The Two Senators Who Could Push UFO Disclosure Over the Line
Above: Senator Chuck Schumer
Above: Senator Mike Rounds
Opinion
Written by Matt Ford - 8 June 2026
On Tuesday, 9 June, a whistleblower and four members of Congress will stand on the Capitol steps and demand the truth about UFOs and non-human intelligence.
The two senators who wrote that phrase into U.S. law are not expected to be there.
The chance to finish disclosure is theirs.
"A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both."
- James Madison, 1822
On Tuesday at 1 pm, a whistleblower and four members of Congress will stand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and ask their own government to stop hiding the truth about UFOs and non-human intelligence.
David Grusch will be there - the former intelligence officer who told Congress, under oath, after reviewing classified documents and interviewing more than forty witnesses, that the United States has spent decades recovering and reverse-engineering craft of non-human origin.
Beside him will be Representatives Eric Burlison, Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Tim Burchett.
They have carried this fight when almost no one else in Washington would.
The journalist Leslie Kean and the filmmaker James Fox will host.
Yet two figures who should be standing alongside them are not expected to attend: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Mike Rounds, a member of the President’s own party.
Their absence is especially conspicuous at a moment when the President has finally begun to test the waters of UFO disclosure and needs bipartisan encouragement to go further.
They wrote the original UAP Disclosure Act, only for its strongest provisions to be stripped out before passage in 2023.
They are the two people in the American government who took the phrase "non-human intelligence" and put it into law.
And that is not merely symbolic.
Of everyone who will, or will not, stand on that podium tomorrow, Schumer and Rounds possess the greatest authority to push disclosure over the line, and perhaps the most to gain from being remembered as the men who did it.
The House has carried this for years with four members and little leverage.
But the two senators with more leverage than anyone in the building have, so far, stayed on the sidelines.
If they want to support tomorrow’s event, they should be on that podium.
Here is what is at stake, in my own words: if the whistleblowers are telling the truth and the documents are genuine, then we are not alone. Another intelligence has been here.
The government has known and kept it from the public.
Two senators could confirm it. One President could prove it.
So far, none of them has.
Some of the files are out
That is the problem
For nearly three years, the fight was about whether to believe Grusch.
That fight is over, because in February the President did what none of his predecessors would: he ordered the UFO files declassified.
In May, the government began posting the first batches on a new public website it calls PURSUE, and the servers took more than a billion visits.
Give him credit - it was the largest release of UAP records the government has ever made, with more promised to come.
Then the country learned the difference between data and disclosure.
What came out was a sliver of the archive, raw and redacted: photographs with no answers, pages blacked out, "unresolved" stamped where a conclusion should be.
The vast majority stayed locked away, and the government dumped the fraction it chose onto the public, leaving them to make of it what they could.
And look at what was in it, and what was not.
The release was old encounter reports, mission logs, astronaut transcripts, decades-old photographs - the kind of records that threaten no one.
The special access programs the whistleblowers point to, the deeply classified compartments where any recovered craft and reverse-engineering would sit, were left sealed.
The government opened the drawer marked "sightings" and left the vault marked "programs" locked.
Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, said it plainly: "data alone is not disclosure."
He's right.
The agencies that hold the clearances and the context are the only ones who can say what these files actually mean, and they won't.
So the secret didn't really come out.
It moved.
It used to sit in the documents; now it sits in a conclusion the government won't state, and a website can't drag that into the open.
A redacted photo can be called ambiguous forever.
A senator who wrote the law cannot - not if he stands up and says what he knows. Which is why this comes down to Schumer and Rounds.
What they have and have not said
I won't pretend these two men have already said what I am about to put in their mouths.
Rounds has told interviewers there is "no smoking gun," and that he does not personally believe what we are seeing is non-human.
Schumer has said only that the public "has a right to know," and that hiding it is "wrong." Neither has crossed the line.
But read the bill they wrote.
It's modelled on the law that opened the Kennedy files, and it doesn't hedge.
It defines "non-human intelligence" as "any sentient intelligent non-human lifeform," and "technologies of unknown origin" as "materials or meta-materials, ejecta, crash debris... engineering models or processes, damaged or intact aerospace vehicles, and damaged or intact ocean-surface and undersea craft."
It defines a "legacy program," and bars anyone tied to one from sitting on its review board.
It orders the government to "exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence" held by private parties.
And the findings say, in plain language, that "credible evidence and testimony indicates" these records exist and are being withheld.
