Congress Demands Access to Government-Held UFO Footage

After years of witness hearings and a lack of physical evidence, the US Congress is now demanding access to specific UFO footage allegedly held by the Department of War.

Tuesday, 31 March 2026 will undoubtedly go down as a landmark date in the history of UFO investigation. In Washington D.C., Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, Chairwoman of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets and member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives, released a letter to Secretary Pete Hegseth calling for the declassification of numerous UAP videos.

This task force is a working group that was set up by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It was appointed to this role in 2025. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth holds the post of Secretary of Defence at the Department of War, the new name for the Pentagon.

But what exactly does this letter tell us? At first glance, this list of PAN incidents may seem puzzling, to say the least. However, it is a military classification system, specifically that of the US Army.

‘Administrative’ formats and codes

Some entries on the list seem to correspond to official report formats, which suggests an internal origin.

IIR (Intelligence Information Report): Several entries begin with ‘IIR’, such as IIR 1 666 SO151 23. This is a standardised report format. ‘IIR’ stands for ‘Intelligence Information Report’. It is an official document used to transmit raw information gathered by human intelligence (HUMINT). Its structure is standardised to facilitate integration into intelligence agency databases. In a technical context, ‘IIR’ can also stand for ‘Imaging Infrared’, a type of infrared sensor. Therefore, there is a possible double meaning depending on the context.

The reference ‘Administrative Revision: IIR 1777 J0032 22’ is even more explicit. It indicates that an existing IIR report has been updated or corrected for administrative reasons, which is a common practice in the management of sensitive documents.

In this context, both interpretations coexist: the numbered entries (’IIR 1 666 SO151 23’) are intelligence reports, while the ‘IIR 1 665 SO301 23/Eglin AFB’ entries in technical format refer to imaging infrared as a type of sensor. There is no ambiguity: these are two distinct uses within the same list.

Platform and Sensor Indicators

The list also includes specific technical terms that are integral to the U.S. military’s intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Aircraft and Units:

• MQ-9: Refers to the MQ-9 Reaper combat drone.

• F-18: Refers to the F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bomber.

• F-16C: A specific variant of the F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter.

• EP-3: An electronic reconnaissance aircraft, the Lockheed EP-3.

• AFSOC: Air Force Special Operations Command, the U.S. Air Force’s special operations command.

• USCG: United States Coast Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard.

• USAF ANG: United States Air Force Air National Guard, the Air National Guard.

• NGA: National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

This agency was created in 2003 following the merger of the NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency) into a DoD intelligence agency, alongside the CIA, NSA, and FBI. Its mission is to provide GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) to the armed forces.

Sensors and technologies:

FLIR: Forward-Looking Infrared, an infrared camera. Videos from FLIR are often referred to by this term (e.g., “F-18 FLIR PAN”).

AIM-9X: Refers to a specific model of air-to-air missile.

A letter that changes the game

The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets is not asking for general reports, nor is it requesting courtesy briefings: it is demanding classified video files, identified one by one, along with their dates and the platforms on which they were captured. This surgical precision is in itself a political statement. The fact that the files mention “hi res”, that is, “high resolution”, twice is also an indication that elected officials will not be fooled by poor-quality images, such as those presented so far by the Department of War.

To understand the significance of this move, it must be placed within its institutional context. In a recent podcast (Fresh Freedom, episode 66), Congressman Eric Burlison revealed that he himself had had to hire David Grusch as a part-time consultant in his office, a whistleblower simply to guide him on where to look.

Sam Gerb, an independent researcher specialising in the structure of alleged UAP programmes, described the entire system as an incredibly complex puzzle, deliberately fragmented over the decades to resist any attempt at oversight. It is precisely this institutionalised opacity that the Luna letter is directed against.

The list of files requested is not random. It reveals a deliberate mapping of the most sensitive blind spots in the UAP dossier.

Best available picture of a UFO shotdown by the U.S. in 2023

One of the videos on the list purports to show an F-16C fighter jet from the National Guard (call sign AESIR11) shooting down a PAN over Lake Huron on 12 February 2023 with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile. If this document confirms these claims, UFOs would no longer be a matter of observation or scientific curiosity. UFOs would be treated as hostile targets and subject to lethal force over North American territory. The Lake Huron incident did not occur in a combat zone. This trivialisation of geography is concerning in itself. Lake Huron is one of the five Great Lakes of North America, located north of Detroit and straddling the US–Canada border. The request submitted on 31 March 2026 does not specify whether the craft was shot down in US or Canadian airspace.

