. After the July 26, 2023 House Oversight subcommittee hearing, Kirkpatrick wrote on LinkedIn that, "contrary to assertions made in the hearing," David Grusch "has refused to speak with AARO," and that some details given to Congress had not been shared with his office; that characterization is disputed, and Grusch has continued to press his claims publicly. In June 2025 The Wall Street Journal, in reporting by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha, wrote that AARO under Kirkpatrick had identified "Yankee Blue" — described in that reporting as a fictitious alien-technology program presented to Air Force personnel for decades and discontinued by a Secretary of Defense memo in spring 2023. Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough acknowledged "pranks" as described by AARO, said the investigation had not been completed in time for the 2024 report, and said the department was committed to releasing a second volume of the Historical Record Report "to include AARO's findings on reports of potential pranks and inauthentic materials," then targeted for late 2025. If that reporting holds, it is consistent with his contention that some sincere insider testimony originated in real but non-alien government activity; the underlying AARO findings remain unpublished, so the account cannot yet be checked against a primary document. He drew sustained public criticism from disclosure advocates, including accusations that he had misstated facts. His Scientific American op-ed of January 19, 2024 described the coverup narrative as "a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard," "told and retold by a small group of interconnected believers and others with possibly less than honest intentions."

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026 there is no public record of Kirkpatrick returning to government service. He joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in December 2023 as chief technology officer for defense and intelligence programs, and the University of Georgia's Department of Physics and Astronomy lists him as an adjunct assistant professor of physics. He remains a contested reference point in the disclosure debate, cited by people on both sides of it. The second volume of the Historical Record Report — the document that would contain AARO's disinformation and hoax findings, and the record against which the Yankee Blue reporting could be checked — was targeted by the Defense Department for late 2025 and has not been publicly released as of this writing.

The Question: Kirkpatrick says no one holding real evidence ever brought it to his office; his critics say there was no path they trusted to bring it. If both sides are describing what they experienced honestly, what kind of inquiry — with what access, and audited by whom — could ever produce a null finding that the people who distrust it would accept?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 17

Mick West

Retired video game programmer turned skeptical investigator and UAP video analyst; creator of Metabunk

Background

Mick West (born 1967 in Bingley, West Yorkshire, England) is a British-American science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer. He became a U.S. citizen in 2009 and lives in the Sacramento, California area. He studied at the University of Manchester and does not present himself as a credentialed scientist; he is described, and describes himself, as a programmer turned skeptical investigator. In July 1994 he co-founded the video game studio Neversoft with Joel Jewett and Chris Ward, where he was heavily involved in programming the first five Tony Hawk's Pro Skater titles. Activision acquired the studio in October 1999; West resigned in 2003. He went on to create the sites Contrail Science and Metabunk, wrote "Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect" (Skyhorse, September 2018), and hosts the podcast "Tales from the Rabbit Hole" (since April 2019). He was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 2020 and co-authored a 2016 Environmental Research Letters paper with Christine Shearer, Ken Caldeira, and Steven J. Davis surveying atmospheric scientists on chemtrail claims.

The Claim

West does not argue that nothing unexplained is being seen, and he says he would welcome solid evidence of non-human technology; his position is that "unidentified" is not a synonym for "extraterrestrial," and that the specific videos treated as the strongest evidence have plausible conventional explanations that can be tested. On GIMBAL he argues the rotating object is an infrared glare fixed in the camera's frame rather than a rotating craft, produced by the ATFLIR pod's gimbal mechanism as it de-rotates, most likely concealing a distant jet. On GO FAST he argues the apparent low-altitude speed is motion parallax, and that the object is slow-moving at altitude. He also stresses method over verdict: his 3D reconstruction tool Sitrec was released open source under an MIT license so that others could load the same ADS-B, satellite, and video data and check or overturn his results.

The Record

Some of West's reconstructions have later been matched by official or independent work. Metabunk identified the 2014 Chilean Navy infrared "UFO" — which Chile's CEFAA had studied for roughly two years before presenting it publicly as unexplained — as a distant airliner producing aerodynamic contrails, matching flight IB6830. A separate French IPACO analysis independently concluded the object was a distant jet airliner, though it differed from Metabunk on the aircraft and on what produced the trail. On GO FAST, AARO's case resolution report dated February 6, 2025 placed the object near 13,000 feet, assessed with high confidence that it showed no anomalous performance, and attributed the apparent velocity to motion parallax — the same conclusions West had published years earlier. His GIMBAL glare hypothesis remains contested. A 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum paper by Yannick Peings and Marik von Rennenkampff, "Reconstruction of potential flight paths for the January 2015 'Gimbal' UAP," reconstructed candidate flight paths and argued that at the shorter ranges the aviators reported, the object's motion is difficult to explain conventionally; West's reply is that such reconstructions rest on eyewitness range estimates rather than confirmed data. In an April 2026 Metabunk exchange over von Rennenkampff's claim of "new findings," West wrote that the disputed rotation in the video's first seconds and the related "katana" panorama are "puzzles that have not been resolved," while maintaining they are not showstoppers for the glare model, which he says a large weight of other evidence supports. Critics — including UAP researchers and aviators who reported the encounters — argue that analyses like his discount trained-observer testimony and sensor context that outside analysts cannot see. This review found no documented retraction or correction of a major West analysis.

