Who Owns the Unknown? When private hands hold technology not of this Earth, who decides what happens next? The UAPDA has an answer.
Photo by Chris Grafton on Unsplash
Opinion
Written by Kevin Wright - 10 August 2025
Imagine this: A private landowner discovers something buried deep beneath the surface of their property. It’s not oil, gold, or a rare fossil, but something entirely foreign. A piece of machinery, perhaps. Advanced. Intact. Entirely unexplainable. It appears to be manufactured, but not by any known earthly process. It does not match the signatures of Russian, Chinese, or even American technology. It is exotic, inexplicable, and possibly not of human origin at all.
What happens next? Does the landowner get to keep it? Auction it to the highest bidder? Lease it to a defense contractor or a foreign state? Does the government step in, invoke national security, and confiscate the technology of unknown origin, without due process or compensation, never to be seen again?
This scenario is no mere thought experiment. The U.S. Senate has now, for the third time, introduced the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act (UAPDA), legislation designed to pierce through 80 years of secrecy, disinformation, and scientific suppression surrounding the subject of UAP, or UFOs. One of its most vital and controversial provisions is its explicit affirmation of the applicability of the right of eminent domain.
Opponents of the UAPDA have zeroed in on this provision. They argue it threatens property rights and creates a dangerous precedent for federal overreach. But these objections collapse under scrutiny. In truth, the eminent domain clause is the linchpin that makes lawful UAP disclosure possible. Without it, we risk continuing a shadow system of secret seizures, constitutional violations, and scientific stagnation.
Let’s be clear: eminent domain is not a novel or unchecked power of our local, state, and federal governments. Instead, it is a deeply rooted legal principle in American constitutional law. What the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment provides is not the denial of that right, but a granting of that right and its regulation through due process, and which goes on to assert one of the required aspects of due process is the taking of property solely for public use with just compensation. The UAPDA need not define “just compensation.” The legal requirement for fair compensation in any lawful taking under eminent domain is already firmly established in precedent and practice. Importantly, the exercise of eminent domain can be contested in court, providing a clear check on government power, unlike covert seizures under the guise of national security, which offer no such judicial review or recourse. The UAPDA merely renders a specific process already governed by over a century of constitutional law.
In that spirit, the UAPDA’s eminent domain provision explicitly enables the proposed UAP Records Review Board (URRB) to exercise eminent domain lawfully over recovered technologies of unknown origin (TUO) with no known means of human manufacture; biological evidence of non-human intelligence or other media associated with TUO/NHI technology or biology. It does not allow for arbitrary or capricious confiscation of any item that is lawfully the property of any non-government person or entity. The provision is constitutionally sound.
Retired Army Colonel Karl Nell, in a recent paper for the Sol Foundation, offered eight compelling reasons why the UAPDA’s eminent domain provision is essential to any lawful disclosure process. These include that the provisions would: (1) ensure the URRB under congressional oversight cannot be legally denied access to recovered TUO; (2) establish ownership precedent for non-human property; (3) provide uniform protective measures; (4) consolidate and centralize all available evidence for systematic study; (5) enable a deterministic and expeditious disclosure pathway; (6) afford transparency to the public; (7) restore equity for the greatest public good not motivated by commercial interests; and (8) facilitate safe introduction of derived technologies into the streams of commerce.
Above: Retired Army Colonel Karl Nell
Nell’s point about oversight is critical because the issue extends beyond a lone landowner. There are credible allegations, supported by sworn whistleblower testimony before Congress, that elements within the government may have previously transferred recovered TUO to private aerospace defense contractors. These secret transfers appear to have possibly been deliberately structured to avoid congressional oversight, placing potentially paradigm-shifting materials into the hands of corporations bound not by law, but by classified contracts and compartmentalized secrecy. Without eminent domain, Nell argues, there is no statutory pathway to recover materials that may have been improperly and secretly transferred to select private entities, outside the constitutional system of checks and balances, potentially violating antitrust laws and federal acquisition regulations.
This is why the eminent domain provision of the UAPDA matters. It doesn’t just protect against future concealment; it provides a constitutional mechanism to reclaim what was unlawfully sequestered in the past. It gives the independent URRB the authority to access and assess these materials according to the requirements of due process, not secrecy. It allows for structured compensation, scientific transparency, and public accountability.
Consider the alternative. Without the right of our government to exercise its Constitutional authority to assert eminent domain, there is no legal mechanism to prevent private landowners or private aerospace defense contractors from refusing access to materials of non-human origin. Owners, or custodians, could exploit them for profit, suppress their existence, or transfer them to hostile actors. No statute currently governs what happens if such an object is discovered. In a vacuum, corporations or individuals, knowingly or unknowingly, could come to possess extremely hazardous, weaponizable technologies, and with them these actors could destabilize markets or threaten international security, perhaps by accident. That legal void invites unilateral government action under the banner of national security, without due process or compensation. It’s the UAPDA that offers protection: a constitutional process with oversight, transparency, and just compensation.
To oppose this provision is not to defend liberty; rather, it is to entrench secrecy, protect monopolization, and perpetuate the very system the UAPDA seeks to reform. The UAPDA, with its independent URRB, controlled disclosure campaign, and eminent domain clause, is the most constitutional, rational, and just approach to resolving the UAP secrecy crisis.
If something truly is buried, on someone’s land, locked in a vault, or hidden under decades of deception, it’s time we made sure it’s handled not by profiteers or partisans, but by a lawful process accountable to the people. That is what the UAPDA offers, and that is why it should become law, including its eminent domain provisions.
