The UAP Disclosure Act: The proposed Pentagon/AARO re-write of November 2023

By Douglas Dean Johnson

@ddeanjohnson on X/Twitter

My gmail address is my full name

Original publication: July 24, 2024, 10:00 AM EDT. Any substantive revisions to the original article will be noted in a log found at the end of the article. Those reading this article in the e-mailed version may have to click on "view in browser" under my byline in order to access embedded documents such as PDF files.

In the light of recent statements by the former head of the Pentagon "UFO office," Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, asserting that the Pentagon/AARO successfully derailed the Schumer-Rounds Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act (UAPDA) in late 2023, I am releasing here a proposed 33-page line-by-line rewrite of the Senate-passed UAPDA that the Pentagon provided to congressional negotiators during end-stage negotiations in November 2023.

This is the first publication of this document anywhere.

Further down in this article, you'll find Kirkpatrick's answers to questions I addressed to him for this article, such as whether the National Security Advisor or any other higher authority ever tried to subdue his activity in opposition to the UAPDA, and why the proposed Pentagon re-write of the UAPDA would have retained provisions affirming the right of the federal government to take ownership (via the exercise of eminent domain) over "any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that be be controlled by private persons or entities..."

GUIDE TO INTERPRETATION OF THE DOCUMENT: In the embedded PDF document, the unmodified underlying text is the Senate-passed UAPDA. Strike-out marking through a paragraph or phrase indicates that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security ((OUSD(I&S)) wanted that language removed from the bill. All underlined words and phrases were OUSD(I&S) proposals for new language or replacement language to be inserted.

Thus, if the OUSD(I&S) text had been enacted in total (which is not exactly what occurred), the resulting law would have been the original text, plus the underlined additions, minus the extensive strikeouts. This type of legislative re-write document is sometimes called a "red line."

The nature of the document is explained in introductory paragraphs found on the top third of the first page, shown in the image above: It was presented as the "informal views" of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, which stated that the Department of Defense "strongly urges consideration" of the proposed extensive rewriting of Division G of S. 2226, which was the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act, part of the the FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that had been passed by the U.S. Senate on July 27, 2023. The introduction to the document says that the Department of Defense position was arrived at "after conferring with NARA/ISOO," referring respectively to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and to the Information Security Oversight Office.

The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security is the top intelligence officer in the Department of Defense. [1] The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the "UFO office," is attached to the OUSD(I&S) for administrative matters, although starting in 2023 the AARO director reports directly to a higher official, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, "on all operational and security matters." The Deputy Secretary, Kathleen Hicks, ranks directly under the Secretary of Defense.

Kirkpatrick served as AARO director from its formal inception in mid-2022 until December 1, 2023, which included the period that the 2023 UAPDA language was under consideration in Congress (mid-July to early December 2023).

Data associated with the original "informal views" file document (which I have sanitized) suggests that it was transmitted to negotiators on Capitol Hill in late November, 2023, during the final stages of negotiations over what UAP language would survive in the final FY 2024 NDAA. The final FY 2024 NDAA language became public on December 6, 2003, passed the Senate on December 13, passed the House of Representatives on December 14, and was signed into law on December 22, 2023 (Public Law 118-31).

Notwithstanding the designation of the OUSD(I&S) document as reflecting "informal" views, the Department's advice was conveyed emphatically ("strongly urges consideration") and in granular detail. The 33-page document proposed an extensive rewrite of the Schumer-Rounds proposal, removing most of the central elements of the Senate-approved language. Moreover, the Department's advice was largely heeded: The final enacted language reflected the Department's basic viewpoint on major points, although not on every detail.

In a 70-minute interview conducted by Marik von Rennenkampff on July 17, 2024 (viewable on YouTube here; rough transcript posted here), Kirkpatrick spoke openly about the Pentagon's 2023 opposition to the UAPDA– the first time that he has addressed that subject in detail in public, as far as I am aware. In this interview, Kirkpatrick presented opposition by the Department of Defense and AARO to the 2023 UAPDA as decisive, telling von Rennenkampff, "We convinced Congress last year not to go down that road..." [italics added for emphasis]

[Under End Note No. 2 below, I have posted an eight-minute clip from the 70-minute interview. I encourage interested readers to use the links above to review the entire 70-minute exchange, which included discussion of well-known IR videos taken by Navy pilots, and also Kirkpatrick's remarks about a recent report issued by AARO regarding analysis of a metallic sample, in addition to the extended discussion of the UAP Disclosure Act.]

The OUSD(I&S) document that I am posting here today does not spell out AARO's substantive objections to the UAPDA, as Kirkpatrick did in the July 17 interview, but it essentially incorporates those objections through its extensive proposed revisions to the UAPDA, which the Senate had already approved. In an email exchange on July 23, 2024, Kirkpatrick said he could not confirm (but neither did he dispute) the authenticity of the OUSD(I&S) document, adding, "However, the document does represent many of the objections I tried to articulate to Marik [von Rennenkampff, in the July 17, 2024 interview]."