Several entries concern the ‘Hackney 6’ (or ‘Toxic 6’) unit, whose sightings increased between August and October 2020 in the Persian Gulf and beyond. There are also reports of unidentified submersible objects (USOs) and UAP formations over Iran, as well as infrared recordings of so-called ‘Tic Tac’ objects. This is not a catalogue of curiosities; it is the systematic creation of a signature database.

One request targets an NGA document dated 1 June 2010, several years before the New York Times made the subject public. This inclusion suggests that the working group knows, or believes it knows, that institutional awareness of UAPs goes back much further than official statements admit.

This directly aligns with Gerb’s interview comments: he stated that files from the Atomic Energy Commission (1954), the precursor to the Department of Energy, concluded that certain UFOs were of non-human or extraterrestrial origin. These archives, by design, cannot easily be declassified by any presidential executive order, as they fall under ‘born secret’ classification systems related to nuclear materials.

Born Secret

‘Born Secret’ is a legal concept specific to US law, introduced by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. This means that certain information is automatically classified from the moment it is created, without the need for an official to mark it as such. In practice, if you work in a laboratory and discover something relating to special nuclear materials or the design of atomic weapons, that information is secret by default, even before anyone has read your report.

This differs structurally from Q-clearance, which is a security clearance, that is, the level of authorisation granted to a person to access sensitive nuclear data from the DOE. Q-clearance is the DOE equivalent of Top Secret. One pertains to the information itself, while the other is an access right granted to an individual.

The crucial point regarding UAPs is that a presidential executive order can declassify information that has been classified by the executive branch. However, the ‘born secret’ status of nuclear material is the responsibility of Congress (via the Atomic Energy Act), not the executive branch. Therefore, Trump cannot lift this classification by mere executive order; a law would be required. Gerb emphasised this point precisely because, if conclusions regarding the non-human origin of certain UAPs have been classified under this regime, they are beyond the reach of a standard executive order.

The report concerning UAPs observed near the Columbus, Ohio, airport (IIR 1 655 S0053 23) is particularly noteworthy: it places the phenomenon in the heart of U.S. civilian territory, within range of commercial air traffic. This expansion of the perceived threat is not without political significance.

The Central Role of Whistleblowers

The Luna Letter derives its legal and political authority from a hearing held on 9 September 2025 entitled ‘Restoring Public Trust Through Transparency on National Action Plans and the Protection of Whistleblowers’. For years, whistleblowers have been trying to brief the U.S. Congress, but have been met with officials seemingly intent on uncovering their sources rather than addressing the constitutional violations they report.

These testimonies echo Sam Gerber’s description in the interview of individuals whose pensions were threatened and others who reportedly received criminal threats if they spoke out. ‘There is a very broad structure of intimidation designed to prevent people from speaking out,’ he summarised. Burlison confirmed that the whistleblowers who have come forward so far are primarily peripheral security personnel, ‘the outer layers of the onion’, rather than members of the core programme.

The AARO in the Crosshairs

The working group has described the AARO’s previous responses as ‘inadequate’. This diplomatic phrasing conceals a more serious accusation.

In the interview, Gerb was less measured. He claimed that the AARO had been ‘hijacked’ from its inception by Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI). He noted Moultrie’s strange decision to remove his ties to the MITRE Corporation, a federal research centre widely cited as a central player in the study of recovered non-human vehicles, from his official résumé. Gerb also pointed to Moultrie’s connections with the Battelle Memorial Institute, which has been accused of studying biological materials derived from these recoveries for decades.

The Luna request addresses this suspicion directly by bypassing the AARO’s narrative filter and requesting the videos themselves.

The structure of secrecy

One of the most valuable insights from the interview is Gerb’s description of the alleged architecture of the PAN programmes. This framework explains why a simple letter to the Secretary of Defence is not enough.

