To its credit, the Trump administration has been taking swift action to declassify documents pertaining to the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations and the Jeffrey Epstein case. Meanwhile, with the administration’s support, Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) is leading a new Congressional Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

The Administration and Rep. Luna have also expressed support for releasing information on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). I believe that if Rep. Luna’s Task Force or the Administration looks in the right places, they will discover a trove of unclassified UAP imagery that is being unnecessarily and improperly withheld from the public. This imagery will not reveal classified sources or methods, which is the common refrain used to deny access to Congress and the American public. Rather, this information can impart important knowledge about UAP, mitigating the potential for strategic surprise.

Liberating this data can provide a boon to UAP researchers; help raise public awareness regarding unmanned vehicles and the strategic challenges they pose for our country; and help to restore the public’s faith in the ability of civilian policymakers to manage a huge and all-too-often self-serving bureaucracy. It is also an early and easy test case regarding the seriousness of the Congress’s and the Administration’s commitment to UAP transparency.

Over-Classification Is a Systemic Problem

There is already a strong bipartisan consensus in Washington regarding the need to combat excessive government secrecy. We spend as much as $18 billion per year on classifying government documents, a number that does not fully account for the costs and inefficiencies this arcane system imposes. As an analogy, the cost of filing taxes is not just the cost of hiring a tax preparer to do your taxes. A true cost would also account for the time lost due to the excessive complexity of federal tax laws.

…

Over-Classification of UAP Imagery

My concerns stem from events that began in 2017 when I obtained three Navy UAP videos approved for public release by the DoD’s Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR). I shared two of these unprecedented military UAP videos with The New York Times, and on December 16, 2017, they appeared in a front-page story entitled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The third UAP video, also from a targeting pod aboard an F-18 aircraft, appeared in The Washington Post on March 9, 2018, together with an op-ed I wrote entitled, “The Military Keeps Encountering UFOs. Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care?” An inquiry by the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) confirmed that the videos were unclassified and their publication did not damage national security.

What happened next was a classic case of a bureaucracy seeking to enforce a monopoly on access to information; information that could raise important but awkward and uncomfortable questions. Suddenly, a new classification manual for UAP was created by the DoD’s UAP Task Force, making virtually anything and everything related to UAP a national secret – including precisely the same kinds of unclassified videos that had already appeared in two of the nation’s leading newspapers!