A July 31 memo signed by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence orders every U.S. spy and defense agency to tell staff that their non-disclosure agreements no longer bar them from reporting UAP information - but only through official channels, not to the public.
For decades, the reliable answer from anyone who might have handled a UAP file was silence, enforced by a signature. A short memo circulating through the U.S. national security bureaucracy is meant to change that.
On July 31, 2026, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) - the agency that oversees the U.S. intelligence community - issued guidance telling the defense and intelligence workforce that their non-disclosure agreements no longer stop them from reporting what they know about unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government’s preferred term for UFOs. According to the memo, as described by the law firm DLA Piper, any existing agreements barring disclosure “to the President, or designees like PURSUE, are no longer in force.”
There is a significant catch, and it is the whole story. This does not free anyone to go public. It lets them talk to the government.
The guidance was signed by Aaron Lukas, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, according to reporting by Fox News and others. It directs the Department of War and the intelligence community to build a process so that current and former employees and contractors can hand over UAP information to two official bodies: the Pentagon’s UAP office, AARO, and the newer PURSUE Task Force - the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the White House-level effort now steering the government’s rolling declassification.
The memo also sets a clock. Each intelligence agency, from the CIA to the NSA to the DIA, has 30 days from receiving the guidance to coordinate with ODNI and name a “PURSUE designee” - a single point of contact for these reports - and to tell its workforce that the President has ordered this change. In plain terms, every spy agency has to build an internal pipeline for UAP tips and post the sign that says the old gag orders do not apply here.
DLA Piper, which published a legal analysis for corporate contractors, notes what the guidance does not do. It does not authorize public disclosure of classified information, and it does not permit disclosures outside the designated channels, which include Congress, AARO, and the PURSUE Task Force. A senior administration official likewise stressed to Fox News that the move “was not a ‘declassification directive’” and only allowed employees to come forward through government channels.
The reason this matters is that the barrier was never only about classification. Cleared personnel have often argued they were trapped by a second layer: private non-disclosure agreements and secrecy oaths that, they say, could expose them to legal jeopardy even when newer laws seemed to protect them. That gray zone is exactly what advocates have been hammering at. In June, former intelligence officer David Grusch and a bipartisan group of House members stood on the Capitol steps demanding the President waive these very NDAs. The July 31 guidance is the executive branch answering that demand on its own terms.
But “on its own terms” is doing heavy lifting. The waiver applies to reporting up the chain, not out to the press or the public. The PURSUE Task Force, not the person coming forward, decides what gets reviewed for declassification. So the honest framing is not “UAP whistleblowers are freed to tell all.” It is closer to: the government has opened an official, protected inbox and told its people to use it.
The memo lands in the middle of the most active government UAP effort in memory. PURSUE launched in May 2026 and has pushed out several batches of declassified files and videos since. AARO’s caseload has climbed past 2,000 reports, according to DefenseScoop. The volume is real.
What has not changed is the bottom line on the evidence. Even as the files pile up, AARO’s own reviews continue to report no verifiable evidence that any incident involved extraterrestrial craft or beings. More reporting from insiders could surface genuinely new material, or it could simply add detail to cases that turn out to be drones, balloons, sensor artifacts, and classified programs.
The intrigue here is not a promise of aliens. It is a bureaucratic one: for the first time, the machinery that kept UAP knowledge locked inside cleared circles has been told, in writing, to unlock a door - even if that door only opens inward, toward the government itself. Whether anyone walks through it, and what they carry, is the part still to come.
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The UAP Disclosure Act, modeled on the law that opened the JFK files, would set a 'presumption of disclosure' for UFO records and hand the government eminent domain over any recovered technology of unknown origin. Sen. Mike Rounds says he will bring the full version back.