Where things stand

As of September 2026 West continues to run Metabunk, where threads he opened in May 2026 cover the U.S. government's first 2026 UAP file release and the launch of a Starlink horizon-flare prediction tool at shf.sitrec.org; the site shows new case activity as recent as late August 2026. He archived the original Sitrec repository on March 5, 2026 — version 1 remains MIT-licensed — and moved development to Sitrec2, which runs on Metabunk. He remains a regular Skeptical Inquirer columnist, with pieces running through the September/October 2026 issue, and his February 20, 2026 Substack essay, "Disclosure, Again: Why I'm Not Holding My Breath for Trump's UFO File Release," explained why he expected little from the announced federal release.

The Question: West's approach has been borne out in cases where official bodies later reached the same prosaic answer, and on GIMBAL he says plainly that specific features of the footage remain unexplained inside his own model while arguing the weight of evidence still favors it. When does a mundane explanation that accounts for most but not all of the data earn more confidence than the trained observers whose accounts it contradicts — and who decides when the remaining puzzles are residue rather than refutation?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 18

Tim Burchett

U.S. Representative (R-TN-02); a lead organizer of the July 2023 congressional UAP hearing and founder of the House UAP caucus

Background

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on August 25, 1964, Burchett graduated from Bearden High School in 1982 and earned a Bachelor of Science in education from the University of Tennessee in 1988. His first election to public office came in 1994; he served in the Tennessee House of Representatives (1995-1999) and the Tennessee Senate (1999-2010), then as mayor of Knox County (September 2010 - September 2018). He was elected to the U.S. House in 2018 and took office January 3, 2019, winning re-election in 2020, 2022 and 2024. In the 119th Congress he sits on the Foreign Affairs, Oversight and Government Reform, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees. No source reviewed for this card disputes his credentials or the offices he has held.

The Claim

Burchett frames his UAP work as a transparency and taxpayer-accountability matter rather than a claim about extraterrestrials as such. Discussing an earlier version of his declassification bill in May 2024, he said: "They spend all this time telling us they don't exist, then release the files, dagnabbit"; "That's all it is. It's about transparency"; and "it's not about little green men or flying saucers, it's about tens of millions of dollars that our federal government is spending on something that at least some of the members of the federal government say does not exist. Yet, they will not release all the files." Separately, and in his own voice, he has stated a personal belief that the government has been concealing the subject "since the '40s" (January 2023), that the technology is "possibly being reverse-engineered right now" (March 2023), and that the United States has "recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings." He argues that people inside these programs need a legally protected channel to come forward; announcing his whistleblower bill in November 2024, he said that "when someone wants to bring something forward, members of our government want to shut it down."

The Record

With Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Burchett organized the July 26, 2023 hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena before the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs — a subcommittee he did not chair — which took sworn testimony from David Grusch, retired Cmdr. David Fravor and Ryan Graves. In August 2023 he launched a congressional UAP caucus. On the corroborating side, the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Pub. L. 118-31, secs. 1841-1843) did create a statutory UAP Records Collection at the National Archives, with processes for assembling, preserving and providing public access to government UAP records — a transparency mechanism that now exists in law — and separately barred the use of funds for UAP-related material not made available to the appropriate congressional committees. The federal eminent-domain authority over UAP-related material held by private parties, part of the original Schumer-Rounds proposal, was stripped before enactment, and journalists covering the subject have described the enacted version as a heavily watered-down form of the original act. Further hearings followed, including a November 13, 2024 Oversight hearing and a September 9, 2025 hearing of the Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets chaired by Luna, at which, DefenseScoop reported, an active-duty Navy senior chief petty officer testified publicly before Congress about a UAP incident for the first time. On the contradicting side, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported in its Historical Record Report, Volume I (March 2024) that it found no empirical evidence that reported sightings represented off-world technology, or of classified unreported programs, hidden alien technology or extraterrestrial artifacts; the same report described a proposed reverse-engineering special access program, "Kona Blue," pitched within the government and rejected by Department of Homeland Security leadership as without merit. Weighing that finding requires noting that AARO is itself a party to the dispute: its then-director, Sean Kirkpatrick, publicly stated that Grusch had refused to speak with AARO and called the 2023 hearing insulting to Defense Department officers. Legislatively, neither of Burchett's two signature UAP bills has been enacted: the UAP Transparency Act was introduced February 11, 2025 as H.R. 1187 and referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the UAP Whistleblower Protection Act, first introduced November 12, 2024, was reintroduced August 29, 2025 as H.R. 5060 and referred to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services and Oversight committees. Burchett has said publicly that he has been obstructed in getting information; that is his own account, and this review located no independent public documentation confirming or contradicting it.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Burchett is serving his fourth term representing Tennessee's 2nd district. On January 9, 2026, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer named him chairman of the committee's Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee, succeeding Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose resignation from Congress took effect January 5, 2026; Burchett said that under his leadership he would "eliminate reckless spending, slash unnecessary bureaucratic red tape, and investigate the rampant fraud and abuse in government." His declassification and whistleblower-protection bills have not been enacted, and he appeared in the 2025 documentary "The Age of Disclosure." Note on currency: the UAP portion of this card is verified through September 2025; developments after that date were not confirmed for this review.

