Disclosure movement

Social and political movement advocating for government acknowledgment of UFOs, UAP, and non-human intelligence

Template:Infobox cultural movement The disclosure movement is a transnational social movement and advocacy network seeking official government acknowledgment of the reality of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), non-human intelligent beings, and the classified programs alleged to have studied and concealed them since at least the late 1940s. Its adherents argue for the public release of government files on the subject for spiritual, humanitarian, scientific, or commercial reasons, and the term "disclosure" refers both to the climactic event toward which the movement aspires and to the ongoing process by which government acknowledgment is advanced. The movement spans civilian whistleblower networks, congressional advocates, former intelligence officials, ufologists, and independent researchers, and advocates have variously predicted that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or Pope Leo XIV would be the president or pontiff under whom disclosure occurs.

Beliefs

Disclosure movement adherents generally hold that the U.S. government and allied military-industrial complex entities have possessed physical evidence of recovered non-human craft and of extraterrestrial contact since at least the late 1940s; that this evidence has been concealed through unacknowledged special access programs operating outside congressional oversight; and that its public release is both morally required and structurally inevitable. The secret-keepers are described as unlikely to release the information voluntarily: "the secret keepers will never voluntarily give away this secret. They have too much to lose." Inevitability is attributed to cultural shift and accelerating technological change.

According to journalist Anna Merlan, disclosure is conceived within the movement as "the time when the world's governments will finally reveal everything they know about UFOs, extraterrestrials, and alien technology". According to journalist Alex Seitz-Wald, "the movement has long believed the government is covering up the greatest secret in history"; advocate Steven Greer has argued that "aliens are here to help us and the military-industrial complex is hyping their danger", and that films such as Independence Day reflect "a false narrative created by covert groups striving to generate fear of ETs". Advocate Christopher Mellon has framed potential revelations of extraterrestrial contact and alien technology as "the biggest discovery in human history", while Luis Elizondo has accused the government of a cover-up, saying, "You have information being locked away that can change the trajectory of [our] species".

Within the movement, the term "non-human intelligence" refers to the entities allegedly responsible for UAP, though definitions vary across adherents. Internal hypotheses include the extraterrestrial hypothesis, the interdimensional hypothesis favored by disclosure advocate Leslie Kean, the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis of a hidden terrestrial civilization, the time-traveler hypothesis, and the demonic hypothesis advanced by Christian fundamentalists.

Observers have framed the movement as partly religious in character. Mark Pilkington writes that "Disclosure's advocates claim that what they want is truth, but what they actually want is to have their existing beliefs about UFOs and extraterrestrials reported by a government they already distrust on the issue." Hari Kunzru argues that the movement's belief that a sudden revelation will trigger beneficial societal transformation gives it a spiritual dimension: "The idea of fighting against secretive bureaucratic evil to bring about a transcendent moment of collective cooperation is a sort of secularized Gnosticism, and it has continued to reappear, in one form or another, since the first sightings in the late Forties." Merlan similarly notes that advocates use "the language of end-times preachers who describe a coming climactic battle, a grand revelation, a final decisive moment when humanity will be divided into the drowned and the saved".

History

"Proofs"

They hold that they won't turn over the info, that it is like an atom bomb in importance, and they are keeping it in their own hands... I am saying that if our scientists were ALLOWED to have but one of these machines (which exist in great profusion and in fine repair) for study, that our whole technical development would be accelerated beyond imagination.

— Richard Shaver, describing a conspiracy to suppress high technology, Amazing Stories (June 1947) ＋

1940s–1960s: Proto-disclosure and the Keyhoe era

The movement's roots trace to the 1940s and the work of Amazing Stories editor Raymond A. Palmer and writer Richard Shaver, whose 1947 "Proofs" column in Amazing Stories framed hidden high technology as deliberately suppressed and inspired subsequent cover-up narratives. As early as 1952, in the wake of the 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident, the U.S. Air Force acknowledged reports from "credible observers of relatively incredible things" while cautioning that the phenomena showed no "pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like consistency that we can in any way associate with any menace to the United States".

