The 2023 UAP Disclosure Act — the most expansive US legislative proposal to date

In July 2023, US Senators Chuck Schumer (Senate Majority Leader at the time) and Mike Rounds introduced as an amendment to the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 — the most expansive legislative proposal on US government UAP-related disclosure introduced in the modern legislative record. The Act in its original form would have established a Records Review Board with substantial declassification authority and a presumption of disclosure for UAP-related government records, modelled in important respects on the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The amendment was substantially curtailed during the conference process before the FY2024 NDAA was enacted, but its introduction marked a substantive escalation in congressional engagement with the topic.

The Act's principal provisions

The Schumer-Rounds amendment's principal provisions included the establishment of a presidentially appointed Review Board with the authority to require federal agencies to identify, locate, and assess UAP-related records for public release; a statutory presumption of disclosure subject to defined and narrow exceptions; eminent-domain authority over privately held UAP-related materials of US government origin; and a sequenced disclosure schedule with defined deadlines.

The most institutionally significant feature was the framing of the presumption. By default, UAP-related government records would be required to be released; the burden would fall on the agency seeking to withhold a record to demonstrate that the record fell within a defined exception. This is a substantial inversion of the default posture under existing classification frameworks.

The legislative passage

The Act in its introduced form did not become law. The version included in the enacted FY2024 NDAA was substantially curtailed: the Records Review Board provisions were significantly reduced, the eminent-domain authority was removed, and the disclosure-presumption framework was attenuated. The enacted provisions did, however, include certain substantive elements — particularly relating to AARO's authority to receive information from individuals previously bound by non-disclosure agreements — that constitute meaningful incremental institutional change.

Senator Schumer and Senator Rounds, together with other supporting Senators, have publicly stated their intention to continue pursuing the broader framework in subsequent legislative cycles. The 2023 amendment is therefore best understood as the opening move in a multi-cycle legislative project rather than as a self-contained event.

Why the proposal matters

The Schumer-Rounds amendment's institutional significance is twofold. First, it represented the highest-ranking US legislative effort to date to systematically reorder the default disclosure framework for UAP-related government records. Second, it explicitly contemplated the possibility that the federal government holds records bearing on the underlying nature of the phenomenon — a posture that the amendment's bipartisan congressional sponsorship made unusually difficult to dismiss as a fringe legislative concern.

For comparison with the historical US institutional disclosure pattern (Project Blue Book closure, FBI Vault releases, AARO's contemporary public posture) and with international disclosure frameworks, see the SkyLens UAP files page.

Editorial note: Independent SkyLens analysis of the contemporary US UAP institutional framework (AARO, UAPTF, AATIP) and the public documents and testimony associated with it. The case index linking related releases is on the SkyLens UAP files page.