You do not write a legal definition for biological evidence of non-human intelligence as a figure of speech.
You do not write an eminent-domain clause to seize recovered craft from private contractors on a hunch.
Nobody legislates on rumors.
A source with direct knowledge gives it a single name: the UAP Deep Legacy Program, an umbrella term for the recovery and reverse-engineering efforts said to have operated in secret for decades.
The Pentagon says no such program exists.
And this is not abstract.
Asked under oath in 2023 whether people had been harmed to keep these programs hidden, Grusch answered, "Yes, personally."
Asked whether anyone had been murdered, he said he "had to be careful" and had "directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities."
Luis Elizondo, who once ran the Pentagon's UAP effort, later testified that he and his colleagues had been targeted "with threats to our careers, our security clearances and even our lives."
He told The Good Trouble Show, flatly: "I am not suicidal... If something happens to me or my family members in the future, you will know what happened."
They have done this before
On December 13, 2023, after the House stripped out the bill’s strongest provisions, including the independent review board modelled on the JFK Records Act, Schumer and Rounds took to the Senate floor for a joint colloquy. It was a formal, on-the-record exchange setting out their shared position.
Schumer called the House's refusal "an outrage."
Rounds said Congress was "not fulfilling our responsibilities."
They promised, in Schumer's words, to "keep working to change the status quo."
They have the format, the standing, and the practice.
What follows is not a transcript, and it never happened.
It is the colloquy they would give if they decided the truth was worth more than the comfort of silence.
It is written for them, and it is meant for one viewer.
[IMAGINED - THE COLLOQUY SENATORS SCHUMER AND ROUNDS WOULD GIVE. NOT A REAL QUOTE.]
SCHUMER: Mr. President, we agree on almost nothing - one of us leads the Senate Democrats, the other is a Republican of your own party. We came to these steps together to tell you, in public and on the record, what this government has kept locked in a classified room: the truth about what is in our skies, and whether the human race is alone.
ROUNDS: And we thank you. You did what no President before you would: you ordered the UFO files opened. But you have seen what actually came out - a thin, redacted slice of it: photographs with no answers, pages blacked out, "unresolved" stamped where a conclusion should be. That is not disclosure, Mr. President. That is a filing cabinet. And it is not what you ordered.
SCHUMER: For decades, this government gathered what it knew and refused to share it. That is wrong. A free people cannot consent to what they are forbidden to know. The censored files have ended the argument over whether something extraordinary is hidden. What remains is a simpler question: does the government still answer to the public, or does the public now answer to the government?
ROUNDS: I am on record doubting this. I said there was no smoking gun, and I meant it. I am a hard sell, Mr. President - I came to this skeptical and stayed skeptical as long as the evidence let me. It no longer lets me. We are not alone. I have read the evidence, and I am telling you plainly: an intelligence that is not human, and not from this world, is here. We wrote "non-human intelligence" into the law of the United States. We did not write it as a metaphor, and we did not write it on a rumor. We wrote it because of what we were shown.
SCHUMER: Let me say it again, because it is the kind of sentence a country can hear and still refuse to believe. We are not alone. Not a balloon. Not a drone. Not a trick of the camera. Another intelligence has been here; our government has known it for the better part of a century, and it decided the American people could not be trusted to know. Every map of our place in the universe is wrong, and the men who could have told us chose silence. I won't pretend I have seen everything - no one outside these programs has. But what I have seen leaves no honest room for denial. It matches what David Grusch told this country under oath, and what others have risked their careers to say: that our government has recovered craft not built by human hands and hid it from the people it serves. Grusch is standing behind us. He told the truth, and he has paid for it every day since.
ROUNDS: And here this institution failed. We are not fulfilling our responsibilities. Programs this size were hidden not only from the public but from the representatives elected to watch them. The people who come forward are not just disbelieved - they are hunted. The government cannot lawfully punish them itself, so it keeps its hands clean: the work runs from the program to a prime defense contractor, to a private security firm, to former special-operations personnel who do the targeting. Three layers, so no one at the top ever answers for what is done at the bottom.
