A 30-day clock set running inside the American intelligence community expires this weekend. On July 31, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas signed preliminary guidance instructing every element of the intelligence community to coordinate with his office and name a designee to the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the task force known as PURSUE. The memorandum also told agencies to inform their workforces that previous or existing nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking to the President or his designees are no longer in force, and that anyone holding information on unidentified anomalous phenomena should bring it to the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or an authorized PURSUE representative. Detailed reporting procedures were promised to intelligence components within the same 30 days.
The guidance followed a directive from President Trump in late July ordering the Department of War and the intelligence community to lift secrecy obligations from employees and contractors who believe they know something. Administration officials framed it as removing an obstacle rather than announcing a finding, saying that people who believe they have information had expressed reluctance to come forward and that the government was eliminating that source of reluctance. The full text of the directive has not been released, which leaves the boundaries of the waiver — who qualifies, and which categories of information it reaches — unsettled even as agencies begin naming designees. PURSUE has released records in tranches through the year, the fourth of them on July 10.
Congress moved in the same weeks. On July 22 the House adopted Representative Eric Burlison's UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2027, restoring an eminent domain provision that had been stripped out during conference negotiations on earlier versions. The amendment would direct the federal government to take possession of recovered technologies of unknown origin and any biological evidence of non-human intelligence, and would create an independent review board empowered to advise the President on declassifying and releasing UAP records. It is an amendment to a bill that has not yet cleared the Senate, and the eminent domain language is the piece most likely to be fought over.
What none of this activity has produced is evidence. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's latest annual report, released in July, logged 319 new reports between June 2024 and May 2025 and resolved 114 of them, attributing the closed cases to balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft, drones, a rocket launch and a jet pack. Total holdings stood at 1,870 cases. The office said that none of the resolved cases indicate advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough technologies, and that a shortage of timely, actionable sensor data continues to constrain its ability to close the rest. Its single maritime case, reported by Navy assets off the Virginia coast and describing roughly 100 airborne objects and two likely uncrewed surface systems, remains under investigation.
