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.
Buried in a proposed amendment to a routine defense bill sits one of the strangest sentences ever drafted into U.S. law: an instruction that the federal government “shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence” held by private companies or individuals. Eminent domain is the ordinary power a government uses to buy out a house for a highway. Here, Congress proposed pointing it at hardware nobody has publicly proven exists.
That clause belongs to the UAP Disclosure Act, a bipartisan bill first offered in 2023 by then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Mike Rounds. In plain terms, the Act would force the government to open its files on unidentified anomalous phenomena - UAP, the official term for what most people still call UFOs - and would build the legal machinery to gather any related material, wherever it sits. Its toughest provisions were cut before it became law. Rounds now says he intends to bring the full version back.
The Act’s core idea is borrowed, deliberately, from a law that worked. According to the sponsors’ own announcement, it is modeled on the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the statute that eventually forced millions of pages of long-secret files into public view.
The mechanism is the same. The bill would create an independent, nine-member UAP Records Review Board, appointed by the president, to gather every government record touching on UAP into a single collection, according to the Senate announcement and an EarthSky summary of the text. Those records would carry what the bill calls a “presumption of immediate disclosure” - meaning the default is release, and the board must give a specific reason to keep any document secret rather than the public having to pry it out.
There is a clock attached. Records would have to be disclosed within 25 years of their creation, EarthSky notes, unless the president personally certifies that continued secrecy is needed to prevent identifiable harm to national security. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said when the measure was introduced.
If the records board is the familiar part, the eminent-domain provision is the part that made the bill extraordinary - and, by most accounts, killed its strongest form. The proposed language, published by the New Paradigm Institute, would let the government take control of recovered “technologies of unknown origin” and any “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” from private hands “in the interests of the public good.”
It is worth being precise about what that does and does not say. The bill does not assert that such material exists, nor that a contractor is hiding a saucer in a hangar. It creates a legal path the government could use if any such material were ever found in private possession - a contingency plan, not a confirmation. The distinction matters, because decades of recovered-craft claims, from Roswell onward, have never produced a verified artifact.
The provision proved too much for the Pentagon. As legislative analyst Douglas Johnson documented, the full Act was gutted in conference negotiations with the House in late 2023, largely over Defense Department opposition to the review board’s sweeping subpoena and eminent-domain powers. What survived and became law was far narrower: a requirement that the National Archives assemble a collection of UAP records, without the board or the enforcement teeth behind it.
The stripped-down outcome is exactly why the fight is not over. Supporters argue the surviving records-collection language has no muscle - no independent board, no presumption of disclosure, no way to compel material out of private or contractor control. That is the gap Rounds says he wants to close.
At the June 2026 Disclosure Forum on Capitol Hill, Rounds and other lawmakers pressed to restore the full version, including the eminent-domain and review-board provisions, in a future National Defense Authorization Act. The pitch is procedural, not sensational: give an independent body the power to see what the government holds, and set the default to disclosure.
None of this rests on a claim that the mystery is solved. The Pentagon’s own UAP office has repeatedly stated it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The Disclosure Act is a bet on a different question - not whether the truth is exotic, but whether the public should get to see the files and decide. So far, Congress has been willing to build the filing cabinet. It has not yet been willing to hand anyone the key.
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