Congress Must Protect Journalists and Whistleblowers in the UFO Debate
Opinion
Written by Matt Ford - 9 September 2025
Today, the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, will hold a hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and whistleblower protections.
On November 28, 2023, I sat down for a late lunch at the top-floor bar of the Waldorf Astoria on the Las Vegas Strip.
I had just arrived from Los Angeles on a crisp winter day. The room was quiet, almost too quiet—the kind where every sound carries.
Sipping a soda water—I don’t drink alcohol—I was about to discover firsthand that not only are government whistleblowers targets of retaliation, but American journalists are too.
An uneasy feeling lingered in my mind. Only hours earlier, the Daily Mail had published the biggest story of my career—a bombshell implicating a little-known office deep inside the CIA.
That morning, during a call with my co-authors Josh Boswell of The Daily Mail and Chris Sharp of Liberation Times, a trusted confidant with deep ties to the intelligence community warned us the article would set off a “firestorm.”
The CIA, he said, would be desperate to uncover how we had obtained our information and to identify our sources.
That warning still echoed in my head as I opened my laptop at the Waldorf bar to catch up on the aftermath of our reporting.
Sharp had initiated the reporting, and I contributed contacts I had cultivated. Boswell carried the story to publication and added layers of detail based on corroboration from his sources.
For me, it was my first contribution to a major investigation.
Above, left to right: Josh Boswell, Matt Ford, Christopher Sharp
Together, we uncovered that the CIA’s Office of Global Access (OGA)—a little-known unit inside the Directorate of Science and Technology—was allegedly key to the nation’s efforts to track and recover crashed craft of non-human origin.
Created in 2003, the OGA’s mission encompasses retrieving lost nuclear weapons, downed satellites, and adversary technology across the globe.
But multiple sources told us it has also played a central role in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) recoveries.
Sometimes operations involve elite units from Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), composed of tier-one operators like Delta Force.
In roughly half the cases, though, missions are handed off to private aerospace contractors—moving sensitive programs out of military channels and beyond Congressional oversight.
Even the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted he was denied access to such programs. If a Majority Leader can’t get answers, who can?
About thirty minutes after I’d entered the bar, a woman in her 30s slid into a seat a couple of chairs away. She struck up a conversation with me, casual at first, but I cut it short and went back to my laptop.
Roughly twenty minutes later, a man in his late 40s wearing a button-down Hawaiian shirt walked in and sat directly across from me. Soon after, the woman shifted over to his side and began chatting with him. That’s when I heard him say the word that froze me in place: “UFO.”
I closed my laptop, leaned in and said:
“Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing you talking about UFOs. Did you read the article that came out in the Daily Mail this morning?”
He locked eyes with me and replied sharply:
“No, but the article about Lue Elizondo being a liar sure sticks out in my head.”
Lue Elizondo is the former Pentagon official who helped expose the government’s secret UFO program in the landmark New York Times article of 2017.
That comment stopped me cold—not because of what was said, but because it had nothing to do with our reporting. Our article never mentioned Lue Elizondo. Hearing his name in that moment, from a stranger in a nearly empty bar, felt rehearsed—like a line planted to rattle me.
My stomach sank. I immediately suspected I was dealing with an intelligence operative, recalling the warning I had received just that morning about surveillance and honey-traps.
I messaged whistleblower David Grusch, whom I had known for some time, for guidance. His response was blunt: don’t engage.
But after fifteen anxious minutes, I ignored Grusch’s advice and asked the man again if he had seen the article. This time he stood up and, with a fumbling movement, held his phone out in front of him—making it obvious he was photographing me.
As he did, he repeated the exact same phrase about Elizondo, word for word, like an actor reading from a script.
Then he turned and walked out.
That moment tipped their hand. Only my family and the four people on that morning’s call knew I was travelling to Las Vegas—and none of them knew the hotel where I was staying.
The encounter made clear it was about me, not the story. It was the first time I suspected I was under technical surveillance as an American journalist.
For the first time in my career, I feared for my safety.
That is why Tuesday’s hearing matters. Because harassment of journalists and whistleblowers isn’t just about intimidation—it’s about democracy itself. Oversight cannot function when the people bringing forward information are punished for doing so.
If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.
Congress must not only investigate the truth about UAP programs but also confront how they are deliberately structured to avoid oversight.
Delegating recoveries to private contractors doesn’t just hide secrets—it undermines the constitutional role of Congress itself.
Lawmakers must defend the democratic foundations that make accountability possible: transparency, whistleblower protections, and a free press.
If Congress is serious about transparency, it should subpoena Douglas Wolfe, the former head of the Office of Global Access, and Glenn Gaffney, the former head of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology—both men, multiple sources told me, were deeply involved in the UAP crash-retrieval program.
And they must also reckon with something even darker: the spectre of surveillance against American journalists.
When operatives confront reporters with rehearsed lines, it isn’t coincidence—it’s intimidation.
Was I swept up in a FISA warrant, or was I subjected to illegal technical surveillance? Either way, this is not how a democracy survives.
Matt Ford is the host of The Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, a program covering national security, government accountability, and the UAP issue. He co-authored a recent Daily Mail investigation into the CIA’s secret UAP crash retrieval program. Ford continues to advocate for transparency and whistleblower protections in the UAP debate.