The Question: Burchett's central contention — that programs exist outside normal congressional oversight — is exactly the kind of question a sitting member of Congress ought to be able to either establish or close. Three years after the first hearing, the record holds firsthand sworn testimony about unexplained encounters, secondhand sworn testimony about the alleged retrieval programs, and an official negative finding from the office charged with investigating them, with no mechanism that has reconciled the two. What evidence would Burchett himself accept as resolving the question, and does Congress currently possess any tool capable of producing it?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 19

Anna Paulina Luna

U.S. Representative (R-FL-13); chair, House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets

Background

Born in Santa Ana, California in 1989. She served in the U.S. Air Force from 2009 to 2014 as an airfield management specialist, reaching senior airman and receiving the Air Force Achievement Medal. She earned a B.S. in biology from the University of West Florida in 2017. Elected to represent Florida's 13th District in 2022 and re-elected in 2024, she serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and in February 2025 was named to chair the Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Part of her personal narrative is contested: in 2023, extended family members told The Washington Post that her father was Catholic and that they were unaware of him practicing any form of Judaism while she was growing up, disputing her account of Messianic Jewish heritage. She has stood by her account.

The Claim

Luna frames her task force in procedural terms. She argues the federal government has withheld records from the public for decades across a set of files — the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations, 9/11, COVID-19 origins, the Epstein files and UAP — and that Congress's job is to force them into the open. On UAP specifically, she has said whistleblowers described video records held by the Department of War and AARO that had never been released, and that public trust cannot be restored while the government is the sole judge of what the public may see. She has described the task force as an instrument for compelling release and protecting whistleblowers, and has said she is willing to reach for subpoena power. Her own public statements, however, have not stayed purely procedural. In a 2025 podcast appearance she said Congress had seen proof of "interdimensional beings" and that "I think that they can actually operate through the time spaces that we currently have." In a UFO documentary she said U.S. government programs were in place for the recovery of alien technology that had crashed on Earth. Those are conclusions about what the objects are, offered alongside the call for the underlying evidence.

The Record

The task force was announced on February 11, 2025 by House Oversight Chairman James Comer, days after President Trump's February 6, 2025 executive order directing plans to release the JFK, RFK and MLK assassination records. It carried an initial six-month authorization, and Luna described its scope as covering UAPs/USOs, the Epstein client list, COVID-19 origins and the 9/11 files, alongside the assassination records. Her task force held a UAP transparency hearing on September 29, 2025, at which witnesses described additional video records held by AARO. On March 31, 2026 she wrote to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth requesting as many as 46 UAP videos, asking for them "as soon as possible but no later than April 14, 2026," and writing that "the continued lack of transparency surrounding these anomalies and the potential national security threat they pose is troubling." The deadline passed without release, and she stated she would work directly with Hegseth and was prepared to seek subpoena authority through Chairman Comer. The administration's PURSUE initiative (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) launched May 8, 2026. On May 15, 2026 Luna reported reviewing more than 40 videos with AARO director Jon Kosloski and Rep. Eric Burlison ahead of declassification, saying Kosloski "has proven through action that he is working in good faith on declass efforts." Separately, on July 31, 2026 ODNI issued preliminary guidance implementing the FY2023 NDAA disclosure framework, directing the Department of War and Intelligence Community to establish a process letting current and former employees and contractors report UAP information to AARO or PURSUE designees notwithstanding prior nondisclosure agreements — while expressly not authorizing public disclosure of classified information or disclosures to Congress outside existing channels. Against that, the underlying material has generally drawn mundane assessments. AARO resolves the large majority of the cases it closes as balloons, drones, birds, satellites, and sensor or camera artifacts, and analysts have shown that optical effects such as bokeh and focus distortion can account for apparently anomalous shapes and maneuvers. The three objects shot down over North America in February 2023 cut both ways as an example: no debris was recovered from the Yukon and Alaska objects, and officials said only that they were likely "tied to commercial or research entities and therefore totally benign" — a widely repeated hobbyist pico-balloon link was amateur speculation, never confirmed — while documents released in November 2024 indicated the Lake Huron object came from a company selling weather-monitoring equipment. Her willingness to break with leadership is documented on unrelated ground. She forced a proxy-voting-for-new-parents measure in spring 2025, resigned from the House Freedom Caucus on March 31, 2025 over the fight, joined eight other Republicans in blocking a rule vote on April 1, and reached a compromise with Speaker Mike Johnson on April 6, 2025. On the Epstein files she was not among the four Republicans — Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace — who signed the 2025 discharge petition to force a floor vote, though she voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act when it passed the House 427-1 on November 18, 2025.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Luna is the sitting representative for Florida's 13th District and continues to chair the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which held a hearing on the CIA's defunct MKULTRA program in June 2026 and has continued to press for UAP video declassification. She is the Republican nominee in the November general election, where she faces Democrat Leela Gray, a retired Army brigadier general with more than 30 years of service, who won the August 18, 2026 primary with about 65 percent of the vote.