In 1955, retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe published The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, arguing for an end to the government cover-up of UFO information. Keyhoe, a principal figure in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP, founded 1956), by 1963 was publicly calling for "full disclosure of UFO facts" on the basis of conversations with members of Congress, predicting "some action in a few months" — though no major announcement ensued. The systematic institutional suppression of UAP information that Keyhoe and NICAP opposed had been formalized by the 1953 Robertson Panel, convened under CIA auspices, whose classified recommendation was to debunk and discredit UFO reports — a mandate that Project Blue Book subsequently operated under and that Mellon has described as having been implemented "extremely successfully". In 1977, during the Carter administration, U.S. News & World Report reported that "unsettling disclosures" about UFOs would be announced by the CIA before year's end; none emerged.

1990s–2009: Greer, Project Starlight, and the National Press Club

Systematic movement-building under the "disclosure" banner dates to the early 1990s and the work of Dr. Steven Greer, a former emergency physician who claims to have seen a flying saucer as a child and who popularized the term "disclosure" for advocacy against the perceived cover-up. Greer identifies himself as the founder of "the worldwide disclosure movement". In 1993 he established the Disclosure Project under the code name Project Starlight, originally conceived as an intelligence-briefing effort aimed at senior government officials, and in December 1993 briefed R. James Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence under President Bill Clinton, at a meeting arranged under cover of a dinner party. Greer assembled a pool of over 400 military, intelligence, aerospace, and NASA witnesses over the following eight years.

The Project's efforts culminated in a National Press Club press conference on May 9, 2001, at which over twenty military, government, intelligence, and corporate witnesses publicly called for congressional hearings with witness immunity, a permanent ban on the weaponization of space, and a full study of suppressed energy technologies. Some adherents of Greer's organization practice the CE-5 protocol, which attempts to directly commune with space aliens through meditation as a means of compelling disclosure; Greer has commercially marketed "Ambassador to the Universe" trainings to teach the protocol.

By March 2007 Disclose.tv existed as a forum devoted to UFOs, paranormal topics, and conspiracy theories, and its name invoked the idea of disclosure that circulates among UFO enthusiasts: the time when the government will confirm the existence of aliens and release information regarding them.

2010–2016: Bassett, Citizen Hearing, Podesta

On September 27, 2010, Robert Salas appeared at the National Press Club with other UFO speakers and recounted the Malmstrom UFO incident, in which a UFO report was linked to nuclear missiles going offline. Former U.S. Air Force personnel at the event alleged that UFOs had interfered with nuclear missiles at U.S. bases. In 2011, George Knapp reported that the "UFO crowd" had hoped Barack Obama would be "the disclosure president" but had "got on to something else" after Obama, responding to a 2011 We the People petition, affirmed there was nothing to disclose. Advocate Stephen Bassett nevertheless continued to insist Obama would be the disclosure president.

In 2013, Bassett organized the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, at which purported UFO witnesses testified to six former members of the U.S. Congress, with Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick presiding; each former member was paid $20,000 plus expenses to attend. The hearing ran from April 29 to May 3, 2013, and heard roughly 30 hours of testimony from researchers and military, agency, and political witnesses, with Paradigm Research Group paying each of the six former members about $20,000 plus expenses. Former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer alleged during the hearing that two space aliens were coaching U.S. government officials on clean energy and that this was being suppressed by the petroleum industry. The event was attended by roughly 100 members of the public, including Louis Farrakhan, Hollow Earth advocates, and people in space alien costumes.

In 2015, Clinton aide John Podesta publicly lamented "my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files". The subsequent WikiLeaks publication of Podesta's emails drew additional attention to his UFO correspondence, and Podesta's involvement led some in the movement to anticipate that a Hillary Clinton presidency would trigger disclosure. After Clinton's 2016 loss, the television series Ancient Aliens speculated that the CIA had intervened in the election to foil disclosure.

