The Pentagon Says You Can Talk Now... Sort Of

Just yesterday, someone who signed a secrecy agreement with the U.S. military can hand over classified UAP information without facing legal punishment, as long as they give it to one specific team. The Department of War just announced that, but what is easy to miss is that the government offered nearly the same protection once before to its most prominent UAP witnesses. Hey Ufologers, I'm Cristina Gomez and this is your UFO News Update. The Department of War, which is the Pentagon under its current name, issued what is called a targeted legal waiver. It covers current and former service members, civil staff, and contractors who hold or once held UAP-related national defense information. And that is the government's term for protected defense secrets. Those people are now cleared to give that information directly to official reps of PURSU, which stands for the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting Systems for UAP Encounters. PURSU is the records effort President Trump ordered earlier this year. The waiver removes the civil and administrative penalties built into two kinds of secrecy contracts. One is the ordinary nondisclosure agreement. The other is the stricter agreement people sign to enter a special access program, the most tightly controlled category of classified work. Now one line in this entire announcement decides how much this actually means. Because the waiver doesn't allow anyone to go public, it doesn't allow anyone to take material to a reporter. It applies to talking with PURSU and nothing else. So whatever comes in gets reviewed, checked for security concerns, and considered for possible declassification, which means it might just maybe reach the public or it might not. The goal is to move people who have seen something to speak. And one member of Congress has spent this month saying she wants exactly that. Rep Nancy Mace, who has led UAP hearings, spoke to Ask a Poll about how she has personally viewed material that the public has not. I'm UAP. Have you been a part of any of these talks with the FBI or with Steve Miller's group in the White House? I have been briefed a couple times by different agencies. When does the public get to see that stuff? Are they going to release those tapes that I know I've seen that aren't out yet? Really? That's curious. It is curious. I want people to see them. Yeah. The reason to slow down before calling this a breakthrough is that the legal path it describes is not new. According to the Black Vault, Congress created a nearly identical authority in the 2023 defense budget law, letting people give UAP information to a designated Pentagon office no matter its classification and regardless of any nondisclosure agreement that they signed. That authority has been on the books for years now. So an insider being legally allowed to hand secrets to an official government team is not the new element of today's news. The new element is the recipient, and that is pursue. And then also the wording is pretty interesting here because it changes certain things. And we'll actually come back to that. But what has never changed is the distance between being allowed to talk and the public seeing anything, which is the point that Mace really touched on. I want people to see what I've seen. That's what I want. That's interesting. Have you reiterated that to the White House? Like, does Stephen Miller's group know where to look? I didn't know Stephen Miller was doing that, I didn't realize that was, yeah. I'll say something. But yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's interesting. We already know how the earlier version worked in practice because the government tested it on the biggest name in the field. In November of 2023, investigators tried to interview David Grush, the former intelligence officer whose sworn testimony put cash retrieval claims into the congressional record. Documents later obtained through the public records requests show that the government told Grush in writing that he was authorized to hand over UAP information regardless of his classification and offered him a secure facility to do it. That offer was made three years ago. But of course, we're all asking, if the protection already existed back then, why is the DOW presenting it now as though it were new? And there are a few possible answers. The first is the recipient. The older authority sent insiders to a single Pentagon office, one that several whistleblowers and their supporters simply didn't trust, here referring to Arrow. But today's waiver points them to pursue instead a newer effort with the White House behind it and the president's name attached to it. So reannouncing the same power under a new owner tells the holdouts the address has changed and that the request is now coming from the very top. The second is timing, and the waiver formalizes an order Trump gave in July, and it lands in the middle of a steady pressure, with a whistleblower bill moving through the House, lawmakers demanding specific videos, and a White House team now assigned to this subject. So a concrete step keeps a public promise of transparency visible, while the harder fight continues to drag on. And now that we've heard this narrative that depending on who wins the House as elections are taking place right now, it might benefit UFO disclosure or hinder it. I guess we will find out when that actually happens. But the third answer is a bit more of a stretch, but it's still worth at least considering. Because routing every disclosure through one presidential program also puts one program in control over what gets reviewed, what gets held back, and what finally reaches the public. And that can be described as possibly as transparency, or as a way to manage how much transparency actually happens. So which one it turns out to be is not something an announcement can settle, it really just comes down to results, and the clearest test that we have is the one case where this power was already tried. The government puts the protection in writing to its most prominent witness, and he still declined it. Grush didn't attend the planned meeting, and his reason is that the part that still has not been solved that we know of. But he said the UAP programs he wanted to describe were buried inside other classified programs that had nothing to do with UAP. So to explain the UAP piece, he argued, he would have to expose the ordinary secret piece, and the protection that he was offered didn't reach that far. It only covered UFO, UAP information, but not these other secrets, which makes this incredibly complex and much stickier than what people probably expected. And if the legal path to speak has existed for years, and one witness everyone was watching wouldn't walk in, what does today's waiver actually repair? The DOW says its waiver overrides penalties in both non-disclosure agreements and these specific contracts people sign to enter those most restricted programs. Either way, the department has released the announcement, but not the directive itself. Without the actual language, no one can compare it line by line against what already existed, and nothing made public so far touches Grush's problem. UAP secrets tangled together with non-UAP secrets. And of course, the latest waiver does not appear on its own. In February, Trump ordered agencies to find and release UAP records, Pursuit followed, with five sets of documents released between May and early August. In July, the president told the Department of War at the Intelligence Community to set aside those secrecy agreements for former personnel. And so this waiver is the department carrying that out. Congress has kept up with the pressure as well, because Rep. Eric Berluson of Missouri has been pushing the administration to restore Grush's security clearances. And Grush now advises Berluson's team. Berluson also got his UAP Disclosure Act attached to next year's defense budget bill in the House, even though it still hasn't survived the negotiations with the Senate, it's still kind of up in the air, but it is a great start to begin with. On the White House side, reporting says the effort is being run by senior advisor Stephen Miller, and Rep. Tim Burchette says Miller has made it a priority and assigned staff to continue the research. So if a witness does come forward through PURSU and the process ends in review and possible declassification rather than public release, does that count as disclosure for you? Or is that the same secrecy with a friendlier label? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. I'm Christina Gomez, that is it for today. I will see you again tomorrow at 12 PM PST for another UFO news update. Be safe and remember, keep your eyes on the skies. If you enjoyed today's show, hit that like button. And if you're not subscribed, what are you waiting for? Hit the notification bell as I do daily UFO news and updates, fresh UAP stories, government disclosures, and breaking developments land here every single day.