Federal agencies have until October 20 to deliver all documents, audio and video they have about UFOs to the US government for distribution to the public.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued the instructions this month, putting into practice the UFO disclosure amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2024, enacted last December.
The guidelines reveal the latest strategy to force reluctant parts of the US military and intelligence community to reveal everything they know about the mysterious aerial events, now called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
The move comes two months after the Pentagon’s UFO office issued a controversial report to Congress, stating that it “found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology.”
The US National Archives requires all UFO records by October 20, 2024. Above, the US Air Force once released this image of a 1972 Viking space probe awaiting recovery at White Sands Missile Range near Roswell to explain the 1947 Roswell UFO crash 25 years earlier
Above, ‘Archives II’, the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, which houses the most contemporary government documents available to scholars and the public. The newly requested UFO records will be available here and online through a digital database.
NARA archivists have issued guidelines requiring that all UFO or UAP documents be delivered in electronic formats with detailed metadata for inclusion in a new searchable database that will be made available to the public.
The database will include classified material that NARA will store independently, keeping the records in a secure location until they can be declassified to the public.
NARA guidelines make clear that all government agencies must label their records with the “official security status” of each file and any “special controls,” including “special compartmented information” (SCI) and “access programs.” special” (SAP).
All federal agencies, including branches of the U.S. military and intelligence community such as the CIA, must also explain to NARA and the public why certain UFO documents qualify as “exempt” from disclosure under the new law.
‘If released in part or retained in whole’, the NARA Guidelines Notice Publication stated, ‘cite specific reasons for the deferral in section 1843 of the NDAA.’
The files added that these agencies must comply with these provisions in the new NDAA UFO Disclosure Amendment of 2024 or with the provisions ‘outlined in Executive Order 13526.’
The order, put into effect by President Barack Obama in 2009, states that all classified material that is more than 25 years old will be subject to “automatic declassification.”
In the late 1990s, the US Air Force also pointed to this aeroshell from a 1967 NASA Voyager-Mars space probe (above) as an explanation for the 1947 Roswell UFO crash, two decades earlier. .
Members of both houses of Congress expressed frustration over the watered-down nature of the UFO disclosure amendment signed into law with the NDAA of 2024.
‘They scammed us. We are completely soaked. They took out all the parts,” said Rep. Tim Burchett, one of the lawmakers behind the law.
And, unpersuaded by the Pentagon’s latest UFO report from last March, members of Congress’ House Oversight Committee have recently said they are preparing two new public hearings on UFOs to keep up the pressure.
“We still don’t know the facts,” Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman told a reporter. ask a politician at the end of last month.
One of these hearings, according to representative Anna Paulina Luna, will focus on underwater cases of unknown vessels, known as Unidentified Submerged Objects (USO).
“We are working to do something with USO,” Representative Luna said this May, ‘we’re talking to some people.’