On July 26, 2023, something happened in Washington that would have seemed impossible ten years earlier. A decorated intelligence officer named David Grusch sat before the House Oversight Committee and testified, under oath and subject to federal perjury statutes, that the United States government was in possession of non-human craft and biological material of non-human origin.

The room did not erupt in laughter. The committee did not dissolve into chaos. Members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — leaned forward in their seats and asked follow-up questions.

That moment did not emerge from nowhere. It was the product of six years of deliberate, bipartisan legislative work — a story that begins not in a hearing room but in a journalist's notebook, moves through the offices of Senate intelligence staffers, and winds through one of the most unusual coalitions in recent congressional history.

This is Part II of The UFO Times' Anatomy of Disclosure series. If Part I asked how the stigma ended, Part II asks the next question: once the subject was legitimate, who in Congress picked it up — and what did they do with it?

The Outsider Who Opened the Door

The bridge between the 2017 media moment and congressional action was an unlikely one: a rock musician and a former Pentagon official.

Tom DeLonge, founder of the band Blink-182, had spent years cultivating contacts within the defense and intelligence communities. In 2017, he launched the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science — a public benefit corporation whose stated mission was to advance research on UAP and build a public case for transparency. The organization included as founding members several former senior officials: Luis Elizondo, who had run AATIP from within the Pentagon; Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and former CIA officer James Lacatski.

The significance of these names cannot be overstated. These were not conspiracy theorists. They were credentialed insiders who had spent careers operating in the most sensitive parts of the national security apparatus. Their public statements — combined with the declassified videos they facilitated releasing to the press — gave congressional staffers a legitimate entry point into the subject. When senators started asking questions, they had people with clearances and institutional credibility to answer them.

Mellon in particular became an effective back-channel between the UAP research community and the Senate. He spent months in 2019 and 2020 walking Senate Intelligence Committee staffers through the classified briefings and documented encounters that the public did not yet know about. His goal was simple: get Congress to mandate what the Pentagon had refused to do voluntarily.

The Rubio Amendment: Congress Forces the Pentagon's Hand

The first major legislative action came in June 2020.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, inserted a provision into the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 that directed the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to submit an unclassified report on UAP within 180 days.

The provision was extraordinary in several respects. It was bipartisan — passed without controversy through a committee not known for agreement. It was specific — asking for data on UAP in or near military installations, and on any efforts by foreign adversaries to replicate observed technologies. And it came with teeth: the report had to be unclassified, meaning it could not simply be buried in the classification system the way previous UAP investigations had been.

The Pentagon had spent years resisting oversight on this subject. With a single amendment, the Senate Intelligence Committee changed that calculation.

"We have things flying over our military bases and we don't know what they are, and we need to find out." — Senator Marco Rubio, 2020

Crucially, Rubio framed the issue — as legislators would consistently do throughout this period — not as a question about extraterrestrial life, but as a matter of national security. Were these objects Russian or Chinese drones conducting surveillance on sensitive installations? Were they the product of a classified American program that the Intelligence Committee didn't know about? Either answer was alarming. The frame kept the conversation firmly in the realm of bipartisan concern.

The 2021 ODNI Report: The Government Admits It Doesn't Know

The mandated report landed on June 25, 2021.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was nine pages long — and remarkable for what it did not claim as much as for what it did. It analyzed 144 UAP reports submitted by U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021. Of those 144 incidents, exactly one was conclusively identified (a deflating large balloon). The remaining 143 remained unexplained.

The report acknowledged five possible explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, classified U.S. government programs, foreign adversary systems, and — listed last, but listed — "other." That final category was defined as incidents with "unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics" that might require "breakthrough aerospace technology" to produce.

The U.S. government, in an unclassified document, had just acknowledged that some of what its military pilots were observing might not have a conventional explanation.

Congress read the report and accelerated its work.

Building the Architecture: AARO and the NDAA

The 2021 report identified a core problem: UAP data was fragmented across multiple military branches and intelligence agencies, with no central authority to collect, analyze, and act on it.

Congress moved to fix that in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022, which mandated the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). AARO was given authority that no previous UAP body had held: a mandate that cut across all military branches and intelligence agencies, a requirement to brief Congress regularly, and explicit responsibility for investigating not just aerial phenomena but underwater and transmedium objects as well.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was the driving legislative force behind AARO's creation and its scope. Her amendment to the NDAA was notable for its bipartisan support and for the specific protections it built in for military and intelligence witnesses. It established a secure mechanism through which cleared personnel could report UAP encounters without fear of retaliation — an institutional acknowledgment that the stigma of Part I had not fully lifted at the operational level.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, played a parallel role — ensuring that AARO received regular oversight scrutiny and that its findings were not allowed to disappear back into the classification system.

The First Public Hearing in Nearly Six Decades

In May 2022, the House Intelligence Committee's Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee held the first public congressional hearing on UFOs since 1966.

The witnesses were Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. Neither said anything that would have satisfied those looking for dramatic revelations. But that was not the point. The point was that the hearing happened at all — that two senior Pentagon officials sat before a congressional subcommittee and answered questions about UAP on the record, in public, without dismissing the subject or the questioners.