2017: Glowing Auras and Black Money and To The Stars

In October 2017, To The Stars Academy (TTSA) was founded by Tom DeLonge (guitarist of Blink-182), parapsychologist Harold E. Puthoff, and author Jim Semivan, with disclosure advocates Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo among personnel; Elizondo had recently resigned from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) citing excessive secrecy and internal opposition. In December 2017 TTSA provided the first of what became known as the Pentagon UFO videos to the press.

Enthusiasm for disclosure accelerated on December 16, 2017, when The New York Times published "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper, revealing AATIP and releasing declassified gun-camera footage of the 2004 Nimitz UFO incident. The article is widely treated as the moment the UAP subject received the imprimatur of mainstream journalism. Luis Elizondo has since argued that "in the last seven years... we've come further on this conversation than we have the last 70", crediting allies inside government with wanting the conversation to occur.

2018–2022: Pilot testimony, AARO, and the 60 Minutes wave

Following the Times article, additional Navy pilots came forward publicly. David Fravor, the Nimitz-incident pilot, gave extensive interviews; Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 pilot with the USS Theodore Roosevelt, testified that his squadron observed UAP on radar and visually "every day for at least a couple years" during deployments beginning in 2014. In April 2019 the U.S. Navy formally changed its guidance to encourage rather than discourage pilot reporting of UAP. That year Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace to "advocate for more disclosure by the military and other government agencies".

During 2021, figures including Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former president Barack Obama spoke publicly about UFOs, with Obama confirming that footage and records of unidentified objects exist while dismissing extraterrestrial claims. In April 2021 Harry Reid published a letter confirming Elizondo's leadership role in AATIP, and in August 2021 60 Minutes aired a prominent UAP report. The FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act mandated an unclassified UAP report from the Director of National Intelligence, which in June 2021 acknowledged 144 U.S. government UAP incidents between 2004 and 2021 and declined to explain 143 of them; the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established within the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2022 as successor to AATIP and the Navy's UAP Task Force.

2022–2023: Congressional hearings, Grusch, and the UAP Disclosure Act

In 2022, the U.S. Congress held its first public UAP hearing in over fifty years. In 2023 Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer proposed legislation to expedite disclosure of UFO-related information, and commentator Art Levine wrote that "UFO Messiah" Luis Elizondo had "become a lightning rod for a dangerous new rage... who are demanding 'disclosure now' by the government". On July 26, 2023, retired Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified at the 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing that the U.S. government maintained a secret crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving non-human craft and biological materials, though he provided no evidence beyond what he said he had been told or read. Grusch expressed hope that disclosure would produce an "ontological (earth-shattering) shock" that would unite humanity. Responding to Grusch, Stephen Bassett said "this thing is getting ready to blow sky high" and predicted President Joe Biden would confirm extraterrestrials within "two weeks".

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 (the Schumer–Rounds Amendment), modeled on the JFK Records Act, was introduced as an amendment to the FY2024 NDAA on July 13, 2023, passing the Senate Armed Services Committee by a bipartisan 17–0 vote before its central enforcement mechanisms — a Presidential Review Board with subpoena power and eminent domain authority over materials held by private contractors — were stripped in the December 2023 NDAA conference. Also in 2023, Garrett Graff cited a December 2020 interview with CIA director John Brennan as the inspiration for his latest book, in which Brennan "admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs". On June 12, 2023, Greer returned to the National Press Club for a second major event, releasing what he described as a one-terabyte Disclosure Project Intelligence Archive including maps and supporting documentation for 145 alleged top-secret facilities and files on 752 whistleblowers.

In the aftermath of Brennan's comments, science writer Joel Achenbach told readers "Sorry to disappoint you... but there's zero evidence of aliens". According to the Washington Spectator, "a common trope of self-described whistleblowers such as David Grusch, Luis Elizondo and Eric Davis [is] that they've signed Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or have other restrictions on what they can say" which prevents them from producing definitive evidence; the U.S. government has indicated it is unaware of the existence of any such claimed NDAs.

