Opinion | It’s Time for U.F.O. Whistle-blowers to Show Their Cards

Last week on the Senate floor two senators rose to express disappointment with the House of Representatives. This was by itself routine enough, but the senators, Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and the New York Democrat and majority leader, Chuck Schumer weren’t complaining about Ukraine funding or border policy. They were complaining that the House was impeding transparency on U.F.O.s.

The back story, for those who don’t follow every twist of what we’re now supposed to call the unidentified anomalous phenomenon (U.A.P.) debate, is that the National Defense Authorization Act, on Schumer’s instigation, included provisions to establish a presidential commission with the power to declassify a broad swath of records related to U.A.P.s, modeled on the panel that did similar work with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

But this disclosure effort was watered down by some House Republicans, making it more of a collection effort by the National Archives, with a weaker mandate to declassify and release.

As ever with this issue, the Senate discussion of these developments veered from the banal to the superweird. One moment, Rounds was talking as if the whole legislative effort was just an attempt to “dispel myths and misinformation about U.A.P.s” — sunlight as a disinfectant for conspiracy theories. The next, he was complaining that the House had stripped out a requirement that the government reclaim “any recovered U.A.P. material or biological remains that may have been provided to private entities in the past and thereby hidden from Congress and the American people.” Which is an odd thing to emphasize if you don’t think there’s a possibility that, say, Lockheed Martin is keeping something strange inside its vaults.