What Does Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Know About UFOs?

I have struggled to write this article in a cogent and coherent manner ever since news broke about a month ago that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) will try to pass their Unidentified Aerial Phenomena amendment in next year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). They tried and failed to get it in the last NDAA, despite still passing some minor UAP legislation; doing it again demonstrates a level of noticeable commitment on the part of two very powerful men on an issue with little to no electoral upside. What’s more, Pentagon UAP whistleblower Luis Elizondo’s book is out today too, which will undoubtedly spark a new wave of interest in the subject. But Schumer’s bill has genuinely caved my head in — specifically this section:

The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.

Excuse me? Am I being pranked here? This from the Charles E. Schumer of New Amsterdam? Holy shit it is! There’s even video of him strenuously defending the bill and everything.

It is an outrage the House didn’t work with us on our UAP proposal for a review board.

This means declassification of UAP records will be up to the same entities that have blocked and obfuscated their disclosure for decades.

Related Content

• A Theory On What Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer May Know About UFOs
• What Does Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Know About UFOs?

We will keep working to change the status quo. pic.twitter.com/SaMnOVBVmw

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 13, 2023

Some have dismissed this as just a tribute to his late friend and previous Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who was very interested in this subject, and if Schumer had dropped this effort after a year, it very easily could have been interpreted as such. But now that this battle is coming up on the horizon again, if this is a tribute to Reid, it’s a stubborn one.

The way I resolved the natural tension in a piece with no firm answers like this is to split it into two articles–one to try to stick to serious journalist stuff about verified reports and the other walking further out on a limb to venture a guess as to what this all is. Interpreting the reports and reporting the reports are incompatible with one another without making this a tedious maze of qualifiers and half-commitments in a piece that runs way too long.

Because the Senate Majority Leader’s office for whatever strange reason just didn’t really want to talk to me about UAP’s when I reached out to them about it, the best we can do to try to answer the question I posed in the title is to follow what he and Senator Rounds wrote in this UAP amendment. Here’s a word cloud of the entire bill that will help guide us down this path.

The phrase “unidentified anomalous phenomena” appears 88 times, and there are 85 occurrences of the word “disclosure,” while “non-human intelligence” pops up 22 times. These will serve as guideposts to try to figure out what Chuck Schumer may be getting at in this absolutely bonkers bill submitted to the United States Senate that contains phrases like “Controlled Disclosure Campaign Plan.”

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

One of the clearest examples of what the government may know about unidentified anomalous phenomena is related to the Navy changing their reporting standards in 2019 to allow pilots and other personnel to report “unidentified aircraft” in a formal process. While there is now about five years’ worth of data produced for the government through this new procedure, the Navy didn’t change this policy on a whim. It was the result of pressure inside the Navy to create a space for pilots to report events that people like Lt. Ryan Graves say were happening “every day” off the coast of Virgina (he also testified to this under oath in front of Congress last year).

The famed 2017 New York Times article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean that sparked this new era referenced perhaps the most well-documented UAP case in the public record. The Navy’s USS Nimitz, other ships and multiple aircraft all detected with various instruments a “tic-tac” shaped object traveling at high speeds and making maneuvers that should turn their occupants into soup based on our understanding of physics. This object was then confirmed by multiple pilots in the famed Black Aces with their own eyes.

Alongside all the other data-centric documentation tracking this anomalous object and others like it for “weeks” on end leading up to Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich’s interaction with the tic-tac in 2004, their credibility is what makes this case especially compelling. If David Fravor, Commander of the Black Aces, is an unreliable witness up in the air, then there is no such thing as a reliable witness. Christopher Mellon, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appears in the last minute of that 60 Minutes clip to further buttress their credibility through his knowledge of the events while he was working behind a high-level security clearance when they occurred.

Mellon himself is a champion for UAP disclosure, as he has used his elite access to rub elbows with everyone important in the nation’s capital to push for a change in policy, while also breaking news on his own Substack. Mellon recently released a screenshot of texts he had with “a senior U.S. government official, circa 2020” that were approved for release by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) where the USG official texted this to Mellon:

We’re dealing with the recovered UAP that landed in Kingman, AZ in the 50s. We’re vacuuming up info as [REDACTED] gets read-in. We now know the management structure and security control systems and ownership of the C/R. We also know who recovers landed or crashed UAPs under what authorities. We also know that a still-highly classified memo by a secretary of the USAF in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover on UAPs.

