US Congress passes stripped-down measure to release UFO records

If the truth about UFOs is out there, the American government doesn’t want you to see it yet.

Just months after US space agency Nasa appointed a research director of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and promised more transparency about what it knows, the US Congress has acted to throttle the flow of information that ultimately reaches the public.

Measures to create a presidential commission to review UFO records, and to order the Department of Defense to declassify certain “records relating to publicly known sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)”, were stripped from the sweeping defense policy bill that passed Congress on Thursday with bipartisan support.

What was left were provisions ordering the National Archives to collect reports of “unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin and nonhuman intelligence”, but giving various government departments broad authority to keep the records secret.

It follows claims from whistleblowers during an eye-raising congressional hearing this summer that the government knew more than it was letting on about its work on UFOs, and had evidence of “non-human beings” gleaned from a top secret decades-long program.

“We got totally ripped off. We got completely hosed. They stripped out every part,” the Tennessee Republican congressman Tim Burchett said of the bill, according to the New York Times.

Burchett, who co-chaired the House panel in July and had promised to “uncover the cover-up”, introduced the measure that would have required the defense department to make public records that “do not reveal sources, methods or otherwise compromise the national security of the US”.

He said the intelligence community had “rallied” to kill his proposal, and in other comments on Thursday blasted House colleagues as “gutless” because “they won’t stand up” for legislation before them.

Separately, the Times cited an anonymous person with knowledge of discussions over the defense bill, who said defense department officials had “pushed back forcefully” on the moves towards openness.

The Guardian has reached out the the defense department for comment.

A report in the Hill published earlier this month said a “powerful” group of Republican lawmakers, including the House armed services committee chair, Mike Rogers, and intelligence committee chair, Mike Turner, were working to block the measure that would have created a presidential commission to review and declassify government UFO records.

The Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “an outrage” that the House had refused to incorporate the proposal, which, according to the Times, was a quid pro quo for the Senate rejecting Burchett’s offering, resulting in a simplified compromise bill containing neither that passed both chambers.

“It means that declassification of UAP records will be largely up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades,” Schumer said.

He did, however, call the bill as passed “a strong foundation for more action in the future”.

The action stalls what had appeared to be a growing willingness by US officials to answer calls for greater transparency over UFOs.

With July’s congressional hearing, and Nasa’s appointment of the space agency’s former Pentagon liaison, Mark McInerny, as its first director of UAP research, the government had slowly begun to embrace the idea of information sharing and public engagement after years of secrecy.

Last month the Pentagon launched an online reporting tool for current or former federal employees to impart knowledge of “US government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945”, with the promise of a public portal to come.

And one of the key recommendations of Nasa’s year-long independent study by experts was to encourage a global army of citizen skywatchers to help its research into the phenomena, as well as harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning as new tools to help evaluate and understand data that comes in.

Nasa’s goal is to “shift the conversation about UAP from sensationalism to science”, its administrator, Bill Nelson, told reporters at the time.

“There is a mindset. We all are entertained by Indiana Jones in the Amazon, and finding the Crystal Skull, so there’s a lot of folklore out there. That’s why we entered the arena, to try to get into this from a science point of view.”

Nelson, however, pushed back on the suggestion Nasa had withheld evidence about extraterrestrial life, promising the agency would always be truthful and open about all of its findings.