The Question: Her task force has demonstrably moved material — letters, deadlines, a statutory whistleblower channel, released files. What is harder to establish from outside is what the released material actually contains: AARO resolves most of what it closes as balloons, drones and sensor artifacts, and no independent review has yet established that the 2026 releases include anything that resists conventional explanation. Is the machinery she built reaching whatever compartmented programs whistleblowers describe, or is it efficiently surfacing already-collected and largely resolvable material while the harder question stays exactly where it was? And what does it mean that the chair pressing for evidence has already stated her conclusion about what the evidence will show?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 20

Jacques Vallée

Astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist; the most persistent scientific critic of the extraterrestrial-spacecraft explanation for UFOs

Background

Born September 24, 1939 in Pontoise, France; a mathematics degree from the University of Paris (Sorbonne, 1959) and an MS in astrophysics from the University of Lille (1961). He worked as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, then at the University of Texas under Gérard de Vaucouleurs, where in 1963 he co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA. He took a PhD in industrial engineering and computer science from Northwestern in 1967 (thesis: "Search strategies and retrieval languages," advisor Gilbert Krulee), and went on to Stanford's Computer Center, then SRI International's Augmentation Research Center under Douglas Engelbart, and the Institute for the Future (1972–1976), where he succeeded Paul Baran as principal investigator on NSF-funded networking research and helped build PLANET, one of the first ARPANET conferencing systems. He founded InfoMedia in 1976 to commercialize that conferencing technology, and later moved into venture capital — Sofinnova from the early 1980s, then Silicon Valley general partnerships from 1987 to 2010 — with fourteen portfolio companies reaching IPO, including Mercury Interactive, Electronics for Imaging, Accuray, and NeoPhotonics. He won the Jules Verne Prize for his first novel, Le Sub-espace (1961), published under the pseudonym Jérôme Sériel, and was the acknowledged model for the Lacombe character played by François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Two episodes in his biography rest on his own testimony rather than external records: a 1955 sighting over his Pontoise home, and his account of watching tracking tapes of an unexplained retrograde satellite be erased in 1961 while working with the French space committee.

The Claim

Vallée holds that the phenomenon is real and leaves physical traces, but that the extraterrestrial-spacecraft framing is too narrow and discards too much of the data — a position he began stating publicly around 1969 and formalized in "Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects" (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1990). Passport to Magonia (1969) argued that close-encounter reports are continuous with fairy lore, religious apparitions, and other visionary traditions, suggesting a phenomenon native to something other than a nearby star system — what he has at times described as multidimensional, though he has never committed to a formal alternative model. In The Invisible College and Messengers of Deception he proposed that the phenomenon functions as a "control system" acting on human belief, and warned that human actors — intelligence services, cults, entrepreneurs — deliberately manipulate the subject, so that any given case may be genuine, staged, or both. He has consistently declined to say what the phenomenon is, arguing that the field's besetting error is premature certainty in either direction.

The Record

His technical and financial record verifies in detail: the Mars map, the Engelbart and Institute for the Future networking work, the ARPANET-era conferencing systems, and the venture portfolio are all independently documented. He is a co-author, with Stanford's Garry Nolan and others, of a peer-reviewed paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences (vol. 128, January 2022; online December 2021) on improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, for characterizing unusual materials of potential relevance to aerospace forensics — an approach consistent with his long insistence on physical evidence over testimony. His contention that governments studied the subject seriously while dismissing it publicly was borne out in December 2017, when the Pentagon's AATIP program was disclosed and acknowledged; and his folklore-continuity thesis, once dismissed inside ufology, has since been taken up in the academic study of religion. His research collection was the founding donation of Rice University's Archives of the Impossible, with files on roughly 500 events and some materials embargoed to 2028–2031. The sharpest contradiction in his record is TRINITY: The Best-Kept Secret (2021), written with Paola Leopizzi Harris, which advanced a claimed 1945 crash near San Antonio, New Mexico based on the childhood recollections of Reme Baca and Jose Padilla. Researcher Douglas Dean Johnson, publishing on his own site, reported in 2023 that service and commission records placed a corroborating figure, Eddie Apodaca, with his Army unit in Europe in August 1945 and showed he was not commissioned into the New Mexico State Police until January 1951; that an archivist found no record of Padilla's claimed New Mexico National Guard enlistment; and that Padilla was never a commissioned California Highway Patrol officer, a credential the book cited repeatedly and one that Vallée and Harris subsequently withdrew. Johnson also located a recording of an earlier UFO-crash account Baca gave to writer Tom Carey around 2002–2003 that differs materially from the published version; Kevin Randle, analyzing that recording, additionally reported that Stanton Friedman and Don Schmitt had each considered Baca's story in the 1990s and declined it. Vallée replied in writing on May 15, 2023, objecting that Johnson's treatment amounted to a personal attack, and again in a declaration dated September 23, 2023, in which he acknowledged that Apodaca could not have been present and — by Johnson's account — described the earlier Baca account given to Carey as fiction, while continuing to maintain the core 1945 account. Harris said publicly in September 2023 that Baca had sought large payments for both the story and an associated artifact.

Where things stand

At 86, Vallée divides his time between San Francisco and Paris and continues to publish his Forbidden Science journals: Volume 6, covering 2010–2019, appeared from Anomalist Books in 2025, and Volume 7, subtitled Final Report and covering 2020–2025, is listed from the same publisher for 2026. He has also served on the French space agency CNES's expert committee reviewing UAP reports. His archive at Rice continues to open in stages, with the most sensitive files embargoed until 2028–2031.

