The Trump Administration Sends a New Signal to Alien Disclosure Whistleblowers

Just over a year ago, Dylan Borland—a former Air Force geospatial intelligence specialist—told a House Oversight task force that he'd watched a roughly 100-foot triangular craft lift silently off the flight line at Langley Air Force Base in 2012. But there were some questions he couldn’t answer. Nearly half a dozen times during the hearing, he told members of Congress he could only answer their questions, such as whether a private company he worked for was reverse engineering nonhuman technology, inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. He said he was concerned whether he was “legally even allowed to answer” some questions and at one point cited a fear of being charged under the Espionage Act. A year later, on September 14, the Defense Department announced it had lowered that risk, though it falls short of what some in the unidentified anomalous phenomena research community say is needed to achieve broad transparency. The Pentagon said on Monday that it had issued a "targeted legal waiver" allowing all current and former “service members, civilian personnel, and contractors" holding UAP-related national defense information to disclose it to the White House–directed effort that has been dumping UFO files on war.gov since May. The waiver, which hasn’t been made public, "supersedes civil and administrative enforcement provisions" of NDAs and special access program agreements, "strictly for communications directed to the PURSUE team," a reference to the White House program. Basically, if you signed a secrecy agreement and know something about UFOs, you can now tell PURSUE without being sued or losing your clearance, though the same protections don’t extend to speaking with Congress, the press, or the public. The release announcing the waiver says nothing about criminal law, and only covers agreements "previously executed within the United States." President Donald Trump telegraphed the move over the summer when he reportedly directed the Defense Department and the intelligence community to waive UAP-related NDAs. It was reinforced on July 31 when Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas sent a memo to 18 intelligence chiefs declaring that any NDAs “prohibiting disclosure to the President, or designees like PURSUE, are no longer in force.” The memo cited a “Presidential Direction” it never quotes and gave the intelligence community 30 days to set up its own procedures. That deadline passed in August. The White House directed a request for comment to the Defense Department. An agency spokesperson said it had no additional comment outside the press release and referred further questions to the White House. Borland, the kind of person all of this was written for, is unmoved. “Bad-faith actors are talking about, ‘Oh, this allows whistleblowers to go and talk to the public.’ No, it doesn't. It changes nothing,” he tells WIRED. “It's one more place to go. “Those of us who already became whistleblowers, we already were told that our NDAs were waived. We were legally allowed to talk to AARO,” he says, referring to the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, created in 2022 to investigate UAP reports and serve as the official channel for whistleblowers. He adds that the new directive essentially “just repeated what we've been told for three, four years.” A provision Congress passed in December 2022 already states that an authorized UAP disclosure—meaning one made through AARO—"shall not be subject to a nondisclosure agreement," complies with classification rules, and "is not a violation" of the relevant section of the Espionage Act. The channel was AARO and Borland used it. But AARO has little credibility with the people it was built to hear from, especially after its former director publicly questioned the credibility of whistleblowers, and its March 2024 historical report found no evidence the government had ever recovered alien technology. Borland told Congress that he met with AARO in March 2023, but that he withheld sources and methods because he considered the agency's public assessments up until then, "a misrepresentation of the truth." That August, after a former intelligence officer testified about an alleged decades-long crash-retrieval program, Borland filed a complaint with the intelligence community's inspector general over what he says he knew and the retaliation he says he’d faced. Since then, he wrote in his statement to Congress, he has "been prevented from resuming my prior employment" and remains “blacklisted from certain agencies within the Intelligence Community.” Other UAP whistleblowers have faced similar issues after coming forward, from break-ins at their homes to leaked personal details. The new waiver also only covers those who have worked with the Pentagon, leaving a CIA-sized hole in it. “I'm glad that they're waiving NDAs for everybody who was on the [Defense Department] side,” Borland says. “It doesn't change the [Intelligence Community] side.” He pointed to the need to offer similar protections to the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies beyond just the CIA, including the National Security Agency, FBI, and others, as well as science agencies like NASA. Marik von Rennenkampff, a former State Department analyst and Obama-era Pentagon appointee now at the Sol Foundation, a UAP research nonprofit, agrees with that sentiment because of where whistleblowers say the secrets about nonhuman technology are kept. He points to a specific unit in the CIA that’s “allegedly—allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, I can't stress that enough—the quarterback for this alleged legacy effort.” “What has been announced publicly does not cover the core of the alleged legacy program yet,” von Rennenkampff tells WIRED. There's a second gap that no memo can close. Many of the people alleged to hold this information work for private contractors, and the government can't waive an NDA it isn't party to. Only the 2022 statute addresses those types of agreements, and only for disclosures made through the official AARO channel. Despite these shortcomings, UAP researchers and whistleblowers point to, von Rennenkampff argues this week’s announcement is still important. “After 80 years of government denial, obfuscation, and ridicule on this topic, there's now true political capital invested in this,” he says. Unlike AARO, PURSUE is a “presidentially directed initiative” that is reporting ultimately to political appointees in the White House, “versus career bureaucrats.” “It shows that the Trump administration is taking extraordinary claims about retrievals of a craft of nonhuman origins seriously,” he says. There’s a phrase in the release that von Rennenkampff says is another curious detail, particularly given how “wordsmithed to hell” government statements about UAP generally are. The Pentagon wrote that “individuals with direct knowledge of UAP-related programs” have historically feared legal liability for speaking. “It doesn't say people with partial knowledge, half knowledge, alleging knowledge,” he says. “It says people with direct knowledge.” Borland's hope is that PURSUE answers to someone with the power to act on what it hears. He points to White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller—who Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed is working on the UAP portfolio—as someone who would signal the White House is doing more than paying lip service to the topic. Beyond that, Borland has an offer. “There's enough smoke, and there's enough people behind the scenes,” he says, referring to himself and other whistleblowers. “If Stephen Miller and Trump wanted to actually know some stuff, they could call us into the White House right now, and I can throw down, and so can the rest of them.”