Representatives André Carson (Democrat, Indiana) and Mike Gallagher (Republican, Wisconsin) both emerged from that hearing as consistent advocates for continued oversight. Gallagher in particular pressed witnesses on whether any UAP exhibited characteristics that "could not be explained by current U.S. technology or could not be explained by any foreign adversary technology." The answer, diplomatically worded, was that some cases remained in exactly that category.

July 26, 2023: The Day the Hearing Changed Everything

If there is a single date that marks the culmination of Congress's entry into the UAP debate, it is July 26, 2023.

The House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee called three witnesses: David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had served as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's representative to AARO; Ryan Graves, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot who had reported regular UAP encounters during training operations off the Virginia coast beginning in 2014; and David Fravor, the former Navy commander who had observed the now-famous "Tic Tac" object during a training exercise in November 2004 and whose encounter became one of the most studied UAP cases in the unclassified record.

Each testified under oath.

Grusch's testimony was the most consequential. He stated that he had spoken with officials who claimed firsthand knowledge of a multi-decade U.S. government program to collect and attempt to reverse-engineer non-human craft. He named no specific locations and presented no documents — he noted that the classified details had been submitted through protected whistleblower channels. But he stated flatly that he believed the program existed, that people had been harmed for disclosing information about it, and that Congress was being denied access to information it was legally entitled to receive.

Graves described UAP as an "open secret" among naval aviators — objects encountered so regularly during training operations that pilots had normalized them while simultaneously having no mechanism to officially report them without consequences.

Fravor recounted the 2004 Tic Tac encounter in detail: an object approximately 40 feet long with no visible wings, rotors, or exhaust plume that appeared to respond to his aircraft's approach before accelerating away at a speed his instruments could not track. The object had appeared on the USS Princeton's radar for two weeks before his encounter and had been corroborated by multiple sensors and multiple witnesses.

The hearing ran for nearly three hours. Members of both parties asked substantive follow-up questions. Not a single member of the committee dismissed the witnesses or the subject.

The UAP Disclosure Act and Its Limits

Buoyed by the July hearing, Senators Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer introduced the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 — modeled in part on the JFK Records Act — which would have established a UAP Records Review Board with the authority to compel declassification of government documents related to the phenomenon.

The act passed the Senate as part of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2024. It did not survive the House.

In December 2023, the disclosure provisions were stripped from the final version of the bill after resistance from the House Armed Services Committee and significant opposition from the executive branch. The final NDAA retained some reporting requirements for AARO but removed the independent review board with declassification authority.

The episode illustrated a tension that has defined congressional UAP work from the beginning: the legislative branch's appetite for transparency consistently runs ahead of the executive branch's willingness to provide it. Oversight committees pass requirements; agencies find ways to comply minimally. Hearings create public pressure; classification systems absorb the impact.

What Congress had achieved by 2024, however, was not nothing. It had established a permanent office with DoD-wide authority. It had held public hearings on the record. It had created secure reporting channels for witnesses with firsthand knowledge. It had put senior defense officials on the record answering questions about UAP in public. And it had demonstrated, repeatedly and in both chambers, that the subject commanded bipartisan support in a legislative environment where almost nothing else did.

Why the Bipartisan Coalition Held

One of the most striking features of Congress's UAP engagement — and one that sets it apart from almost every other policy debate in Washington — is its durability across party lines.

Rubio (Republican), Gillibrand (Democrat), Warner (Democrat), Schumer (Democrat), Gallagher (Republican), Carson (Democrat), Tim Burchett (Republican), Anna Paulina Luna (Republican), Jared Moskowitz (Democrat) — the list of consistent UAP advocates in Congress is genuinely bipartisan in a way that is rare in contemporary American politics.

Several factors explain this.

First, the national security frame. Acknowledging that unknown objects regularly penetrate military airspace does not require any position on their ultimate origin. It simply requires acknowledging a security failure — something both parties have an interest in addressing.

Second, constituent interest. UAP sightings are not geographically or demographically clustered. Pilots, sailors, and civilians who report anomalous encounters come from every congressional district and every ideological background. Representatives who engage with the issue are not serving a narrow constituency.

Third — and perhaps most importantly — the information asymmetry. Members of both parties who have received classified briefings on UAP have emerged from those briefings visibly changed. They do not say what they were told. But they return to their oversight work with a consistency and urgency that suggests the classified picture is more compelling than the public one.

What This Phase of the Story Established

When Congress entered the UAP debate, it changed the stakes permanently. The executive branch could resist a journalist. It could ignore a researcher. It could classify a report and move on.

It cannot ignore an oversight committee with subpoena power and the ability to condition defense funding. It cannot ignore sworn testimony submitted to the congressional record. It cannot indefinitely withhold information from the branch of government that controls its budget.

The UAP story is no longer a story of individuals pressing governments for answers. It is a story of one branch of government pressing another — with all the institutional weight that implies.

In Part III, we will examine the institution that Congress built to handle what it found: AARO — what it was designed to do, what it has actually done, and where its mandate has met its limits.