Opinion
Written by Kevin Wright - 6 November 2026
Executive orders fade. Only the UAP Disclosure Act, kept in the final defense bill before the window closes in December, can make disclosure permanent.
There are rare moments when a nation decides, in the span of a few weeks, whether a truth kept from its people for generations finally sees the light of day.
We are witnessing one of those moments. The door is open. It will not stay open for long, and history will remember who chose to walk through it and who let it swing shut.
For the first time in eighty years, a sitting president ordered the government to stop hiding what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
Through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), the Trump administration has released more than 155,000 pages of records to the public across seven tranches, along with videos, photographs, and audio files.
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has driven the effort from inside the White House. Harvard’s Avi Loeb has lent it scientific seriousness.
After decades of ridicule, we are finally talking about records, not rumors. That is real, and the president deserves credit for it.
But credit is not the same as completion, and the work is now in danger of stopping well short of the finish line.
The releases, as striking as they are to many, have not settled any questions, and even those closest to the issue say so.
Ryan Graves, the former Navy pilot whose sworn testimony helped drag this subject into the daylight in July 2023, now sits on the very UAP Science Advisory Council the administration formed under Harvard’s Loeb to help resolve the mystery.
And even Graves has called what has been released so far unsatisfactory: short infrared clips rather than the high-grade sensor data that would allow proper scientific analysis of these encounters.
When one of the administration’s own advisors says the disclosure effort falls short, the problem is not the president’s intent or a missing directive from him. It is a missing law with the power to enforce it.
The president has called for openness. The departments and agencies that hold the files have answered with something short of it: a release of what they choose, at the pace they choose, while keeping back what they would rather not surrender.
That is not disclosure. It is the shadow of it. And a shadow is precisely what the people who have guarded these secrets for decades are counting on.
In July, the House did its part. It adopted Representative Eric Burlison’s (R-MO) UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027.
The bill is modeled on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which did not simply release a handful of documents.
It built a system. It created a permanent collection of the assassination records at the National Archives, established an independent review board empowered to hunt down documents and force agencies to justify every secret they wished to keep, set a legal presumption that the records would be made public, and fixed a deadline for opening them.
Burlison’s bill applies that same architecture to the UAP question, extending the duty of disclosure even to the private contractors who have sheltered behind government secrecy for years.
That bill now sits in conference, where the House and Senate will reconcile their versions and write the final text, likely by mid-December.
Here is what should alarm anyone who cares about this issue. For three years running, UAP transparency language was quietly stymied, stripped, or killed.
In 2023, the last time the UAPDA went to conference, it was gutted in the same room, by the same committees (and many of the same members) who hold the disclosure legislation in their hands.
The same fate waits again unless the president and his team make it unmistakably clear, in public and in private, that Burlison’s language stays in the final bill.
Some in the administration will resist. They will argue that the president already controls disclosure, so why hand authority to an independent board and tie his own hands.
It is a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer.
The answer is that the president’s control is largely an illusion. He has signed the directives. He has ordered the releases. And still the pace crawls, the best material stays buried, and the questions that matter most go unanswered.
Why?
Because the so-called Legacy Program, the alleged apparatus of crash retrieval and reverse engineering that former intelligence officer David Grusch described under oath to Congress, is reportedly run out of the very departments and agencies the president commands.
Asking those offices to surrender their own deepest secrets is asking the fox to guard the henhouse. An executive order without an enforcement mechanism is a wish written on White House letterhead. The people slow-walking the president are not his partners in this effort. They are the obstacle to it.
So, understand what this UAPDA amendment to the NDAA actually proposes to do.
It does not take the files out of the president’s hands. It takes them out of the hands of the people inside his own administration who are defying him.
The independent review board is not the president’s rival. It is the hammer his directives have never had, a body armed with subpoena power and a statutory clock that can finally force the holdouts to produce. Something will have to compel them, kicking and screaming.
For anyone worried about the president surrendering his authority, read the bill.
He nominates all nine civilian members of the review board; then the Senate confirms them, so the body that oversees disclosure is staffed by his choices, not imposed on him.
The bill also preserves the executive’s authority to postpone the release of genuinely sensitive material on national security grounds. The president keeps the brake, but gains the engine.
There is more.
A law carries a credibility that no executive action can.
Right now, disclosure is coordinated by a UAP Governance Board, an interagency body that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) established with the FBI and the Department of War.