THE BIRTH AND DEMISE OF THE ORIGINAL UAP DISCLOSURE ACT

The UAPDA was originally unveiled, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as prime sponsor and Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) as lead co-sponsor, on July 14, 2023. Four other senators co-sponsored the measure. After some modifications, it was added to the FY 2024 NDAA as part of a list of agreed-on amendments, without floor debate or a separate vote. The Senate passed its FY 2024 NDAA, including the UAPDA, on July 27, 2023.

As passed by the Senate, the UAPDA would have created a President-nominated, Senate-confirmed UAP Records Review Board– a temporary federal agency with full-time professional staff and broad investigatory powers to search out, gather, and release any UAP-related material from throughout the government, with the President making final decisions regarding delay or release of material deemed especially sensitive. The bill was modeled in most respects on the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.

However, in conference committee with the House of Representatives, the UAPDA was greatly stripped down. The proposed independent review board was eliminated, as was most of the original language that had been widely read to imply that somewhere within the government's purview tangible evidence of nonhuman visitation was likely to be found. The final FY 2024 NDAA enacted on December 22, 2023 merely conferred on the National Archives and Records Administration a somewhat beefed-up mission to gather UAP-related documentation into a collection, but affording far more authority for agencies to shield material from public disclosure, especially during the first 25 years after creation of a document.

[For a more detailed description of the final enacted language, I refer the reader to my article "Quick guide to UAP-related provisions in the final FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act" (December 13, 2023).]

Throughout the period of July-December 2023, I reported extensively on the progress of the UAPDA, a measure that I supported. At the time, and since, I have repeatedly stated that the gutting of the bill was due not to any lobbying campaign by powerful defense contractors, as some imagined, but to opposition from the Pentagon/AARO, the objections of which were largely adopted by several of the very senior Republican lawmakers who were among the small group of lawmakers who resolved the final contentious issues on NDAA. [3]

The Pentagon's opposition to the Senate-passed UAPDA was far from a state secret even in late 2023. After the stripped-down final version emerged from behind closed doors in early December, even the New York Times reported that a "person familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to describe them noted that the Defense Department also had pushed back forcefully on wider measures." ("Congress Orders U.F.O. Records Released but Drops Bid for Broader Disclosure," by Kayla Guo, New York Times, December 14, 2023)

THE PENTAGON AND THE WHITE HOUSE

From the time that the UAPDA was unveiled on July 14, 2023, up until the issuance of the final NDAA conference report on December 6, 2023, certain social-media influencers claimed that the UAPDA had the backing of President Biden and his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. At no point did I encounter any actual evidence of such interest or support by high-level decisionmakers in the Executive Branch, and as months passed after the Senate's July 27 passage of the NDAA/UAPDA, it became quite clear that the Biden Administration was not doing anything to help enact the UAPDA.

I asked Kirkpatrick, "When you were the director of AARO, did you ever receive direction or heavy guidance from anybody in the White House, or the Executive Office of the President, or the National Security Council, or any other higher authority, indicating that you should soften or qualify your opposition to the UAPDA?"

Kirkpatrick replied:

The White House could have cared less about this issue. No one from the White House, EOP [Executive Office of the President], NSC [National Security Council], or any other 'higher authority' called me or my boss to put pressure on me to soften my position on the UAPDA. No one in Congress did either. (email, July 23, 2024)

As I was the first to report (on July 13, 2024), Senator Rounds re-introduced the UAPDA on July 11, 2024, as a possible amendment (SA 2610) to the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (S. 4638), which the Senate will take up later this year. As filed by Rounds on July 11, Senate Majority Leader Schumer was listed as co-sponsor (no longer the prime or controlling sponsor).

Marik von Rennenkampff led off his July 17 interview with Kirkpatrick by noting that reintroduction of the UAPDA, to which Kirkpatrick responded: "Last year we convinced Congress last year not to go down that road..." Von Rennenkampff soon followed up: "Did you say that you or AARO pushed back on the Schumer-Rounds amendment when it was proposed last year? That seems to be a big mystery as to how it was, shall we say, watered down? Other people say 'gutted.'"

Kirkpatrick answered:

So let's be clear about how the process works in the United States government. Every year the NDAA is put together by proposals from both the Senate and the House side. Okay? Those proposals are socialized with the Department. The Department then gets an opportunity to write a reclaima [request for reconsideration] that goes back to the Hill that says, "Hey, this is not a good idea for these reasons," or, "This would be better if it was written this way," or, "Yeah, we just can't really support this because of these resource constraints," or whatever the case may be. And that is true for every piece of the NDAA– it gets farmed back to us and we or the Department get to look at that.

As AARO, the pieces of legislation that were written about AARO come to us, and we are allowed to write our thoughts and disclaimers. And so we wrote exactly that. "Look, this is duplicative of language you gave us in '22 [the NDAA enacted in December 2022, which mandated a "historical report" to be produced by AARO]. Let us finish the thing that you told us to do the first time, before you write additional legislation."

