EDITORIAL GUIDE
~5 min read
The UAP Disclosure Act 2024 — What the NDAA Actually Mandates
The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act contained the most significant UAP disclosure legislation in U.S. history. Section 1841 created NARA Record Group 615, mandated rolling public transfers of agency UAP records, and strengthened whistleblower protections. This guide explains what the law actually says and what it has produced.
What Section 1841 of the 2024 NDAA Requires
Section 1841 of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act — formally titled the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 (passed in the 2024 NDAA cycle) — directed the Archivist of the United States to establish a centralized, publicly accessible collection for all federal UAP-related records. The provision passed with bipartisan support from both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Oversight Committee, reflecting the unusual cross-party consensus that had developed around UAP disclosure since the 2023 hearings.
The law's core mandate is proactive release, not passive FOIA response. Agencies covered under the act — primarily the Department of Defense, Department of State, NASA, and the FBI — are required to identify, transfer, and release responsive records on a defined schedule rather than waiting for individual FOIA requests. This is the same fundamental structure used for the JFK Records Act of 1992, which created a parallel public archive for assassination-related records. Legislators modeled the UAP provision on that precedent deliberately, anticipating that agencies would seek delay and using the precedent's enforcement mechanisms as a template.
The Creation of NARA Record Group 615
The direct legislative output of Section 1841 was NARA Record Group 615 — the UAP Records Collection. NARA established RG 615 as the official repository for all records transferred under the NDAA mandate. Unlike agency-specific archives, RG 615 receives records from multiple agencies under a single catalog structure, allowing researchers to search across DoD, FBI, NASA, and State Department materials through a unified index.
The law set initial transfer deadlines and created a review board mechanism — modeled on the Assassination Records Review Board — to adjudicate agency requests to withhold specific records. The review board is empowered to override classification claims where the public interest in disclosure outweighs the agency's stated harm. This provision was specifically designed to prevent the kind of indefinite extension that allowed significant JFK-related records to remain classified for over 30 years after the passage of the original JFK act.
The DoD PURSUE Program: How Records Actually Flow
The most active pipeline flowing from the 2024 NDAA mandate has been the Department of Defense's PURSUE program — the operational mechanism through which DoD fulfills its Section 1841 obligation. PURSUE releases are published via war.gov, the official DoD publication portal, in batches that include operational UAP incident reports, radar data packages, program administrative files, and sensor analysis documents.
Three PURSUE releases have been published as of May 2026 — Release 01 (63 files), Release 02 (160 files), and Release 03 (64 files) — covering over 280 individual documents. The law does not guarantee that all responsive records have been released; agencies retain authority to request delayed release for specific documents through the review board process. However, the proactive release structure means that the baseline is disclosure, not classification — reversing the prior posture in which UAP records were classified by default.
Whistleblower Protections and the David Grusch Provisions
Section 1841 also strengthened protections for federal employees and contractors who come forward with information about UAP-related programs. Before the 2024 NDAA, existing whistleblower statutes provided limited protection for disclosures related to Special Access Programs — the classified compartments where the most sensitive UAP-related work was alleged to occur. The new provision explicitly covered UAP-related SAP disclosures, creating a protected channel through the Inspector General system.
These provisions were directly influenced by the testimony of David Grusch before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023, in which Grusch described a pattern of personnel being discouraged or threatened to prevent UAP-related disclosures. The whistleblower protections passed in direct response to this testimony and the Senate Armed Services Committee's subsequent investigation into classification practices around UAP programs. The law created a formal secure reporting channel through AARO for personnel with information about classified UAP programs or non-disclosure agreements related to UAP activities.