Senator trying to force Uncle Sam to share everything it knows about UFOs

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been pulling some strings to force the government to spill what it knows about UFOs.

With the frenzy around "unidentified anomalous/aerial phenomena" – the slightly less hysterical term – reaching unusual heights of late, the New York senator aims to introduce an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would form a commission with authority to declassify government docs on UAPs, alien spaceships or unknown materials – if such things exist.

The legislation from Schumer, the Democrat senator who also has a few ideas on AI regulation, has bipartisan support from the likes of Republicans Mike Rounds (South Dakota) and Marco Rubio (Florida) who has worked to get reports on unidentified phenomena published before.

The House is likely to back it too, the New York Times reports, with a provision [PDF] in its version of the defense bill asking for the "declassification of certain reports of unidentified aerial phenomena."

Schumer's amendment would give government agencies 300 days to get their records on UAPs in order to then provide them to the review board.

Uncle Sam got rather trigger-happy with regard to unidentified aircraft earlier in the year, shooting down four balloons, one of which was determined to be a Chinese spying effort.

And that's what a lot of these sightings are usually chalked up to. However, footage from US Air Force training exercises have caught flying Tic-Tacs exhibiting anomalous movement that neither the pilot nor analysts can confidently explain.

The thinking is that a more comprehensive data dump of government documents on the matter will push back against conspiracy theories and the perception that Uncle Sam is purposefully holding back information from the public.

The problem is the government is reluctant to share data which has been gathered sensitively – that is to say it does not want adversaries to know about the extent of its spying capabilities, which was pointed out in yet another review of UAP material. That panel also said the quality of data is so poor that it is impossible draw any conclusions.

• Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech
• NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing
• Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind
• Pentagon shoots down UFO rumors but says 650 cases are still pending

To be fair, US agencies have been far more open about these things over the last few years, or so they would have you believe. In 2021, the CIA dumped a box of records alleging to be everything it had on UFOs on the desk of The Black Vault website. The stories therein were intriguing but still nothing that comes close to hard evidence for extraterrestrials on Earth.

What doesn't help is chaps like David Charles Grusch, a former US intelligence officer who blew the whistle claiming government is sitting on a hoard of alien technology. He's never seen the alien technology, but provided classified info to Congress containing "specific data about the [UAP] materials recovery program."

This stuff, if true, would indeed be nice to know about and could benefit humanity. Plus, relying on the explodey hydrocarbon rockets of billionaire playboys is getting really old, but officials have repeatedly denied the existence of off-world technology.

Meanwhile, researchers who found that one in five academics have experienced unidentified anomalous phenomena called to remove the stigma from such encounters.

We shall see if anything comes of Schumer's move, but the fact is that the White House will not release material it deems to be a risk to national security.

If anything of note is revealed, we're sure it won't be aliens. We all know that a space-faring civilization with its eyes on Earth would first etch an AI supercomputer onto an extra-dimensional photon then fire it at us to disrupt scientific progress and communicate our every move back to the mothership in real time via quantum entanglement.

Four hundred years later, we're in a spot of bother. ®