The Question: Vallée spent fifty years teaching the field to distrust testimony, watch for human deception, and demand physical evidence — and then built a book on two men's memories of their childhood in 1945, first told publicly in 2003 and published in 2021, parts of whose surrounding accounts the documentary record does not support. Where should a researcher who takes his own warnings seriously draw the line between a witness worth believing and a story that has been shaped by everything he says shapes stories?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 21

Whitley Strieber

Horror novelist; author of Communion, who describes lifelong contact experiences

Background

Born June 13, 1945 in San Antonio, Texas; educated at Central Catholic Marianist High School, the University of Texas at Austin, and the London School of Film Technique, graduating from both in 1968. He worked in New York advertising, rising to vice president, and left in 1977 to write full time. He established himself as a horror and speculative novelist with The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), both adapted as feature films, and with the nuclear-war and environmental books Warday (1984) and Nature's End (1986), co-written with James Kunetka. His publishing and screen credits are a matter of public record and are not in dispute. What has been disputed is not his education or career but part of his account of his own past — an episode from his university years, set out below.

The Claim

Strieber says that on the night of December 26, 1985, at his cabin in upstate New York, he was taken from his bed by non-human beings, and that this was one episode in a pattern of contact running through his life. He has consistently declined to call them extraterrestrials: he chose the word "visitors" precisely to leave open that they might be something else — an unrecognized aspect of consciousness, the dead, or a category science does not yet have. His position is that the experiences were real and in some sense physical, that he does not know what the visitors are, and that the honest response is sustained attention rather than a verdict. In more recent work, including The Fourth Mind (2025), he has grown more confident that a non-human intelligence is present on Earth and that official secrecy about it is breaking down, while still declining to say what that intelligence is.

The Record

Communion was published February 25, 1987 and reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list in both hardcover and paperback, selling more than two million copies across editions; Strieber wrote the screenplay for the 1989 Philippe Mora film starring Christopher Walken, and afterward said the adaptation was too literal — "you see more of them in the movie than I think you should, and there was too much light on them." Skeptical accounts have offered ordinary explanations: neurologist Steven Novella has observed that the details of the waking-paralysis account correlate with aspects of hypnagogia, a common neurological phenomenon; and in UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988), Philip J. Klass argued that Strieber was too quick to dismiss temporal lobe epilepsy, a possibility raised by psychiatrist Donald Klein — whom Strieber had himself asked to examine him. Klein reported that testing was negative for psychosis and that temporal lobe epilepsy, while not absolutely excluded, was unlikely. Strieber has since said that after Klass's criticism he underwent further testing for temporal lobe epilepsy and other brain abnormalities and that no anomalies were found; that second round rests on his own account rather than on published findings. The Los Angeles Times moved his 1988 sequel Transformation from its nonfiction list to its fiction list, a reclassification he publicly protested as "an ugly example of exactly the kind of blind prejudice that has hurt human progress." One strand of his account has been told three ways. For years, including in a 1985 interview, he described witnessing the August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman tower shooting in Austin in first-person detail; in Communion he disclosed that he had in fact not been on campus that day, and set the false memory in the context of abduction screen memories; then in Transformation he said he had changed his mind and concluded he had witnessed it after all. Ed Conroy's Report on Communion recorded Strieber's mother saying he was in Austin that day but not on campus, and public records show no child on a bicycle among the dead, though a 17-year-old cyclist was wounded. Running the other way, his correspondence has become an academic object rather than a curiosity. His wife Anne Strieber, who died in 2015, curated the hundreds of thousands of letters readers sent him; about 3,400 that religion scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal has singled out as the most significant form part of a Strieber collection spanning 1970 to 2016, accessioned in 2023 at Rice University's Archives of the Impossible, the archive Kripal founded in 2014 and with whom Strieber co-wrote The Super Natural (2016). Rice began a two-year study of the collections in 2024, using a method that deliberately brackets the question of what caused the experiences.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Strieber is 81. Unknowncountry.com publishes daily; he hosts the Dreamland podcast (on hiatus until September 4) alongside The Mystical Underground and weekly subscriber chats, and has released Transformation 2026, an annotated edition of his 1988 sequel carrying the complete original text plus hundreds of updates. On August 31, 2026 the site published his response to what he describes as a difficult, at times accusatory communication from the visitors — relayed, he says, through a person he credits with strong telepathic ability, and which the site itself notes cannot be independently verified as non-human in origin. He answers it with a call for reconciliation rather than anger: "I offer them mercy, and I ask for mercy in return."

The Question: For forty years Strieber has declined to say what the visitors are, which is either the most honest posture in the field or an unfalsifiable one — and either way a reader is left weighing the same body of evidence: a lifetime of vivid, unrepeatable, self-reported experience, one strand of which he has now told three different ways. If a person asks to be tested, keeps the word "visitors" rather than the word that would settle the matter, and still cannot say what he encountered, what would it actually take for an outsider to tell an accurate witness from a sincere one?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 22

Daniel P. Sheehan

Constitutional and public-interest attorney; chief counsel, Romero Institute and New Paradigm Institute

Background

Born April 9, 1945 in Glens Falls, New York, Sheehan earned a BA from Harvard College in 1967 and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1970. His institute's biography describes him as "Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School-trained"; Wikipedia places him in a Harvard Divinity School alumni category but its text does not state that he attended, so the divinity training rests essentially on his own account. The same biography states that he was chief trial counsel for the ACLU in the Rocky Mountain states and general counsel for the National Office of Social Ministry of the American Jesuit Order; independent sourcing confirms only that he was, in Wikipedia's words, "legal counsel to the Jesuit U.S. national headquarters in Washington, D.C." He co-founded the Christic Institute in 1980 with Sara Nelson and the Jesuit priest William J. Davis; the Romero Institute succeeded it in 1998 with Sheehan and Nelson continuing in leadership, and the New Paradigm Institute was launched in 2023 as a Romero Institute initiative, with Sheehan as its chief counsel. Since 2015 he has lectured at UC Santa Cruz on American history, politics, and the Kennedy assassination. He was one of the attorneys for Karen Silkwood's estate in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., in which Gerry Spence was lead counsel. His role in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate matters is described differently in different places: his institute lists both under a heading of "Early Successes" without specifying his function, and Wikipedia says only that he participated in them. Stronger formulations circulate in interviews and promotional material, but nothing in the sources checked for this card independently establishes them.

