IRAD agreements and UAP non-disclosure
Internal Research and Development (IRAD) agreements are a mechanism by which aerospace corporations have, according to physicist Hal Puthoff, acquired full proprietary control over materials and technologies derived from recovered unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) craft — effectively placing those materials beyond the reach of congressional oversight, Freedom of Information Act requests, and military re-access. Puthoff publicly disclosed this mechanism in a presentation at the Sol Foundation inaugural symposium in November 2023, describing it as one of the central structural obstacles to official UAP disclosure.
The IRAD mechanism
An IRAD is a standard financial instrument in which the U.S. government provides funding to a major aerospace or defence contractor for independent research and development activities. Critically, under IRAD terms, any intellectual property and physical findings produced through that research belong exclusively to the corporation — not to the government that provided the funding. Unlike standard government contracts, IRAD-funded research is not subject to government ownership claims, FOIA requests, or most forms of congressional investigative access.
Puthoff described the two pathways through which crash retrieval materials could be transferred from military custody to corporate research:
- A formal contract with non-disclosure agreement, under which the government retains some rights and visibility into findings
- An IRAD arrangement, under which the corporation receives both the materials and total ownership of whatever is discovered — with no residual government claim
The second pathway, Puthoff indicated, had been the dominant route for much of the recovered material, motivated in part by the corporate argument that IRAD funding creates no discoverable paper trail. Even FOIA requests to the military would yield nothing, because the military itself would have no records — it had ceded them entirely.
Corporate negotiating position
Puthoff described the characteristic corporate posture when military or intelligence representatives approached them with retrieved materials for analysis:
People get materials, ordinarily. Ordinarily you say, okay, it's on a contract, the government has access to it, and so on. But originally when they went to aerospace corporations and elsewhere and said, you know, you've got to help us with the problem, the answer was: we're not going to do that.
— Hal Puthoff, Sol Foundation, 2023 (as quoted by Dr. Michael Salla)
The corporations' position, according to Puthoff, was not that they lacked capability but that they refused to assist under terms that would allow the government to retain control of, or access to, the discoveries. Their stated condition was: "If we have control, then we'll consider doing it." The IRAD mechanism was the legal structure that satisfied that demand — providing the corporation with total ownership of findings derived from government-supplied crashed craft materials.
The Thomas Wilson case
Puthoff's description is paralleled by the documented experience of Rear Admiral Thomas Wilson, who in 1997 served as Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and as a senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wilson possessed the highest-level security clearances then available. He attempted to gain access to a classified reverse-engineering programme known to be run by a major aerospace contractor and was refused entry — denied access even in his official capacity as one of the most senior intelligence figures in the United States Department of Defense.
The Wilson incident — corroborated by notes taken at a meeting Wilson had with physicist Eric W. Davis in 2002, and subsequently leaked and published — is regarded as direct empirical evidence that corporate IRAD ownership of retrieved ET materials had, by the late 1990s, made those programmes effectively inaccessible even to the most senior government overseers.
Crash retrieval programmes
Puthoff identifies the military crash retrieval infrastructure as the origin point from which materials flowed into corporate IRAD channels. The retrieval process involves specialised military units known under various programme names including Project Moon Dust, Project Blue Fly, and Project Pounce — covert teams tasked with locating and recovering any crashed unidentified craft anywhere in the world. Retrieved materials were initially brought to military research facilities such as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Air Force) or the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station (Navy).
When military scientists reached the limits of their own understanding and sought corporate assistance, the IRAD pathway provided the corporation with justification to demand — and receive — permanent ownership of the research output.
Disclosure implications
Salla characterised Puthoff's Sol Foundation disclosure as "a total shocker" — because it demonstrates that publicly funded government agencies tasked with recovering non-human technology had, by signing IRADs with corporations, effectively donated the resulting research permanently to those corporations, with no public accountability mechanism and no governmental right of access.
The IRAD mechanism creates a structural gap in disclosure legislation: congressional mandates to disclose UAP-related information apply to government agencies and classified government programmes. They do not compel disclosure by private corporations of proprietary research findings, even if that research was conducted on materials recovered by government crash retrieval teams and supplied to the corporation under government authority. Salla assessed that this "is going to put a damper on complete disclosure to the public."
Sol Foundation context
The Sol Foundation is an academic research organisation founded to study UAP from a scientific and interdisciplinary perspective; its inaugural symposium in November 2023 brought together researchers including Jacques Vallée, Diana Pasulka, Christopher Mellon, and retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet (former acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Puthoff's panel presentation at that symposium — approximately 18 minutes in length — included the IRAD disclosure as part of a broader discussion of structural barriers to UAP transparency.
Salla assessed the Sol Foundation overall as performing a valuable function in introducing the UAP phenomenon to skeptical academic audiences, while criticising it for operating as a "limited hangout" that endorsed a narrative of failed reverse engineering — implying that retrieved craft were too advanced for human understanding — when whistleblower and contractor accounts indicate that major corporations including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman have in fact successfully reverse engineered elements of recovered technology.
The 1997 Wilson briefing
Steven Greer — who organized the 2001 Disclosure Project National Press Club event and had briefed CIA Director James Woolsey in 1993 — described his 1997 briefing of Admiral Wilson to Shawn Ryan in detail. Greer had couriered Wilson a portfolio of UAP documents including a classified 1990 Nellis security alert document with program code names in the distribution list; Wilson then attempted to use his authority as head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to access the relevant program — and was denied and threatened with demotion. At the conclusion of the briefing, Wilson expressed his assessment that confronting the organizations running these projects was futile given the technological disparity: "How do I take on a group that have technologies that can do circles around the best thing I know? We have the B-2 stealth. That's the best thing I know to deploy." Greer stated Wilson's final words were "point, set, match" — an acknowledgment that institutional authority had no leverage against a technologically superior covert organization.
Greer additionally noted that the constitutional US government has not exercised proper oversight of these operations "since the late 1950s" — describing the situation as one in which even the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States, and the director of the CIA had all been denied access to the program through channels, a claim consistent with Puthoff's description of corporate IRAD control placing the research beyond any government access mechanism.
Puthoff's closed-session disclosure modeling: corporate litigation as a negative factor
In an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2023, Hal Puthoff described a separate closed-door modeling exercise — which he placed during the George H. W. Bush administration — in which a group of roughly sixty invited participants including CIA officers, DIA personnel, and military figures were asked to score the societal consequences of disclosing confirmed crash retrieval evidence on a scale from positive nine to negative nine across approximately sixty impact categories. One of the items that drove net negative scores was the corporate access problem created by selective IRAD arrangements: "Suppose materials from a crash retrieval of a non-human craft was given to Corporation A. But Corporation B didn't get any samples. And then years later, Corporation A is making lots of money based on what they got. Meanwhile, Corporation B has gone bankrupt and then they find out they were excluded. Well, they're going to end up suing the corporations, suing the government. I mean, it really gets gnarly when you get into the weeds and into the details." Every participating group in the exercise reached negative aggregate scores, leading the convener to conclude that disclosure should not occur — a conclusion that Puthoff said he personally no longer endorsed by the time of the 2023 interview.