David Grusch sat before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security on 26 July 2023 and testified under oath that the United States government had recovered craft of non-human origin, that the programme to study them had operated outside Congressional oversight, and that biological occupants had been recovered. He named no specific programme but committed criminal liability to the substance of the claim. The hearing room was the first thing many Americans had ever seen on the subject that did not carry the visible discomfort of officials trying not to be in the same frame as the questions being asked.
Three years later, the field is in a different position than the immediate post-hearing analyses predicted — better in some respects, worse in others. The mistake the most sceptical commentators made in August 2023 was assuming the question would die back down once the news cycle moved on. The mistake the most credulous made was assuming that disclosure had broken open and the institutional inertia could not close ranks again.
The institutional inertia closed ranks. The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established the year before Grusch testified, released its second annual report under Director Sean Kirkpatrick in early 2024 and reported that the office had found no evidence of non-human intelligence in any case it had reviewed. Kirkpatrick departed shortly after. His successor, Tim Phillips, has taken a more cautious public posture but the substantive conclusions of the office have not moved. The Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act that would have established a review board with subpoena authority over private contractors was gutted in the December 2023 NDAA negotiations and a substantially weaker version was enacted instead. The eminent-domain provision was the first thing to go. The criminal-immunity provision for whistleblowers survived in a constrained form.
What did not close ranks was the public attention, the witness pipeline, or the journalistic infrastructure. James Fox’s 2024 film The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See put more Pentagon insiders on camera than any prior production. The Debrief, Liberation Times, and Mystery Wire continued breaking specific claims about specific programmes. Lue Elizondo’s Imminent (October 2024) became the first book by AATIP’s actual former director and stayed on the New York Times nonfiction list for fourteen weeks. The Senate Intelligence Committee held a series of classified briefings in 2024 and 2025 that produced no public outcomes but reportedly produced internal momentum that has not been audible at the level of press releases.
The most consequential thing that happened, in retrospect, was not Grusch’s testimony itself but what it certified — that an officer of the United States government with active TS/SCI clearances was willing to testify under oath that the disclosure question was substantive. The category of person willing to do this expanded in the months that followed. Several former programme officers have since named themselves or attached their names to specific affidavits. The 2025 AARO Historical Record Report acknowledged for the first time in writing that programmes the office had been asked about could not be ruled in or out, which is materially different from the office’s prior posture of categorical denial.
The honest read in May 2026 is that the disclosure decade is in a slow consolidation phase rather than an acceleration phase. The political infrastructure that the 2023 testimony required — a Congressional appetite, a small bipartisan caucus willing to ask hard questions, a press that takes the testimony seriously rather than mocking it — exists now in a way that did not exist before. The substantive answers do not exist. They may not exist on this Congressional calendar. They may not exist on the next one.
What the Spooky Valley disclosure archive makes legible is that the substantive answers existed in some form decades ago — in the FBI records of the 1950s, in the Project Blue Book Special Report 14 statistics, in the J. Allen Hynek transition from sceptic to convert, in the documented sustained UAP activity around US nuclear facilities from 1948 through to the 2024 SCATANA-mandated AARO investigations at Vandenberg and Edwards. The Grusch testimony did not produce a new factual claim. It produced new permission to ask the old questions out loud. That permission has held, three years on, even as the institutions have done what institutions do.
The next inflection point will come, on the present trajectory, from a primary-source disclosure that institutional commentary cannot route around. Either a programme officer produces something that triggers genuine investigative momentum, or AARO’s slow attrition of denials reaches a point of structural untenability, or a foreign government discloses first and forces the United States to follow. None of these is certain. Two of them are sufficiently underway that they have moved from speculation into the category of trackable developments.
This site exists for the moment after the next inflection. The work in the meantime is keeping the record complete.