The Claim

Sheehan's position is that the United States government has, for roughly eighty years, run programs concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena and non-human intelligence outside the constitutional chain of oversight - withheld, in his framing, not only from the public but from Congress itself - and that this is first a separation-of-powers problem and only second a question about what the craft are. His proposed remedy is legal and legislative rather than sensational: lawful disclosure to Congress, preservation of records, statutory protection for whistleblowers, and a structured declassification process that he argues can be reconciled with genuine national-security needs. He also holds that disclosure, when it comes, is a civilizational threshold rather than a news cycle. His institute states its mission as compelling "full and responsible UAP disclosure from governments, private or public companies, and individuals" and preparing "the human family for the cultural shifts that will come with irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial contact"; its About page speaks of humanity gaining "our place in a galactic civilization" and pairs that with stated aims to "deconstruct unjust social and economic structures across our planet" and "restore living biosystems." He has separately given a first-person account of being shown classified photographs of a recovered craft at the Library of Congress in 1977 while assisting a study connected to the Carter administration.

The Record

The corroborated portions of the record are substantial. He was on the Silkwood estate's legal team through the litigation in which an Oklahoma jury awarded $505,000 in damages and $10 million in punitive damages, a federal appeals court cut the judgment to $5,000 and reversed the punitive award, and the Supreme Court on January 11, 1984 held that federal nuclear regulation did not preempt state punitive damages, reinstating the verdict; Kerr-McGee settled in 1986 for $1.38 million with no admission of liability. The Christic Institute's Greensboro civil suit ended in a jury award of damages against the city, its police department, and Klan and American Nazi Party defendants - though not against the federal agents who had also been named. And after Harvard Medical School's fourteen-month inquiry into psychiatrist John E. Mack, in which Sheehan and Roderick MacLeish acted as counsel, Dean Daniel Tosteson reaffirmed "Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment" and imposed no discipline, while the review committee did criticize aspects of Mack's methodology. The contradiction in the record is equally documented. In Avirgan v. Hull, the Christic Institute's $24 million La Penca conspiracy suit, Judge James Lawrence King granted summary judgment on June 23, 1988, finding that plaintiffs had "made no showing of existence of genuine issues of material fact with respect to either the bombing at La Penca, the threats made to their news sources or threats made to themselves"; on February 3, 1989 he ordered the institute to pay $955,000 in attorney's fees and $79,500 in court costs as Rule 11 sanctions. The court of appeals affirmed, the Supreme Court declined further review, and in 1992 the IRS revoked the institute's 501(c)(3) status on a finding that it had acted for political reasons. Plaintiff Tony Avirgan publicly faulted Sheehan for chasing unsubstantiated "wild allegations." The New York Times wrote that "the vast majority of the 79 witnesses Mr. Sheehan cites as authorities were either dead, unwilling to testify, fountains of contradictory information or at best one person removed from the facts." The New Paradigm Institute's biography page today lists the Iran-Contra civil lawsuit under a heading reading "Supreme Court Cases" - accurate in that the case generated a cert petition, which the Court declined - and again under public-interest investigations; the page does not describe the outcome. On the UAP side, he is counsel to Luis Elizondo, who filed a complaint with the Defense Department Inspector General in May 2021 alleging a coordinated campaign to discredit him. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office concluded in its March 2024 historical review that alleged hidden UAP programs "either do not exist, or were misidentified authentic national security programs," and found that AATIP was not a recognized, official program and had no dedicated personnel or budget - the Washington Spectator, reporting the review, described the activity as unfunded and hobby-like. Sheehan told that publication that Elizondo "stands by his original claims." AARO's conclusions are the executive branch's own account rather than an adjudication, and disclosure advocates dispute them. As to Sheehan's 1977 Library of Congress account, no independent corroboration has been publicly produced; by his own telling the legal pad on which he copied the symbols is lost.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Sheehan, 81, remains chief counsel of the Romero Institute and of its New Paradigm Institute. On April 14, 2026 the institute launched a UAP Transparency Pledge campaign asking all 435 House members, all 100 senators, and 2026 congressional candidates to commit to lawful disclosure to Congress, preservation of government records, whistleblower protections, and a structured declassification process balancing national security against accountability; the announcement was issued as the institute's own press release and quotes executive director Sara Nelson and public advocacy director Olivia Cantu Monette rather than Sheehan. The institute publicly welcomed the Trump administration's release of UFO/UAP and non-human-intelligence records under PURSUE - the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters - including a tranche reported on May 8, 2026, while pressing for accountability for records still withheld. It is running a $25,000 matching-donation drive this September. Reporting available for this card did not establish the number of documents in the May tranche or the schedule of any subsequent batches.