In a much less publicized NYT UAP report, longtime government contractor Eric W. Davis said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.” David Grusch’s testimony about what he purported to know of UAP crash retrievals took up all the oxygen from Fravor and Graves’ accounts in front of Congress last year, and Bob Lazar was also heavily ridiculed in 1989 for saying something similar to KLAS’s George Knapp, but these two famed examples are not the only ones who have told this now familiar tale. The sixth man to ever walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, once said basically the same thing too, and he dedicated his post-astronaut life to studying the paranormal. This is not to suggest this theory is true, just to stress that the story Grusch told under oath last year that so many could not believe was not the first time that broader narrative has been shared.

America, like with so many issues these days, is on a bit of an island when it comes to this subject and how taboo and discredited it is despite the decades of government documentation suggesting that all these people aren’t investigating figments of their own imagination. They may not be little green men from outer space, but something larger than our gargantuan American ego has been unfolding around the world for some time. Soviet media wrote about a flurry of UAP reports in 1989. France opened their UAP files in 2007, and the British government released thousands of files associated with UAP sightings in 2011. Brazil’s government ordered their pilots to record UAP sightings back in 2010, and the government celebrates “Official UFO Night in Brazil” every year to commemorate their progress made on our next guidepost that Chuck Schumer badly wants to get done.

Disclosure

This seems to be Schumer’s main aim: declassification of the government’s knowledge of UAP’s to some degree. The rest of this bill is so sensational that it is possible it is just posturing and will be traded in to ferry the presidential review board through Congress. Schumer and Rounds have modeled this on the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, asserting the urgent need to restore the public’s trust on an issue similarly shrouded in mystery. So far Congress has opposed this portion of the bill, with the House being its largest obstacle to date, but Rounds and Schumer are already fighting to pass this again next year, and they have other co-sponsors like Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Kirsten Gillibrand to start the fight this time around. Marco Rubio has also championed this issue in the Senate and is one to keep an eye on going forward, proving this to be one of the last true bipartisan coalitions in Washington D.C.

It seems pretty clear that the members of Congress digging into this feel that Congress may have been lied to. That’s the gist of all their public statements over the past year after they have met in classified settings with members of the military and internal government watchdogs who are purported to be involved with UAPs. Congress apportions funds for things, and if those funds don’t go to those things, that’s illegal. Congress doesn’t like it when that happens. They feel stupid. They’re the ones who are supposed to be pulling the ‘ol switcheroo.

So where would the supposed misappropriated funds go? I have one idea. Return to Schumer’s sentence that sparked this whole article, talking about (emphasis mine) “biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.”

To listen to award-winning journalist George Knapp tell it, the fear is that gigantic defense contractors have the majority of the information on this issue. One of the best counterpoints to UAP’s being a thing is “how could the government keep this a secret over all this time?” but maybe they didn’t have to. Maybe someone buried it deep in behemoths like Lockheed Martin as suggested by Knapp’s sources, far away from FOIA laws and other pesky democratic measures that could pry the doors open.

Schumer is obviously fishing for something. Disclosure would not be the priority for him if he did not believe that there were things to disclose. A cursory look at the United States government’s interactions with UAPs throughout history makes it clear, as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid noted in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, that “we discovered that there weren’t tens, or hundreds, of people who have credibly witnessed UAPs, there are thousands.”

UFOs and Nukes is one of the seminal books on this subject, as Robert Hastings uncovered documents and interviewed over 150 veterans across four decades describing encounters with unidentified objects at nuclear installations. To cite just one example, a declassified FBI document from 1950 describes “flying saucers” almost 50 feet in diameter near the Los Alamos labs. Former Air Force ICBM officer Robert Salas has told a story about UAPs seemingly shutting down nuclear weapons at Malstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and we’re not the only country with reports like this.

In the early 1990s George Knapp, shall we say, escorted top secret documents out of the collapsing Soviet Union which contained similar reports of persistent UAP sightings around their nuclear weapons. He submitted these Soviet reports in a sworn testimony to Congress last year detailing “likely the largest UFO investigation ever undertaken.”

UAPs even spent a summer buzzing Washington D.C., as pilots and radar operators saw flashes and radar returns for weeks on end in 1952. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book debunked it as a natural phenomenon called a temperature inversion, an explanation that was called into doubt by Kevin Randle, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who wrote Invasion Washington: U.F.O.s Over the Capitol.

Between Project Blue Book, the fraudulent Condon Report where the Low memo admitted its study would find UAPs to be hogwash before the study had concluded, now to AAWSAP and AATIP and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the government has proven over many decades that it is interested in UAPs. Schumer wants to crack open some of the good stuff and let everyone know what the government has for some time, like possibly our last phrase in the word cloud that Harry Reid helped put there.

Non-Human Intelligence

Hell yeah baby let’s get weird.

Wait, this isn’t the weird article, this is the one about stuff we have reports on. What is this doing here?

