Unidentified Flying Objects: US Congress passes stripped-down measure to release UFO records

US Congress passed legislation last week that directs the government to eventually tell the public at least some of what it knows about UFOs but stops short of more aggressive steps lawmakers sought to force greater transparency around unidentified phenomena and extraterrestrial activity. (Image/ Lexica.art)

The measure, which was tucked into the annual defense policy bill that won final approval with a bipartisan vote, directs the National Archives to collect government documents about "unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin and nonhuman intelligence." (Photo/ Lexica.art)

Under the provision, which president Joe Biden is expected to sign into law, any records not already officially disclosed must be made public within 25 years of their creation, unless the president determines that they must remain classified for national security reasons. (Photo/ Agencies)

Lawmakers in both chambers have ratcheted up efforts to increase government transparency surrounding UFOs and extraterrestrial matters as conspiracy theories proliferate and suspicions persist that the government is concealing information from the public. (Photo/ NYT)

But the measure is far weaker than what Schumer and other lawmakers in both parties had sought. Schumer succeeded over the summer in attaching a bipartisan measure to the defense bill that would have established a presidential commission with broad power to declassify government records on UFOs. (Photo/ Lexica.art)

The Republican-led House added a proposal by Rep Tim Burchett, that would have skipped any review and simply ordered the defense department to declassify "records relating to publicly known sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena that do not reveal sources, methods or otherwise compromise the national security of the United States." (Photo/ Agencies)

Unable to reconcile the two competing approaches, negotiators who hammered out a bipartisan compromise between the House and Senate on the defense policy bill ended up dropping both Schumer's measure and Burchett's. (Photo/ Lexica.art)

The measure that ultimately was included in the defense bill grants government agencies wide latitude to keep records classified. It permits government agencies to determine whether public release of certain records would pose a national security threat that outweighs the public interest of disclosure. (Photo/ IANS)