The Question: The same working practice - building a large factual theory out of many partial sources and putting it in front of a court - is present in the Silkwood judgment the Supreme Court reinstated and in the La Penca suit a federal judge dismissed and sanctioned. The comparison to his current work is imperfect in a way worth stating plainly: the UAP effort is legislative and procedural, a pledge campaign and a push for records preservation and whistleblower protection, not a filed conspiracy claim that a court will test. So the open question is a narrower one than a track record usually invites. What weight, if any, should a lawyer's past wins and past sanctions carry when the proposal on the table is a process - and when that process can be evaluated on its own terms, by whether the disclosure and declassification mechanisms he is asking Congress to adopt are sound?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 23

Karl Nell

Retired Army colonel and former UAP Task Force liaison who publicly vouched for David Grusch

Background

Karl E. Nell is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a long-career aerospace and national-security executive. His conference biography lists more than thirty years of industry leadership — Bell Telephone Laboratories, Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, TASC, CACI and ENSCO — including service as a vice president and general manager of a national-security R&D division and as a deputy chief technology officer; separate reporting has described him as a Northrop Grumman executive. On the military side, that biography states he was a fully joint-qualified Army Reserve officer who commanded at every grade through colonel, was selected for a nominative active-duty assignment advising the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, and served as the Army director supporting the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force. The dates and the more widely used title come from elsewhere: The Debrief, in June 2023, described him as "the Army's liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022." Two credentials are stated only in general terms and are worth flagging rather than asserting: the same biography calls him an "Ivy League graduate" and a "War College alumni" without naming either institution. What the primary sources support is a liaison to, or director supporting, the task force; any rendering that makes him its leader or its former head is a stronger claim than those sources state.

The Claim

Nell's stated position is short and he has repeated it in consistent terms: non-human intelligence exists, it has been interacting with humanity, and that interaction is not new but ongoing. Asked at the SALT iConnections New York conference on May 21, 2024 how confident he was, he answered, "There's zero doubt." He further holds that a compartmented U.S. effort to recover and reverse-engineer technologies of unknown origin has operated outside normal congressional oversight, and that the responsible course is legislated, controlled disclosure rather than what he calls catastrophic disclosure arriving as an uncontrolled leak. He has publicly backed the UAP Disclosure Act, including the eminent-domain provision over recovered technology in private hands — a provision stripped from the version enacted in the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act. A 2025 Sol Foundation paper of his sets out eight reasons that provision is essential to lawful disclosure. He does not present physical evidence in these appearances, and he offers the assessments in a personal capacity, not as an official U.S. government position.

The Record

Nell's most consequential act is documentary. In The Debrief's June 5, 2023 article on David Grusch, he went on the record under his own name as a recently retired Army colonel who had been the Army's UAP Task Force liaison from 2021 to 2022 and had worked with Grusch there, stating that Grusch's assertion "concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence." He also characterized Grusch as "beyond reproach." That is a named, on-the-record endorsement from someone whose task-force role is documented in contemporaneous reporting rather than merely self-asserted. Its limits are equally documented, and they are not small: what Nell offered is an assessment, not an exhibit. He has not produced physical evidence, documents, or a named program in public; he has not given public sworn testimony before Congress; and an endorsement of Grusch's account, however credentialed, is not independent confirmation of any underlying fact. Officials on the record at the time contradicted the claims themselves. The Pentagon said in June 2023 that its All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently." NASA said the same month that it had found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life. General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on August 6, 2023 that he had never encountered evidence verifying Grusch's claims or any cover-up program. Critics have engaged Nell directly rather than ignoring him: writer Jason Colavito, reviewing the SALT appearance, wrote that Nell offered no substantive evidence and objected to his citation of former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer as a supporting source. Nell has continued working in policy rather than spectacle — he presented at the Sol Foundation's inaugural symposium at Stanford in November 2023, authored the 2025 Sol Foundation paper on the UAP Disclosure Act's eminent-domain provision, and spoke in the opening "The UAP Situation Today" session at the Sol Foundation's symposium at the Hotel Dino on Lake Maggiore, Italy, on October 25, 2025. He appears in the documentary The Age of Disclosure, which premiered at SXSW on March 9, 2025 and opened in limited theatrical release and on Amazon Prime Video on November 21, 2025; it holds a 27 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes from a small sample of eleven reviews against a 93 percent audience score, with reviewers faulting its reliance on testimony over physical evidence.

Where things stand

As of September 1, 2026, Nell is a private citizen active in the disclosure-policy debate rather than in government. The most recent activities this review could document are the 2025 Sol Foundation paper on the UAP Disclosure Act, his October 2025 talk at the Sol Foundation symposium in Italy, and his appearance in The Age of Disclosure. The federal picture has moved since he spoke: President Trump announced in February 2026 that he would direct agencies to identify and release UAP-related files, and the Department of War published previously unreleased UAP material in May 2026. This review found no reporting placing Nell in any role in that process, and no public statement from him about it — an absence of found reporting, which is not the same as an established fact about what he has been doing.

