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Spooky Valley Archive 5,455 cases indexed Declassified sources
Briefing

NDA Waivers, a New Archive Series and 943 Closed Cases: The Rest of the UAP Record, August–September 2026

Away from the PURSUE releases, the intelligence community and the Department of War both waived non-disclosure agreements for people who want to talk to PURSUE, the National Archives added Air Force and Border Protection series, AARO's closed-case count reached 943, and AARO moved to subscribe to a private UFO archive in New Mexico.

#disclosure#AARO#PURSUE#ODNI#National Archives#NDA#Department of War

The PURSUE file releases get most of the attention, but the U.S. government did several other UAP-related things between August and late September 2026, and some of them may matter more over time. Two agencies issued waivers covering people who have signed non-disclosure agreements. The National Archives added two new series to its UAP collection. AARO updated its public count of resolved cases. And AARO posted a contracting notice to pay for access to a private archive of old UFO case files. The primary sources are listed at the end.

The intelligence community’s waiver

On August 1, 2026, Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri published a two-page memorandum from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saying the administration had authorized its release. Its reference number is ES 2026-00818 and its title is “Preliminary Guidance for Implementation of NDA Waiver.” It is signed by Aaron Lukas, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and dated in his handwriting July 31, 2026.

The memo cites “Presidential Direction” and tells the Department of War and the intelligence community to set up a process so that current and former government employees and contractors with UAP information “shall have prior non-disclosure agreements (NDA), agreements, oaths, or commitments waived when speaking with authorized government representatives” of AARO or PURSUE. It gives every intelligence community element 30 days from receipt to name a PURSUE designee with ODNI and to tell its workforce that NDAs barring disclosure to the President or his designees “are no longer in force.” It is addressed to eighteen organizations, among them the CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, NGA, the FBI, and the intelligence branches of each military service. It calls itself preliminary and says detailed reporting procedures will follow within another 30 days.

The Department of War’s waiver

On September 14 the Department of War issued a waiver of its own. Its press release says that all current and former service members, civilian employees and contractors of the Department who hold, or once held, access to UAP-related national defense information may now disclose it “directly to official PURSUE representatives.” The waiver “supersedes civil and administrative enforcement provisions” in both standard NDAs and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements (SAPIAs), “strictly for communications directed to the PURSUE team.” The Department says the goal is to remove fears of legal liability, lost clearances or administrative penalties that people have given as reasons for staying silent.

What a waiver does and does not do

A waiver removes an obstacle. It does not produce evidence. Before these two documents, someone who believed they knew something about a UAP program risked breaking their secrecy agreement by describing it, even to officials cleared to hear it. Now there is an approved, legally protected route to AARO or PURSUE. For years, witnesses and members of Congress have said secrecy agreements kept people quiet, and nobody could test that while the agreements applied.

The limits matter just as much. Neither waiver makes anything public. Information given to PURSUE goes into what the Department calls “systematic review, security evaluation, and potential declassification,” and it stays classified unless and until that review releases it. The Department’s waiver, as written, covers only civil and administrative enforcement and only communications with PURSUE. It does not permit anyone to talk to the press. Most importantly, a waiver says nothing about whether anyone has anything to report. If the people it covers bring forward nothing verifiable, that will be informative; if they bring something forward, it will need the same checking as any other claim. The waivers make the test possible. They do not decide its result.

The National Archives adds two agencies

Record Group 615, the UAP Records Collection that the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act required the National Archives to create, gained two new series. The first is Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Its agency-supplied metadata lists 30 records from the Air Force Historical Research Agency. The National Archives catalog shows the series description arriving on August 27 and 28. Most of the records are Cold War unit histories. They include two histories of the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, the Colorado Springs unit that handled field investigations for Project Blue Book in the mid-1950s, as well as histories of air divisions, fighter wings and the 72d Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Ramey, Puerto Rico. The series also contains a 1962 edition of Air Force Regulation 200-2, the rule that governed UFO reporting; a 12-page paper from 1953 titled “Lights Seen Over Japan”; three years of UFO correspondence from Hamilton Field near San Francisco (1947, 1949 and 1952); a 1966 piece called “I Once Saw A Flying Saucer - Project Blue Book”; and a 1963 paper titled “A Survey of Exobiology.” Several files carry declassification stamps from the 1970s. That suggests much of this material was historically available at the Air Force archive at Maxwell, but it has not been easy to reach online until now.

The second is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection series of 12 videos made between 2013 and 2021. They include two from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, one of them the widely discussed April 2013 footage, plus several from Arizona. The catalog shows this series arriving on September 18 and 19, and the collection’s index page was last reviewed on September 21. The metadata has one detail that is easy to miss: every file is marked “Files on CBP.gov.” This footage was already public, so its move to the National Archives is about keeping it in one permanent place, not about revealing anything new.

AARO’s 943 closed cases

AARO’s UAP Reporting Trends page now covers January 1, 1996, through September 15, 2026. Its closed-case chart adds up to 943 resolved cases: 468 balloons, 346 satellites, 66 drones, 22 birds, 15 aircraft, 14 jetpacks, 8 missiles or rockets, 2 sensor artifacts, 1 piece of ordnance and 1 laser. Balloons and satellites alone make up 814 of the 943, about 86 percent.

The breakdown needs to be read carefully in both directions. It describes only the cases AARO has closed, and a closed case is by definition one that has been explained. So the chart cannot show that the unresolved cases are ordinary too, and it should not be presented as if it did. What it does show is what happens once an unexplained report has enough data to work with: nearly half turn out to be balloons and more than a third turn out to be satellites. Many of those satellites are probably the large low-orbit constellations that now cross the evening sky in long lines. Among the resolved cases, every single explanation is an everyday one. That does not settle the rest. It does mean that any new report is far more likely to be a balloon or a satellite than anything unusual, and a serious reader should start from that assumption. For how these closed cases compare with the office’s total caseload, see our earlier analysis.

AARO and a private archive in New Mexico

On July 31, 2026, Washington Headquarters Services, acting for AARO, posted a notice of intent on SAM.gov to award a sole-source, firm-fixed-price contract to the National Unidentified Flying Object Historic Records Center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. The notice describes “a commercial data subscription to gain unique insights into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) through the analysis of historical cases (pre-1990).” It would run for one base year with four option years, and it states that it “is not for professional labor or advisory services.” Responses were due by August 17. DefenseScoop reported the notice on September 2, quoting a War Department official who said the center holds “hundreds of thousands of unique case files” found nowhere else. The center was founded by the researcher David Marler, and DefenseScoop reports that its holdings include personal files of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who advised Project Blue Book. The Department would not give an estimated cost.

The notice’s own reasoning is worth noting. By buying the subscription, the government is acknowledging that civilian researchers kept much of the mid-century UFO record after the official projects shut down. AARO’s congressional mandate is to review the government’s UAP history back to 1945, and the office evidently does not expect to finish that job from government files alone.

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