But a coordinating board can only release what the agencies beneath it are willing to surface, and if the allegations hold, the most sensitive records are buried so deep, inside compartmented programs and the files of private contractors, that they may lie beyond the reach of the board itself.
Even the scientists the administration recruited under Loeb have been held to material already released, and when Loeb’s council asked the agencies for more, the custodians refused, citing national security.
A release administered by the departments and agencies, some of the alleged gatekeepers, from beginning to end, will always invite the same question: what did they choose not to show us?
A disclosure compelled by an independent board, under the law, retires that question for good. The president does not weaken his hand by accepting outside verification. He is the only one who can give this effort the legitimacy that silences the skeptics.
Then there is the matter of legacy, and here the choice could not be starker.
Executive power is borrowed, and it is temporary.
Everything this administration has built through its own authority can be undone by the next one, quietly, with a single signature, on the first afternoon of a new term in January 2029.
Only a statute endures. The Kennedy records law outlived the president who signed it precisely because it was law and not preference.
If President Trump wants disclosure to stand as his legacy rather than a footnote the next administration erases, there is exactly one way to secure it: carve it into the permanent law of the United States.
And let no one pretend that doing nothing keeps the president in control.
On January 3, the gavels change hands. A new majority in the U.S. House and Senate will control the committees, the subpoenas, and the investigations.
If this issue is left open, the president loses command of it. He hands the files, the framing, and the credit to his opposition.
The real choice is not whether to keep control or give it up. It is whether to lock disclosure in now, on cooperative terms, with his name on it, or to watch it pass to the Party that just defeated him. Inaction does not protect his control; rather, it forfeits it.
Consider, too, what the country just said out loud.
Only days ago, Americans across the political spectrum sent an unmistakable message that they are finished with a government that hides the truth and shields its own. The right to know is not a partisan slogan. It is the oldest promise a free people makes to itself, the promise that those who govern will answer to those they govern.
A president who meets that demand by joining hands with Congress to make transparency permanent is not on the defensive.
No, he is out in front, leading the parade that the public is already marching in.
The administration also ignores a hard political calculation at its peril. Until now, this fight has been genuinely bipartisan, which is the only reason it has gotten this far. The moment the new majority takes the gavels, the temptation will be enormous to turn transparency into a cudgel; to convert an honest search for the truth into one more investigation aimed squarely at this president and the agencies beneath him.
The White House is going to face a wall of those battles in the next two years. Settling UAP disclosure now, through a neutral process written into law while it can still be done on friendly terms, takes that weapon off the table before it can be picked up. It converts an open-ended partisan probe into an orderly process governed by rules that both parties already support. One less front to defend and one lasting victory to claim.
This is not a fringe demand. In a CBS News/YouGov poll this summer, 84 percent of Americans, across both parties, said the government knows more about UFOs than it is telling. Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree on little right now. They agree on this.
This is a direct appeal to the president, to Stephen Miller, and to every member of Congress who has carried this fight on their shoulders.
Do not let the conference committee do in the dark what it did in 2023.
The men and women who hold the pen in that room have names, and they should hear from the White House this week.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) in the House. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) in the Senate.
House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), who steer the defense bill.
House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) and Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton (R-AR), who guard the classification lines.
Tell them plainly that Representative Burlison’s UAP Disclosure Act stays in the final NDAA. Not a hollowed-out version. Not another commission to study the question for another year. Not another shelf at the National Archives. The real thing, with the review board, subpoena power, and the teeth intact.
We have waited eighty years.
Generations of pilots, scientists, and ordinary witnesses were told to stay quiet, that it was nothing, that they had not seen what they plainly saw, and allegedly threatened, harassed, intimidated, and worse.
Remember: for the first time in this republic’s history, a president chose to pull back the curtain on this enigma. The only question left is whether he finishes the job while the power to finish it is still his, or whether he lets it pass to the people who just defeated him and watches them take the credit. Or worse, the buck gets passed to another generation to fight for what is theirs, the right to know.
A handful of officials and professional staff will write the final conference report in a non-public room over the next few weeks, carrying out their respective Chairman’s and Ranking Member’s directives.
This is where the final decision on the UAPDA will be made.
Trump does not need to sign anything new or issue another order.
Trump needs only to make his will plain to those with waning influence and power in Congress, including the leaders of both chambers: the UAP Disclosure Act stays in the NDAA, intact.
That leverage is very real, but it expires the moment the gavels change hands in January.
He should use it now and make the people’s right to know the law of the land.