The Question: Nell has staked a real name and a real career on a conclusion whose underlying basis he says he cannot show — so what is a fair-minded reader supposed to do with a credentialed source who is himself the evidence? And with the government now moving on the records — President Trump announced in February 2026 that he would direct agencies to identify and release UAP files, and the Department of War published previously unreleased material in May — does that machinery have any way of confirming or disconfirming what he asserted in 2023, or does it mainly produce documents that leave the interpretation to us?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

No. 24

Hal Puthoff

Laser physicist; director of SRI's remote-viewing program; AAWSAP/AATIP-era research contractor

Background

Harold E. Puthoff, born June 20, 1936 in Chicago, holds a BA and MS in electrical engineering from the University of Florida and a 1967 PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford, with a dissertation on the stimulated Raman effect and its application as a tunable laser; he co-authored the textbook "Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics" (Wiley, 1969) with his adviser Richard Pantell. Published accounts state he served with the Naval Security Group and then the National Security Agency before joining Stanford Research Institute, though open sources give no detail on the dates or duties of that service. From 1972 he directed SRI's CIA- and later DIA-funded remote-viewing research with Russell Targ, work later absorbed into the program known as Stargate; he founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin in 1985, incorporated as EarthTech International in 1991, and co-founded To The Stars with Tom DeLonge and Jim Semivan in 2017. Popular coverage sometimes calls him an "ex-CIA scientist"; what is documented is that the CIA funded his SRI research, not that he was a CIA employee. He was involved with the Church of Scientology from the late 1960s, reaching OT VII by 1971, and severed the connection in the late 1970s.

The Claim

Puthoff's position is that certain anomalies — psi effects at SRI, and now UAP flight characteristics — are empirical questions that mainstream physics set aside prematurely rather than settled, and that they deserve instrumented investigation rather than dismissal. On propulsion he argues a specific, publishable thing: that general relativity permits "metric engineering," in which manipulating the vacuum's effective properties would produce the observed kinematics, and he is explicit that no such capability exists today — as he put it on a May 2026 roundtable, "I think we can write the equations... but we don't have the engineering prowess to do it." On crash retrievals and non-human biologics he does not claim firsthand knowledge. Asked directly on that same program about recovered bodies, he answered, "I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people who I talk to," and framed the count of "at least 4 types" as what people who came forward from the alleged programs have told him, not as something he has verified.

The Record

Targ and Puthoff published "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding" in Nature (vol. 251, pp. 602–607, 1974), reporting that Uri Geller had "performed successfully enough to warrant further serious study." Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann later identified a gauze-stuffed peephole in the wall of the shielded room and a two-way intercom accessible to Geller; in the separate remote-viewing trials they reported that transcripts contained inadvertent cues to target order, with results falling to chance once those cues were removed, and they reported that their requests for copies of the transcripts were refused. James Randi called the protocols "sloppy and inadequate." Against that, Puthoff was vindicated on a point many had treated as fantasy: the government-funded effort was real. SRI's psi research began under CIA funding in 1972, the successor program known as Stargate ran until 1995 at a cost the CIA put at roughly $20 million, and it was declassified. In the 1995 CIA-commissioned American Institutes for Research evaluation, statistician Jessica Utts concluded that the statistical effect had been established and that further proof-oriented replication was unnecessary, while psychologist Ray Hyman concluded that the results had not been shown to be paranormal and were consistent with ordinary explanations; the CIA ended the program on the finding that remote-viewing information was "vague and ambiguous." His physics work has drawn similar splits: Steve Carlip identified a serious computational error in a 1989 zero-point-field inertia paper, Yefim Levin raised further questions about the formula and the treatment of magnetic effects, and a University of Wisconsin law school case study used EarthTech's 1998 patent 5,845,220 as an example of how "even a competent examiner may fail to distinguish innovation from pseudoscience." He worked as a contractor and adviser on the Bigelow Aerospace–run AAWSAP effort, and on January 16, 2019 the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 AAWSAP-commissioned reference titles in response to a FOIA request from Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists; one of those titles — "Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering" — is his. Aftergood said of the contract that it would be hard to argue that either the military or the public "got their money's worth"; here too Puthoff was ahead of the public consensus that the Pentagon had run such a program at all. To The Stars, which he co-founded, disclosed in 2019 that it paid $35,000 for several items, among them six bismuth/magnesium-zinc pieces and a piece of aluminum; its COO, Steve Justice, said their structure and composition were "not from any known existing military or commercial application." Outside specialists were skeptical — chemists said such materials would be identifiable within hours at any research institution, and one chemical engineer suggested the pieces were slag from the Betterton-Kroll industrial process — and no peer-reviewed analysis has established anomalous origin. AARO's Historical Record Report Volume 1, published March 6, 2024, said it found no empirical evidence that reported sightings represented off-world technology or that the U.S. government had recovered any, and reported that a proposed reverse-engineering effort called "Kona Blue" was rejected by DHS leadership as "without merit"; that report does not name Puthoff.

Where things stand

Puthoff turned 90 in June 2026 and remains associated with EarthTech International and its research arm, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, which he founded. He appears in Dan Farah's documentary "The Age of Disclosure" (SXSW premiere March 9, 2025; theatrical and Amazon Prime Video release November 21, 2025). His remarks on a UFO roundtable released May 14, 2026 were widely covered, largely for the "at least four types" remark. He has not appeared as a witness at the public congressional UAP hearings held to date.

The Question: Twice now, a secret government effort Puthoff described has later been confirmed to exist — and twice, that confirmation has been treated in public argument as though it also vindicated what the effort found. So the open question is whether his accuracy about institutional facts he could check transfers to his confidence about claims he says plainly he has not checked: when a careful physicist tells you he is relaying what trusted, unnamed people told him, what weight does that testimony actually carry?

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Every entry here was independently reviewed for accuracy and fairness before publication. If you are one of these people and your card is wrong, say so and it gets fixed — that correction goes to the front of the line.