Two weeks ago we published a piece arguing that the legal instrument everyone in Washington kept naming — a presidential amnesty — was the one tool that could not free UAP witnesses to talk, and that the July guidance which had already lifted their nondisclosure agreements had three holes in it. On Monday the Department of War filled one of them.
That is not nothing. It is also not the thing that has been promised on television for three years, and the gap between those two statements is the entire story.
What the department actually issued
On 14 September the Department of War announced what it called a “targeted legal waiver”, authorising current and former service members, civilian personnel and contractors who hold or once held access to UAP-related National Defense Information to hand that information over to designated representatives of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — PURSUE, the task force the department stood up on 1 May and which has since pushed out five tranches of files.
The operative mechanic is narrow and precise. The waiver supersedes the civil and administrative enforcement provisions contained in nondisclosure agreements and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements — the SAPIAs that people read and sign on the way into a compartmented programme — strictly for communications directed at the PURSUE team.
In the department’s own words, the relief “establishes an authorized pipeline for systematic review, security evaluation, and potential declassification of historical and ongoing UAP data in furtherance of national mission objectives”.
Read that sentence slowly. Review, evaluation, potential declassification. It is a description of a process, not of an outcome, and the department has been careful about which verbs it used.
The hole it closes
The July guidance — the ODNI memorandum signed by Principal Deputy DNI Aaron Lukas on 31 July — reached nondisclosure agreements, oaths and commitments. As we set out at the start of the month, drawing on a client alert the law firm DLA Piper wrote for defence contractors trying to work out what their staff could now say, that memo left three things undone: it did not address criminal liability, it did not authorise public disclosure of classified material, and it set out no implementing procedure for contractors at all.
That last gap was the conspicuous one. The people at the centre of the crash-retrieval allegations are, in almost every telling, contractor personnel rather than uniformed officers. A disclosure regime that forgot to say anything about contractors was a regime with a hole shaped exactly like its subject matter.
Monday’s waiver names them in the first line. It also names SAPIAs explicitly, which the July guidance did not — and the SAPIA, not the garden-variety NDA, is the document that actually governs someone who was read into a special access programme. On the contractual half of the problem, this is a genuine and specific improvement, and the people who spent August complaining that the July memo was drafted too narrowly were right to complain, because it has now been redrafted.
The two holes it leaves open
The first is the one that matters most, and it is visible in the department’s own wording. The waiver supersedes civil and administrative enforcement. It says nothing about criminal statutes, because a departmental waiver cannot say anything useful about them.
Unauthorised disclosure of national defence information is an offence under 18 U.S.C. § 793, and § 798 where signals intelligence is involved. Those are acts of Congress. The Department of War can release you from a contract it is party to; it cannot release you from the United States Code. So a witness who walks into a PURSUE interview and describes a compartmented programme has been relieved of the risk of being sued or administratively punished for breaching their paperwork. They have not been relieved of anything a prosecutor could do.
The second hole is that this waiver does not declassify a single page. The department has said plainly that information handed to PURSUE remains subject to security review before any potential public release, and that nothing in the waiver gives anyone permission to hand classified UAP material to a journalist, a researcher or a congressional hearing broadcast on C-SPAN.
Disclosure to PURSUE and disclosure to the public are two different words that happen to share a root.
Which means the state of play, after Monday, is this: the contractual gag is off, for conversations with one specific set of government officials. The criminal exposure is unchanged. The classification system is unchanged. Two out of three walls are still standing, and they are the load-bearing two.
The channel points inwards
There is a structural feature of all of this that keeps getting lost in the coverage, and it is worth stating without any cynicism attached, because it is simply how the machinery is built.
Every route the executive branch has opened this year runs into the executive branch. The ODNI memo required each intelligence agency to appoint a PURSUE designee within thirty days. The waiver authorises disclosures to designated PURSUE representatives. A witness using this channel is not going public; they are moving information from one government filing system to another, where it will be reviewed by the same security apparatus that classified it in the first place, and released — if at all — at a time and in a form that apparatus chooses.