In the von Rennenkampff interview, Kirkpatrick stressed his view that creation of a UAP Records Review Board would duplicate a mission already assigned to AARO. But he also maintained that there was no evidence that would justify creation of a new agency to hunt for inter-government knowledge or possession of nonhuman technology.

Kirkpatrick said:

I mean, look, let me be clear: We found no evidence of any of these allegations. None. And I had access to everything there was to have access to. I went up and briefed and testified [to members of Congress] just as recently as a couple of months ago, with the SAPCO director and the CAPCO director from ODNI [officials who oversee special access programs], and all of us have gone through everything that we have, everything that witnesses have come forward and said, "Hey, this is this hidden program." And it turns out none of them are those hidden programs. None of them. All of them have turned out to be other things that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial reverse engineering. And all of them have been reported to Congress....

And [in the UAPDA] they're telling the commercial industry they have to turn over all of this stuff. Well, the commercial industry – and I talked to all of the commercial industry, and they're scratching their heads and they don't know what they're talking about [in the bill language].

The November 2023 OUSD(I&S) "informal views" draft was not adopted by the House-Senate conferees in total. But the final enacted language appears to have been largely consistent with OUSD(I&S)/AARO's core objectives. The proposed independent review board, with its professional staff and broad powers, was deleted. The final law, like the OUSD(I&S)/AARO draft, gives Executive Branch agencies broad discretion to prevent disclosure of specific records, although the enacted version contains a limited presumption for disclosure 25 years after creation of a UAP-related document.

PENTAGON'S PROPOSED 2023 UAPDA REWRITE RETAINED AN EMINENT DOMAIN PROVISION

One noteworthy aspect of the OUSD(I&S) draft is the way it proposed to rewrite Section 9010, "Disclosure of Recovered Technologies of Unknown Origin and Biological Evidence of Non-human Intelligence." In the Senate-passed UAPDA, this section empowered the Review Board to exercise eminent domain (i.e., assert government ownership) "over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities..."

The OUSD(I&S) draft proposed substantial weakening of the provision by replacing mandatory language ("The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over...) with non-binding hortatory language ("It is the sense of Congress that the Federal Government should exercise eminent domain appropriately over...)– but OUSD(I&S)/AARO did not propose deleting the objects to which such eminent domain "should" apply: "any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities..."

Moreover, other OUSD(I&S) revisions would have required that any such exotic material be made available to AARO (rather than to an independent review board), and would have assigned to the President (rather than a review board) certain determinations regarding such material.

By email, I asked Sean Kirkpatrick, "What was the rationale for recommending retention of proposed new provisions of law that would have provided something of a legal foundation for AARO or other federal entities to assert control over hypothetical technologies of unknown origin or hypothetical evidence of non-human intelligence (at least, apparently, in such cases in which the President deemed it appropriate)? Was this a 'just in case' provision?"

Kirkpatrick replied:

At the time, the conspiracy frenzy was pushing this narrative of some prime contractor having this material, and there were these lingering allegations of AARO not having authorities, despite it being written into law previously. So a compromise was proposed to allow for the exercising of eminent domain under AARO’s authority to underscore that AARO could compel disclosure of anything, should anything exist. Since we know nothing exists, we didn’t feel it made our job harder, and felt this could close a gap in uninformed allegations. (email, July 23, 2024)

In the final enacted bill, however, the eminent domain section was entire absent. [4]

END NOTES

[1] In 2023 the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security was Ronald Moultrie, who resigned effective February 29, 2024. President Biden has nominated as his successor Tonya Wilkerson, who is currently Deputy Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Wilkerson's nomination is currently pending before the Senate Armed Services Committee. For further information on that matter, see my article "Who is Tonya P. Wilkerson, and what does it have to do with UFOs?," May 21, 2024.

[2] I have embedded here a nine-minute excerpt from the 70-minute interview of Sean Kirkpatrick, conducted on July 17, 2024, by Marik von Rennenkampff. This clip runs from about the 8-minute point to about the 17-minute point in the original video.

[3] In an exchange with Senator Rounds on the Senate floor on December 13, 2023, Senator Schumer said, "It is really an outrage that the House didn’t work with us on adopting our proposal for a review board, which, by definition, needs bipartisan consent. Now it means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades." However, Schumer said nothing on that occasion (or any other occasion of which I am aware) to indicate that he viewed the opposition to the UAPDA as originating in whole or part from corporate entities. Rather, he expressed criticism of unspecified actors within the Executive Branch: "The U.S. Government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people. That is wrong, and, additionally, it breeds mistrust. We have also been notified by multiple credible sources that information on UAPs has also been withheld from Congress, which, if true, is a violation of the laws requiring full notification to the legislative branch, especially as it relates to the four congressional leaders, Defense Committees, and the Intelligence Committee."

[4] All of the UAP-related language that was included in the final Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted December 22, 2023 (Public Law 118-31), is included in the PDF file embedded below. The UAP Records Collection provision, which is what survived of the original UAP Disclosure Act, appears on pages 568-575. Additional explanation is found in my December 13, 2023 article, "Quick guide to UAP-related provisions in the final FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act."