GoKawiilJust 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18 intelligence chiefs declaring that any NDAs “prohibiting disclosure to the President, or designees like PURSUE, are no longer in force.”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.
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