Believe it or not, there is actually evidence for this too that could explain its presence in the UAP bill.

UAP is the designation for something that is wholly unidentified, but what happens when there are identifiable outcomes from interactions with UAP? This is the direction I suspect that Schumer’s “non-human intelligence” line of inquisition travels, as examples like the one I will cite below suggest something that has intelligence behind it.

This is where we get into the government’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), which brings us back to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who wrote the foreword to Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, a book written by George Knapp, Colm A. Kelleher and James Lacatski about AAWSAP.

That famed NYT report in 2017 got part of their bombshell wrong. They said Reid apportioned $22 million for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) under the auspices of AATIP, the UAP investigation office that impending bestselling author Luis Elizondo oversaw, but that money was given to AAWSAP, as the former Senate Majority Leader notes their error in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: “the story merged the original AAWSAP program with the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).”

Reid asserts that “the full picture of the purview of the accomplishments achieved by the AAWSAP program” is recounted in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. Which is…hoo boy.

There is a story in the book about a 49-year-old man named Derek Jones who said he was alerted by his two dogs barking just before midnight on Friday May 8th, 2009. He went into his backyard and saw a large triangular object directly above him and four smaller ones around it, all emitting “their own sourced lights of various changing colors” and moving without making a sound with no obvious means of propulsion. Jones pointed a million-candle-power spotlight beam at the triangle, and he attested that “an intense bluish white light about two-to-three feet in diameter struck him for about three seconds.” Jones said the beam had an intense heat and caused a burning sensation on his neck and shoulders.

The next day he “reported feeling an intense headache, weak, and extremely nauseous” and had a “metallic or coppery taste in his mouth.” He said he was immobilized on the couch, and the subsequent day, he purportedly received a visit from two men driving a four-door Ford sedan who wanted to talk to him about his “sighting report.” This was a very classic Men in Black encounter where Jones said he felt intimidated and was supposedly told not to mention this UAP sighting to anyone else.

If the story ended there, then it would simply just exist in the vast unproven lore that surrounds this subject, but the four-door Ford sedan kept this in the realm of reality when Jones recognized it and the agent again after driving into town a week later. He called BAASS investigators and gave them the car’s license plate number, and the researchers eventually “unambiguously tracked [it] to a specific Department of Homeland Security carpool.”

Jones’ health would continue to deteriorate too. BAASS investigators “photographed hair loss on the back of Jones’s head within 18 days of the incident” and three weeks after the event, Jones had his blood drawn at a local medical facility, which “showed some abnormalities.” In October of 2009, Jones “began reporting that lumps began to appear on his legs, groin, and back.” By February 2010, Jones reported these lumps were incredibly painful, and two physicians performed an exam and found all sorts of issues, like a “hepatic mass R/O primary malignancy secondary to ionizing radiation injury.”

Jones would eventually have one of the 24 lumps surgically removed with a BAASS contract physician in attendance, and after “conferring with the local hospital physicians, a preliminary diagnosis of non-malignant lymphoma was introduced, although the surgeon told the BAASS contract physician that in his 22 years as a board-certified pathologist, he had never seen a case like this.”

This is but one of many stories in the book about AAWSAP and BAASS investigating reports that extend well beyond the typical “weird thing in the sky with no obvious source of propulsion does weird things” stories that were largely the purview of AATIP. There is more physical evidence than you would think stemming from interactions with UAP (which for me was none before reading the book), and according to the AAWSAP investigation, it is not uncommon for people to experience symptoms similar to radiation poisoning after coming into direct contact with a UAP.

Many of AAWSAP’s scientific investigations took place at the notorious Skinwalker Ranch, which has been the subject of paranormal legend among the native Ute tribe, and the Skinwalker legend features in the history of many other Native American tribes across the Southwest. The ranch gained fame with more current occupants like the Sherman family who reported being tormented by paranormal activity and Harry Reid’s friend, the billionaire Robert Bigelow who bought it as a paranormal lab for the government to study through BAASS. The ranch has since been sold to a new owner, real estate investor Brandon Fugal, and there is a show on the History Channel about their investigation too, which stars one of the top scientific investigators on the United States’ UAP task force, Travis Taylor.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a Senator helping a donor steal money from the government under the auspices of an urban legend with a craven TV network now jumping in on the grift, but AAWSAP produced real data like the medical diagnoses of Derek Jones that still exist no matter Reid’s intent in apportioning that $22 million. I believe the likeliest outcome here is that Schumer is just following his good friend’s lead that he developed through AAWSAP and other government programs in the past, and in part two I will attempt to venture a guess as to what the last two Democratic Senate Majority Leaders know about UFOs.

You can read Part 2 here.