Chuck Schumer’s UFO Bill Is Not Messing Around About Aliens

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Last week, Senator Chuck Schumer proposed legislation that would declassify as many records as possible regarding the Pentagon’s experience with unidentified foreign objects. It was a step toward actual clarity from the government: This is the Senate majority leader after all, not just some crackpot backbencher in the House. But some UFO believers remained concerned that the bill, modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, would leave key documents in the dark, as the JFK bill has.

A deeper look at the bill, provided by The Hill, shows that Schumer is serious about getting the UFO info out there. While previous bills about UFOs have mostly dealt with transparency around internal reporting of national security matters, Schumer’s amendment to the annual Defense policy bill requires “any and all recovered [UFOs] and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities” to be handed over to a Senate-appointed review board. The board would then determine which evidence could be released to the public. While it’s possible that the panel would be able to withhold evidence from the public to protect national security information-collecting practices, it would also be required by law to “carry a presumption of immediate disclosure” to the public.

Over the past month, many lawmakers have expressed a new level of interest about the military’s seemingly endless encounters with UFOs. For that, you can thank whistleblower David Grusch, a former member of the Pentagon’s UFO research team who claims that intelligence officials are hiding evidence of alien technology from Congress. (Critically, Grusch has not seen this evidence himself.) Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley have both suggested that Grusch’s claims of a cover-up could have merit based on other testimony they’ve heard. Rubio — together with Republican senators Mike Rounds and Todd Young — has voiced support for Schumer’s bill, as have Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich.

House leadership appears to be jumping onboard, too. On Monday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News that he supported more transparency. “If we had found a UFO, I think the Department of Defense would tell us because they’d probably wanna request more money,” he said. “I’d love to see what other facts and information we have. I’m very supportive of letting the American public see what we have.”

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is planning a hearing on UFOs — officially referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs — for July 26:

State Department spokesman John Kirby also said that the administration is focused on the issue and looking for answers: “We wouldn’t have stood up an organization at the Pentagon to analyze and try to collect and coordinate the way these sightings are reported if we didn’t take it seriously,” Kirby said. “Of course we do.”