John Brennan
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John Brennan (born September 22, 1955) is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and Director of the CIA (2013–2017) under President Barack Obama — cited in UAP disclosure research for a December 2020 television interview in which he declined to rule out an extraterrestrial explanation for UAP, stating he was "quite puzzled" by some of the UAP reports and that some might involve "a type of aerial vehicle or phenomenon that is beyond our current understanding."
Early life and education
Brennan was born in North Bergen, New Jersey, to Irish Catholic parents. He studied at Fordham University in New York City and then at the American University in Cairo, where he studied Arabic — a language skill that would define his subsequent intelligence career. He received a Bachelor of Science in political science from Fordham in 1977 and later studied at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a graduate degree in government. He joined the CIA in 1980 and underwent the agency's clandestine service training program.
CIA career
Brennan served 25 years as a CIA operations officer and analyst, spending significant time in the Middle East — including a posting as the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia — before returning to headquarters roles. He became a senior member of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in the years before the September 11, 2001 attacks. After 9/11, he served as Deputy Executive Director of the CIA under Director George Tenet and played a significant role in the expansion of the CIA's drone strike program and enhanced interrogation operations. He left the CIA in 2005 and founded The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a government intelligence contractor, before returning to government under President Barack Obama as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (2009–2013) — effectively Obama's principal counterterrorism advisor — and then as CIA Director (2013–2017). His confirmation as CIA Director required a 63-34 Senate vote and was preceded by controversy over his role in the post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program. The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation — the so-called "torture report" — implicated programs operating during Brennan's tenure at the agency, though the Senate summary attributed primary responsibility to the CIA leadership at the time of the program's creation.
December 2020 UAP statements
In December 2020, weeks after the announcement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be required to produce a UAP report under the Intelligence Authorization Act, Brennan gave an interview on the Tyler Cowen podcast (Conversations with Tyler) that drew significant attention in the UAP research community. He stated that he found some UAP reports "quite intriguing" and could not rule out that some phenomena represented "a new form of life" or technology developed by an unknown party. He stopped short of endorsing extraterrestrial explanations but explicitly declined to dismiss them — an unusual departure from the dismissive position taken by virtually all former senior intelligence officials at the time. The statement was widely noted because Brennan had access during his 34-year career to the most highly classified IC programs, and his refusal to attribute UAP reports to mundane explanations was interpreted by researchers as a signal that his classification oaths prevented him from making more direct statements.
Significance in UAP research
Brennan's December 2020 comments were made approximately six months before the June 2021 release of the Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by the ODNI — the first official unclassified government report on UAP since the termination of Project Blue Book in 1969. Researchers including Richard Dolan and Steven Greer noted that a series of former senior officials had made unusually direct UAP comments in the year preceding the report's release, including former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who stated in a Fox News interview that some UAP moved in ways that exceeded any known U.S. or foreign technology. Brennan's comments are positioned within this pattern as part of a controlled pre-disclosure signaling process — a gradual normalization of the UAP subject in elite commentary intended to prepare the public and the media for the official report. His statement that some phenomena might involve "a type of entity that is beyond our current understanding" was more philosophically open than most official commentary and has been repeatedly cited in disclosure literature as one of the most significant public UAP statements by a former senior IC official.
CIA and UAP history
The CIA's institutional history with the UAP issue extends from at least 1953, when the agency convened the Robertson Panel — a committee of scientists that recommended debunking UAP reports and reducing public interest in the subject on the grounds that mass interest in UFOs could overload military communication channels and be exploited by adversaries. The Robertson Panel report remained classified until 1966. The CIA's subsequent involvement includes: the classified support for the Condon Committee investigation at the University of Colorado (1966–1968); the agency's acknowledged collection of foreign UAP reports through its HUMINT networks; and the classification and de-classification of various categories of UAP-related document in response to FOIA litigation beginning in the 1970s. When Brennan served as CIA Director, the agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence maintained an active interest in UAP as potential foreign aerospace technology, separate from the DIA-housed AATIP program.
Post-government positions
After leaving the CIA in 2017 Brennan became an MSNBC national security analyst and a persistent critic of President Donald Trump, particularly on issues of Russian intelligence operations and the firing of FBI Director James Comey. His security clearance was revoked by the Trump administration in August 2018 — an action Trump stated was in response to Brennan's public criticism of the administration. Brennan's 2020 UAP statements came in this post-government, post-clearance context, suggesting that whatever constraints had prevented more direct statements during his time in government had at least partially lifted — consistent with the pattern of other former officials becoming more forthcoming on UAP after leaving positions in which classified access created legal constraints on speech.
Whistleblower prosecutions
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who became the first CIA employee to publicly confirm the agency's use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique, has alleged that Brennan personally directed his prosecution in retaliation for longstanding personal animosity predating Obama's election. According to Kiriakou, discovery documents in his espionage case included three internal memos in which Brennan wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder with the instruction "charge him with espionage" — a charge Holder's own staff concluded was not supported by the evidence. Per Kiriakou, Brennan then wrote again urging Holder to "charge him anyway." Kiriakou, who ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of disclosing a covert agent's identity, described Brennan as someone who "for sport would ruin people's lives."
Kiriakou also stated that when the Trump administration revoked Brennan's security clearance in August 2018 he publicly endorsed the action, arguing that no private citizen possessed a right to a clearance and that Brennan in particular "shouldn't be anywhere near a federal building — with what we know he's plotted in the past."
Joe Rogan Experience discussion
Kiriakou's description of Brennan's role in his prosecution was repeated and expanded in a 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. Kiriakou described Brennan as "one of the fathers of the torture program" — noting that liberal opposition to Brennan's initial nomination as CIA Director was grounded in Brennan's documented role in authorising enhanced interrogation, a fact Kiriakou argued "everybody seems to forget now." Kiriakou told Rogan that Brennan sent a memo to Eric Holder with the instruction to charge him with espionage, that Holder's staff replied the evidence did not support espionage, and that Brennan replied "charge him anyway and make him defend himself" — a sequence that resulted in five felony counts, three of them espionage charges that were eventually dropped after Kiriakou went bankrupt.
Kiriakou further characterized Brennan as personally responsible for Russiagate, telling Rogan: "As it turns out, the only one who was actually plotting to overthrow the government was John Brennan" — referring to the 2015–2016 period in which the Steele dossier was assembled and circulated through intelligence and media channels. Kiriakou described Christopher Steele as an operations officer who gathered low-level sources, wrote up speculative assessments, and sent them back — arguing that the intelligence community chain of custody that treated the Steele dossier as intelligence product represented a fundamental misapplication of how operations officers and analysts are supposed to function.