He describes a four-tiered pyramid. At the top is a ‘UAP steering group’, now fragmented since Dick Cheney’s departure in 2009, which Grush reportedly described as the last to have had a centralised view of it. Below that are the programme administrations: The CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the NGA, the NRO, elements of the armed forces and, a lesser-known fact, the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (the underwater equivalent of the NRO). Next come the FFRDCs (Federal Funded Research and Development Centres), non-profit institutions operated by contractors, national laboratories such as Sandia, Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore, which provide the government with plausible distance while concentrating the industry’s best minds. Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid are the major defence contractors: Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics and RTX.

What makes the whole system so difficult to penetrate, according to Gerb, is that even within each level, the compartmentalization is such that the various subunits of the same special access program may be unaware of what their neighbors are doing. “No one has the full picture.”

This architecture also explains why the request for videos specifically targets the AARO and not a higher level: the AARO is supposed to aggregate data from the entire system. If whistleblowers claim that it possesses these videos, it is because this aggregation has, at least partially, worked. If the AARO does not have these videos, it has failed to do its job.

The Department of Energy: The Blind Spot

Gerb placed great emphasis on a player that is often overlooked: the Department of Energy (DOE). In his view, the DOE is ‘embedded at every level’ of the PAN recovery and exploitation programmes. It has its own intelligence agency (the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, or OICI), its own secure transport service (the Office of Secure Transportation, or OST), its own FFRDCs (the national laboratories), and ‘born-secret’ classification systems relating to nuclear materials that are, by design, immune to presidential executive orders.

This dimension is absent from the Luna list, which may be a strategic oversight or a deliberate omission for a later stage. Burlison himself acknowledged that targeting the DOE, the NNSA and the OST through sworn depositions could be ‘a very significant step’.

What will the response reveal?

The 14 April 2026 deadline frames the showdown. The two scenarios have asymmetrical effects.

If the Department of War complies, the publication of the videos, particularly the one from Lake Huron, will irrevocably change the nature of the debate. PANs will no longer be the subject of scientific curiosity or speculation; they will become a documented operational reality, with all that this implies for the rules of engagement, NORAD protocols and the credibility of the whistleblowers who have exposed themselves.

If the Department refuses or delays, the structure of the refusal itself will become evidence. Each cited justification must apply on a file-by-file basis, creating a public catalogue of reasons why this data remains off-limits. In an information environment where insider accounts are increasingly well documented and cross-referenced; this is precisely the work of researchers like Gerb, the discrepancy between official denials and insider claims creates a narrative that the executive branch can no longer control.

As Burlison summarised, “I really believe it’s starting to unravel”. One of the most ingenious moves by US lawmakers was to recruit observers within the administration who could detect whether the requested files were being moved or removed from their hosting servers. This ensured that anyone attempting to withhold the files from lawmakers would be caught. However, it should not be forgotten that two letters were sent, one by Burlison and one by Luna. As of this writing, only Luna’s letter has been made public.

Do the requested videos actually exist in the described state?

We don’t know. The letter cites designations (IIR, video 0/1/2, etc.) that resemble actual formats. However, there is no guarantee that the corresponding files depict anomalous phenomena. An ‘IIR 1 666 SO151 23’ could be a routine report on an Iranian drone, a bird or a sensor artefact. Congress’s request concerns videos labelled PAN, but this label is administrative, not phenomenological.

The 14 April 2026 deadline is approaching. If the Pentagon refuses to release the videos, it will probably cite military classification or the protection of sources and methods. Transparency advocates will then interpret this refusal as confirmation of the footage’s exceptional nature. However, this is a classic bias: in the absence of access, the imagination fills the void. A refusal can also be a tactic to maintain narrative tension without ever providing the evidence.

Full letter

Dear Secretary Hegseth:

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets (Task Force) is continuing its investigation into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (PAN). The continued lack of transparency surrounding these anomalies and the potential national security threat they pose is troubling. On September 9, 2025, the Task Force held a hearing focused on these concerns.¹ Whistleblowers informed the Task Force that AARO possesses additional video records of potential PAN sightings. To continue its investigation, the Task Force requests certain video files related to PAN sightings.

