National security

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National security

National security is a legal, political, and administrative concept used by the United States government — and governments worldwide — to designate information, activities, and programs whose disclosure is deemed to endanger the safety of the state, its armed forces, or its population. Within the context of UFO and non-human intelligence (NHI) research, national security has functioned as the primary legal mechanism through which evidence, crash retrieval programs, and reverse engineering projects have been withheld from the public, from elected representatives, and even from presidents of the United States. Journalist and historian Richard Dolan has argued that the national security architecture erected after 1947 created a permanent, self-sustaining bureaucracy capable of operating beyond democratic oversight — what he and others have called the breakaway civilization or deep national security state.

History and legal foundation

The formal national security apparatus of the United States was created by the National Security Act of 1947, signed by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1947 — the same year as the 1947 Roswell incident and the wave of Kenneth Arnold sightings that defined the modern UFO era. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council (NSC), the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and unified the military branches under a new Department of Defense. The NSC was created to coordinate foreign policy and military strategy at the highest executive level.

Executive Order 13526, signed by President Barack Obama on December 29, 2009, is the current governing framework for the classification of national security information in the United States. It establishes three classification tiers — Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret — and creates a system of "special access programs" (SAPs) for particularly sensitive material. Above SAPs are unacknowledged special access programs (USAPs), which have no official acknowledgment of existence even to most of the executive branch. Steven Greer has described USAPs as the mechanism by which UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs have been insulated from presidential and congressional knowledge for decades.

The original statutory basis for information classification derives from the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and various National Security Acts, but the practical framework has been built through presidential executive orders since Dwight Eisenhower's administration. Title 50 of the United States Code, which governs war and national defense, provides the legal authority for the intelligence community's classification powers, covert operations, and the protection of "sources and methods."

The classification system

The modern U.S. classification system, as governed by EO 13526, operates on five key principles:

  1. Information is classified only when its disclosure would damage national security.
  2. Classifying officials must identify a specific harm that would result.
  3. Classification must be for a defined period, not in perpetuity.
  4. Information cannot be classified to conceal wrongdoing, inefficiency, or to prevent embarrassment.
  5. The public interest in disclosure must be weighed against the harm.

In practice, critics — including David Grusch, Christopher Mellon, and Lue Elizondo — have documented that the fourth principle is routinely violated in the context of UAP programs. Grusch testified under oath before Congress in 2023 that programs concealing non-human craft and biological materials have used national security classification not to protect legitimate secrets but to prevent accountability for illegal activity. Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, corroborated that the SAP system had grown to a point where programs could exist without any senior official being aware of them.

Special Access Programs and USAPs

Beyond Top Secret classification, special access programs (SAPs) require specific additional authorization ("read-in") before any official may access them. Unacknowledged special access programs take this further: their existence is not admitted even in classified settings. Personnel within USAPs are authorized to deny — to Congress, to inspectors general, and to the President — that the programs exist at all.

Lue Elizondo, former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), described encountering this wall when attempting to access UAP-related programs from within the Pentagon: certain programs were simply off the organizational chart. Grusch, who held a Top Secret/SCI clearance and worked as the National Reconnaissance Office's representative to the UAP Task Force, stated that he was provided "specific, verifiable" details about legacy crash retrieval programs that operated within USAP structures to avoid congressional oversight.

National security and FOIA

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), enacted in 1966, is the primary mechanism by which citizens and journalists can request government records. However, FOIA contains nine statutory exemptions, the most expansive of which (Exemption 1 and Exemption 3) cover classified information and information specifically protected by statute. The practical result is that any document marked classified under EO 13526 is categorically exempt from FOIA disclosure.

Thousands of FOIA requests related to UAP programs have been filed since the 1970s. The government has consistently responded by invoking national security exemptions to withhold responsive documents entirely — or by releasing documents so heavily redacted as to be unreadable. Steven Greer's Disclosure Project compiled extensive documentation of FOIA responses in which entire pages, often entire files, were withheld under Exemption 1 (classified) and Exemption 3 (intelligence sources and methods). This pattern continued through the period of the UAPTF (2020–2022) and the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022.

Congressional oversight and national security

The constitutional framework gives Congress broad oversight authority over the executive branch, including the intelligence community. The Intelligence Committees of the Senate and House are the primary oversight bodies for classified programs. Under the National Security Act, the executive is required to keep the congressional intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of intelligence activities, including any "significant anticipated intelligence activity" before it is initiated.

In practice, unacknowledged special access programs have routinely circumvented this requirement. Grusch's whistleblower complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) in May 2023 alleged that programs with non-human intelligence material had been deliberately withheld from congressional oversight for decades — a direct violation of the statutory notification requirements. This was corroborated by Tim Burchett, Mike Rounds, and other members of Congress who stated publicly that they had been denied access to programs they had oversight responsibility for.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee have both passed legislation in recent years attempting to force disclosure: the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act (modeled on the JFK Records Act), which passed the Senate in 2023, would have required mandatory declassification of UAP records. It was stripped in conference.

National security invoked against the President

One of the most disturbing claims in the UAP disclosure literature is that the national security apparatus has been used to withhold information from the President of the United States. Steven Greer has stated, based on testimony from senior officials, that presidents including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were denied access to crash retrieval programs when they sought information — and that the intelligence officials managing these programs had no legal obligation to inform them. CIA Director Richard Helms established precedents in the 1960s and 1970s for keeping information from the executive under the doctrine of "need to know."

Lue Elizondo has recounted being told by a senior Pentagon official that "this program is not on anyone's radar" — meaning it was not in any chain of command visible to political appointees. Christopher Mellon similarly testified that programs using contractor control (outside government) were specifically designed so that the normal national security oversight chains did not apply.

The "national security" suppression tool

Critics across the political spectrum have argued that "national security" has become a blanket suppression tool, invoked not to protect genuine secrets but to shield programs from accountability. Glenn Greenwald, writing and speaking extensively on the surveillance state, has argued that the NSA's bulk collection programs — acknowledged only after Edward Snowden's 2013 disclosures — were kept from the public under national security claims that were legally unfounded. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the scope of these programs under oath in March 2013.

In the UAP context, Richard Dolan has documented that from 1947 onward, the national security apparatus engaged in a systematic policy of "explain away, ridicule, and classify" regarding UAP evidence — using security classifications not because disclosure would harm national security in any conventional sense, but because disclosure would reveal that the official position (UAPs do not exist as extraordinary phenomena) was false. This has been described as the use of national security law to commit fraud upon the American public.

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