Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced on Monday that his legislation to force the federal government to disclose information it has on UFOs is in danger of getting shot down in Congress.
The fate of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023 is now being determined as negotiators work to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the next National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in the conference process. Lawmakers aim to get the defense policy bill enacted the before the end of the year.
House Republicans are “attempting to kill another commonsense bipartisan measure passed by the Senate which I was proud to cosponsor with Sen. Rounds as the lead sponsor to increase transparency around what the government does and does not know about unidentified aerial phenomena,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor.
“Unidentified aerial phenomena that generated intense curiosity for many Americans and the risk for confusion and misinformation is high if the government isn’t willing to be transparent,” he continued.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calls out House Republicans trying to kill the UAP Disclosure Act in the NDAA. @SenSchumer pic.twitter.com/LO9eeWA3vU
— UAP News (@HighPeaks77) December 4, 2023
“The measure I championed with Sen. Rounds would create a board just like we did with the JFK assassination records to work through the declassification of many government records on UAPs. This model has been a terrific success for decades. It should be used again with UAPs. But, once again, House Republicans are ready to kill this bipartisan provision,” Schumer said.
In a follow-up post to X summarizing his remarks on the amendment, Schumer added, “We’ll keep working to get this done.”
House Republicans are trying to kill the Senate's bipartisan measure to increase transparency around UAPS.
The measure I’m championing with Sen. Rounds would create a board to work through the declassification of government records on UAPs.
We'll keep working to get this done.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 5, 2023
The UAP Disclosure Act, which Schumer unveiled this summer with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) as an amendment to the Senate’s version of the NDAA, would give heads of government offices 300 days to organize records in their possession and give them to a review board, members of which would be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate, to determine whether certain documents should remain classified.
Similar to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the president will have the ultimate authority to postpone disclosure of UAP records if there is an “identifiable harm” to national security, but otherwise calls for their release “not later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the first creation” of the documents by the originating government entities.
Among the many provisions in the UAP amendment was a section that said the federal government shall “exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.”
While it remains to be seen what the final NDAA will look like, the U.S. government has already started making strides in publicly addressing and studying reports of UAPs with the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and other endeavors. Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, recently told NewsNation that he viewed the Schumer amendment as a “poorly drafted piece of legislation” even though he denied that he was “holding up” the measure.
There remain suspicions that the government has not been fully transparent about what it knows concerning UFOs, and a bipartisan group of House lawmakers who have banded together to form the House UAP Caucus have voiced support for passing the 64-page UAP Disclosure Act in conjunction with a one-and-a-half page amendment to the House version of the NDAA that would pushes Department of Defense (DoD) officials to declassify records related to publicly known sightings of UAPs in 180 days.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), the congressman who offered that amendment, told The Daily Wire last week that he had spoken to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) about the UAP issue and “got him to commit to transparency.”