The 2026 UAP Disclosure Forum on Capitol Hill
On 25 June 2026 a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress sat on an open stage in the Russell Senate Office Building and talked about unidentified anomalous phenomena on the record. The most concrete news to come out of it was the disclosure that a recording from the 1952 Washington, D.C. sightings still exists and may finally be released.
What did witnesses see at Russell Senate Office Building?
The Disclosure Foundation convened what it billed as a first of its kind public forum in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on 25 June 2026. Unlike a congressional hearing, this was an unofficial event organized by an outside nonprofit, but it put sitting lawmakers on a public stage to discuss UAP as a science, national security, and policy question rather than as tabloid material.
Confirmed participants included Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who chairs the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and Representatives Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Eric Burlison of Missouri, both members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Scientists and former national security officials joined the panels.
The forum came inside a remarkable year for official UAP records. Since 8 May 2026 the U.S. Department of War has been publishing declassified UAP files at war.gov/UFO under a program called PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, directed by the White House. By the time the forum met, three tranches had been released, on 8 May, 22 May, and 12 June 2026, drawing on records from the CIA, the FBI, NASA, and the Pentagon.
What is the official explanation?
The forum itself produced no single official government statement. Its weight came from who was on the stage and what they said in public.
The headline disclosure was made by Representative Eric Burlison. He announced that a recording exists of an Air Force briefing delivered to scientists about the July 1952 Washington, D.C. sightings, an event so dramatic that the press of the day called it the Invasion of Washington. The material is understood to be a reel to reel audio tape, and Burlison said MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, had agreed to make it available. No details of the tape’s contents have been released, and there is no confirmation yet that it contains anything previously unknown. Burlison framed it in terms of principle, saying the public is frustrated when it learns the government has kept information from it, and that the recording would be important historical information to have.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna pressed the document access problem from the other direction. She voiced frustration that agencies have not produced records that lawmakers know exist, telling the room that Congress has been told certain files cannot be located. She also said her team was handing the White House a list of names of people to be granted immunity, working with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, so that credible witnesses could come forward without facing retaliation.
Senator Mike Rounds announced that he would reintroduce the UAP Disclosure Act alongside Senator Chuck Schumer. That bill, in its earlier forms, defines a legacy program as a secret government effort to retrieve and reverse engineer craft of unknown origin, and it would build a records review process modeled on the one used for the John F. Kennedy assassination files.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The recurring theme across the speakers was whistleblower protection. Burlison stressed that people need to be safe when they step forward, and argued for immunity and for waiving non disclosure agreements that cover anything to do with life beyond Earth. Luna’s immunity list was the practical expression of the same idea.
Much of what was said at the forum is testimony and assertion rather than demonstrated fact. The claims that secret retrieval programs exist, that documents are being withheld, and that witnesses fear retaliation are made by lawmakers who say they have been briefed, but the supporting records remain classified or, by the lawmakers’ own account, missing. The forum is best understood as a marker of where the disclosure push stands politically, not as the release of new physical evidence. The one item that could become checkable evidence is the 1952 tape, and only if and when MIT Lincoln Laboratory actually releases it and its contents can be examined.
Is the 2026 UAP Disclosure Forum on Capitol Hill real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the deflationary reading. A forum is a political event, and political events generate momentum, not proof. Everything announced here is either a promise of future action, the reintroduction of a bill, an immunity list, the planned release of a tape, or a restatement of frustration that records cannot be found. None of it, on its own, establishes that anything unexplained is in government custody. Skeptics can fairly note that previous waves of congressional UAP attention have produced hearings and headlines without producing the craft or bodies that the strongest claims imply, and that a privately organized forum carries no subpoena power.
Pass two, what is actually notable. Even read conservatively, the event is significant for what it documents about the institutional posture. Sitting senators and representatives from both parties, several of them on the relevant oversight committees, stood in a Senate office building and treated the subject as legitimate, named specific mechanisms, immunity, a records review act, a real archival recording, and pointed at named institutions including MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the White House chief of staff’s office. The 1952 Washington sightings are among the best documented radar and visual cases in the historical record, and a contemporaneous Air Force briefing tape, if released, would be a primary source of real value regardless of what it ultimately says.
This case is filed as Unknown. It is a fully documented public event, there is nothing uncertain about whether the forum happened or who spoke, but the underlying phenomena it concerns remain unresolved, and the most evidentially important item, the tape, has not yet been made public. UAP Globe will update this file if and when the Lincoln Laboratory recording is released.
Sources
- www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/disclosure-foundation-to-convene-senators-members-of-congress-and-leading-experts-across-disciplines-for-landmark-public-forum-on-june-25-302807931.html
- www.ibtimes.co.uk/1952-invasion-washington-ufo-recording-1805248
- lamag.com/news-and-politics/of-course-something-is-going-on-congress-dodges-questions-on-missing-scientists-at-ufo-transparency-push/
- thehill.com/video-clips/5939109-watch-live-washington-talks-ufos-at-uap-disclosure-forum/
- disclosure.org/news
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