Marik von Rennenkampff, the former State Department analyst turned UAP commentator, called the waiver an “extraordinary development” on NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports, and noted where the pipe actually terminates: “This goes right to Stephen Miller’s task force that is looking specifically at this issue.” He also said he remains sceptical it will produce a rush of witnesses. Both halves of that are worth keeping. He is a proponent of disclosure who thinks this particular instrument may not deliver it, which is a more useful position than either cheerleading or dismissal.
Compare it with what Congress already built and largely left on the shelf. The FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act created UAP-specific whistleblower provisions at 50 U.S.C. § 3373b, under which an authorised disclosure is not subject to an NDA and is deemed to comply with the regulations issued under Executive Order 13526 — the order that runs the whole classification system. The statute reaches further than Monday’s waiver does, and it has been on the books for nearly four years.
The sceptic’s read
There are two sceptical positions available here, and they point in opposite directions.
The first is procedural and comes from inside the field. Matthew Brown, who authored the Immaculate Constellation report, has spent since the summer telling other witnesses not to use the PURSUE intake channels, on the view that they are more of the same and possibly a trap. Monday’s waiver answers part of his complaint — contractors are now covered, SAPIAs are named — and leaves the rest of it exactly where it was. If your objection is that the channel routes testimony back into the executive branch while leaving the criminal statute intact, the new document does not touch your objection. If anything it sharpens it, because the department has now demonstrated that it can draft a broader waiver when it wants to, and has still declined to go near § 793.
The second position is duller and, on the evidence of the last three years, rather more likely: there may be very little for the waiver to unlock. The central claim — that identifiable people worked on programmes that recovered non-human craft — has been in the public record since David Grusch testified in 2023. It has since produced no document, no photograph and no corroborating witness willing to be named, specific and under oath. AARO’s own historical review found nothing supporting it. Five tranches of released files have not turned up a supporting page. A waiver is a key; it is not evidence that there is a door.
Those two readings are not compatible, and you cannot hold both. It is worth being honest about which one the next few months will test, because this one is genuinely falsifiable.
What would actually show it worked
Three things, in ascending order of significance, and none of them is a television appearance.
A count. PURSUE has an intake. If, by the end of the year, the department or the task force can say how many people came forward under the waiver, that is a real number and it will be either impressive or embarrassing. Silence on the figure would itself be informative.
A named contractor. The waiver’s headline improvement is that it covers contractor personnel. The test of that is a person from a defence prime describing a compartmented programme to PURSUE and saying publicly that they did so — not the content, just the fact. If the contractor provision is real, someone will eventually use it.
A declassification. The only instrument that turns any of this into public knowledge is the one nobody has used. Material handed to PURSUE that is subsequently declassified and released — with a date, a docket and a page — would settle the argument about whether the pipeline has an outlet. Until then, the honest description is that a great deal of paperwork has been signed about the conditions under which people may talk to the government, which is not quite the same as anybody talking.
The public, for what it is worth, has already priced this in. Gallup found a record 78% of Americans believe the government knows more than it is saying — a figure that rose, rather than fell, after the disclosure programme began.
The UAP Times take
On the facts of the document itself, this earns a Well-sourced rating — five out of five on our scale. That is not a judgement about flying saucers. It is a judgement about provenance: this is an official Department of War press release, published on war.gov under its own name and date, reported the same day by DefenseScoop and carried by NewsNation, Newsweek and the wires, with every outlet quoting the same specific and unusual terms — civil and administrative enforcement, Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements, disclosures to PURSUE only. When independent reporting converges that precisely on the same clause, you are looking at a real document rather than a rumour about one.
What the document achieves is a separate question and deserves a colder answer. The Department of War has removed the contractual penalty for talking to a specific set of government officials, has extended that to the contractors the July memo forgot, and has left the criminal statute and the classification system precisely as it found them. That is the second of three steps, and the third — declassification — is the only one that produces anything the public ever sees. It remains untaken, and it remains, as it has been all year, entirely within the President’s gift.
Further reading: why a pardon was never the instrument that could free UAP witnesses to talk and the ODNI memorandum that started the clock in July.
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