The lack of disclosure regarding the very real threat posed by PANs in and around U.S. restricted airspace is concerning. The Task Force has found responses from AARO, when questioned about PAN sightings and provided data, less than adequate.² The presence of PANs in and around the sensitive airspaces of U.S. military installations poses a threat to the security of the armed forces and their readiness.

To assist the Task Force in its investigation of PANs we request the following videos be delivered as soon as possible but no later than April 14, 2026:

1. 4 PAN formation – Iran, 8/26/22

2. Syrian PAN instant acceleration, 2021

3. PAN USO formation Wiley 2X Zinc

4. Cigar-shaped or fat spherical PAN, 10/15/22

5. Spherical PAN erratic movement remix (RUST), 2022

6. Spherical PAN over AFG in and out of clouds, 11/23/20

7. Spherical PAN pulsing over water Jacker 2X

8. Spherical PAN in clouds

9. Voodoo 4X (Cranberry) PAN

10. NGA PAN, 6/1/10

11. Spherical PAN Warlock 4X, 4/12/21  a. Video 0  b. Video 1  c. Video 2

12. AFSOC Kabul PAN, 2017

13. USCG C-144 PAN 2 Tic Tac IR hot, 4/24/24

14. USCG C-144 PAN 2 Tic Tac IR hot, 4/24/24

15. Multiple Spherical PAN USO near Sub. Cactus 1X in and out of water, 3/25/22

16. IIR 1 666 SO151 23 video footage of PAN captured by fifth generation aircraft, 1/20/23

17. F-18 FLIR PAN

18. IIR 1 665 SO301 23/Eglin AFB

19. USAF ANG F-16C (callsign AESIR11) shoots down PAN over Lake Huron with Aim-9X, 2/12/23

20. Administrative revision: IIR 1777 J0032 22 Kazakhstan – PAN in vicinity of Karaganda International Airport

21. IIR 1 655 S0053 23/ Several PAN in vicinity of Columbus OH airport

22. MQ-9 observer PAN in East China Sea, 1/5/23

23. Assault 1X (steel) HD_20220613, 6/13/22

24. EP-3 Observed PAN in the ECS, 6/9/21

25. Lightning (Lavender) observes PAN, 1/3/21

26. Hackney 6 (Toxic 6) observes and tracks PAN, 11/2/20  a. video 1  b. video 2

27. Toxic 6 (Mercury) observes 3 fast moving PANs, 10/29/20

28. Toxic 6 (Hackney 6) observes PANs, 10/20/20

29. Greed observes PAN, 10/18/20

30. Greed observes PAN, 10/16/20

31. Mad Dog 31 observes PAN, 10/17/20

32. Regulator 73 observes PAN, 10/17/20

33. Toxic 6 (Hackney 6) observes PAN, 9/16/20

34. PAN on East Coast, 12/1/19

35. Toxic 6 PAN, 9/5/20

36. Toxic 6 PAN (Hackney6) observes PAN, 8/31/20  a. video 1  b. video 2

37. Hellhound 1X (Coffee) observes PAN, 8/24/20

38. Toxic 6 observes PAN in Persian Gulf, 8/21/20

39. Hackney 6 (Toxic 6) PAN observation, 8/8/20

40. Hackney 6 (MQ-9) Gulf of Arabia dual PAN, 5/5/20

41. Hackney 5X (mint) HD 2020-02-13, 2/13/20

42. Hackney 6 (MQ-9) PAN in Persian Gulf, 5/20/20

43. HH-11 PANs, 7/3/18

44. Hi-Res: Hackney 4X observes PAN at 2135Z, 9/25/19

45. UFOs in formation over Persian Gulf

46. Hi-Res: Hackney 4X observes PANs at 1715Z, 9/23/19

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X. To arrange for delivery of documents or to ask any related follow up questions, please contact the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Majority staff at (202) 225-5074. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Anna Paulina Luna

Chairwoman

Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets

cc: The Honorable Jasmine Crockett, Ranking Member

Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets

1. Restoring Public Trust Through PAN Transparency and Whistleblower Protection: Hearing Before Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, 119th Cong., at HVC-210 (September 9, 2025).

2. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth: Hearing before Subcomm. on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation. (November 13, 2024) (Statement from Nancy Mace, Member, U.S. House of Representatives.)