2024–2026: AARO report, continued hearings, and international spillover

In March 2024, AARO released a historical report which affirmed the absence of UFO information available to disclose and indirectly implicated some prominent disclosure advocates in advancing specious cover-up claims. The Washington Spectator reported that, in the aftermath of that report and to fill the vacuum it created, belief according to secret space program was revisited by some UFO followers. In 2025, the Wall Street Journal revealed that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been told, falsely, that there existed "a secret program to harvest alien technology" — a "long-running practice" the paper described as "like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control" — and reported that a classified electromagnetic pulse test, rather than alien activity, had been responsible for the 1967 Malmstrom missile-offline event.

U.S. Congressional subcommittees have continued to hold UAP transparency hearings, led by "a small group of policymakers who have been steadily prioritizing whistleblower hearings, public engagement sessions and other legislative efforts". In September 2025, a hearing hosted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna featured former Air Force and Navy personnel Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Dylan Borland, and Alexandro Wiggins, and George Knapp. In advocating for accelerated transparency, Chuck Schumer has continued pressing for declassification of UFO files. Following the enthronement of Pope Leo XIV, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor Kody W. Cooper noted speculation that he might be "the disclosure pope" and "reveal the Vatican's UFO 'secrets'". In January 2026, The Times of London reported that Helen McCaw, a former Bank of England expert on "preparing for events that could impact the economy", had written to Bank governor Andrew Bailey urging contingency planning for a U.S. announcement of alien life.

Adherents

In addition to Greer, Keyhoe, and Bassett, notable figures associated with the movement include David Wilcock (host of Gaia's Cosmic Disclosure), Daniel Sheehan (constitutional attorney, longtime Disclosure Project counsel, founder of the New Paradigm Institute), Luis Elizondo (former AATIP director), John Podesta (former White House Chief of Staff), Harry Reid (former Senate Majority Leader and AATIP sponsor), Garry Nolan (Stanford immunologist), retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, Christopher Mellon (former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), investigative journalist Ross Coulthart, Navy pilot witnesses David Fravor and Ryan Graves, congressional sponsors Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, and filmmakers Jeremy Corbell and James Fox. Advocate Stephen Bassett has described the UAP Caucus — co-founded by Representatives Tim Burchett, Nancy Mace, and Anna Paulina Luna — as "serious about really pressing this issue forward".

Relationship to other streams

The disclosure movement overlaps with, but is distinguishable from, the broader UFO conspiracy theory tradition and the exopolitics field. The broader UAP disclosure pipeline distinguishes the official legislative and congressional track — AATIP, AARO, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and the 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing — from the older Disclosure Project / Project Starlight lineage and from the exopolitics tradition of contactee, abductee, and secret space program testimony, with significant personnel overlap across all three streams. The 2017 wave and the pre-2017 disclosure movement are not identical: the post-2017 disclosure push originated largely from inside the national-security establishment (via DeLonge, Mellon, Elizondo, and Reid), while the pre-2017 movement was organized outside government by Greer, Bassett, and their allied civilian witness networks. Both streams have converged since 2023 around the UAP Disclosure Act and ongoing congressional hearings.

See also

• UAP disclosure
• UAP disclosure (2017–present)
• Disclosure Project
• To The Stars Academy
• UAP Disclosure Act of 2023
• 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing
• AATIP
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office
• Glowing Auras and 'Black Money'
• NICAP
• Donald Keyhoe
• Factions of the UAP control group
• Counter-disclosure
• Managed disclosure
• Catastrophic disclosure
• Limited hangout
• UFO conspiracy theory
• The Age of Disclosure

References

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Further reading

• Seitz-Wald, Alex (January 8, 2022). "Disclosure or deception? New UFO Pentagon office divides believers". NBC News. Retrieved May 25, 2025. ＋