SCHUMER: The pattern is always the same. They are surveilled, their movements and messages tracked, and devices placed on their cars and their spouses' cars. When a husband or wife holds a clearance of their own for unrelated work, that clearance is flagged and their career is ended, out of pure vindictiveness. And it goes further than careers. Under oath, in that chamber, a decorated officer was asked whether anyone had been killed to keep this secret. He did not say no. He said he had to be careful and that he had handed what he knew to the authorities. Another testified that he and his colleagues had been threatened in their careers, their clearances, and their lives. That is how a citizen's life is taken apart for the crime of telling the truth. It is illegal, Mr. President, and it is being done in your name.
ROUNDS: In his farewell address, a Republican President and five-star general warned us to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence... by the military-industrial complex," and against "the disastrous rise of misplaced power." Eisenhower saw it coming; we are living in it. And every taxpayer, left and right, should be furious at how it is paid for. The contractors decide what to build, build it in secret, and bill it back to you - billions of dollars a year, buried in programs so deeply walled off that, by the whistleblowers' account, even the Pentagon's own UFO office has been kept from looking. You pay for it. You are forbidden to see it.
SCHUMER: Paid for by the public, hidden from the public, owned by no one the public elected. And that is only the legal end of it. Grusch testified under oath that the rest runs on misappropriated funds and dark money - appropriations diverted from the purposes Congress approved, with billions placed beyond the reach of any auditor. The provision we fought hardest to pass, and they fought hardest to kill, was the one that would have let the people reclaim what their money built. Follow what they cut, and you find what they are protecting.
ROUNDS: What began, perhaps, in good faith has metastasized into a cancer on this democracy. Be fair to the men who first chose silence - the fear was real: panic, war, handing an enemy an advantage we did not understand. They were not villains. But reasons expire. One, people will say, has not: the fear of giving an adversary an edge. So hear this clearly, Mr. President - confirming this is real is not the same as publishing how it works. We are not asking for a blueprint. And if our rivals have watched these skies for eighty years, the only people still in the dark are the Americans who paid for all of it.
SCHUMER: The deepest fear was always that the people could not bear it. But every generation handed a larger universe has proven equal to it. The American people are not children, and they are tired of being governed as though they were. The danger was never the truth. It's a government that decided its own people couldn't be trusted with it.
ROUNDS: And it is not the people's job to do the government's work. When your agencies dumped a stack of photographs on the public and said, "Draw your own conclusions," they turned the duty on its head. Reading the nation's intelligence is the government's job - never more than when the subject is a threat to the country. So do not let them do to your disclosure what they did to our bill. The same office that spent years insisting there was nothing to see is the one now cutting the answers out of your files. That is the deep state hiding behind your name, Mr. President. You did not open that door, so they could bury the truth in plain sight.
SCHUMER: Mr. President, I am a Democrat. I have stood across from you in nearly every fight you have picked, and I do not reach for the phrase "deep state." I use it now because it is true, and because you, of all people, are the one who actually opened the door. The people gutting this are not my party. They are inside your own government, hollowing out your own order from within. And the clock is on no one's side. The witnesses are old men now; some are already gone, and they died being called liars by the country they tried to warn. This is the last chance - not because we say so, but because the people who saw it with their own eyes are dying, because this law has been killed twice, and because there will never again be a President who ran on opening files sitting across from the two senators who wrote this one.
ROUNDS: You opened the Kennedy files when no other President would. You did not do it because it was easy. Kennedy said we do these things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" - and this bill was built on that same Kennedy law. This is that same hard thing, one more time. You opened the door, Mr. President. Finish what you started. Not more paper - the truth of what it means.
ROUNDS and SCHUMER: Mr. President, finish it.
[IMAGINED - NOT A REAL QUOTE.]
That is what they should say.
As things stand, neither senator is expected at that podium tomorrow - but this is not a reprimand.
It is an opportunity, and it belongs to the two of them more than to anyone alive.
They wrote "non-human intelligence" into the law of the United States. They have spent years pushing this toward daylight. No one is better placed to carry it the last few feet.
Because that is what is on offer tomorrow - not another bill, not another hearing, but a place in history: the two senators who stood on the Capitol steps and finally told the American people the truth.
It is a short walk from the Senate floor to those steps, shorter than the walk the witnesses made - the ones who told the truth and were called liars for it, some of whom did not live to see the door cracked open at all.
Senators Schumer and Rounds, the microphone is yours.
Make the walk. Push it over the line. The chance to do this - and to be the ones who did it - may not come again.
Matt Ford is the host and executive producer of The Good Trouble Show and a former Director of Strategy for Disclosure Foundation. He has been published in The Daily Mail, The Liberation Times, and The Debrief.
