Representative Luna has called for the defunding of AARO amid questions surrounding alleged influence manoeuvres from the Pentagon's UFO Office
After months of criticism from parliamentarians and suggestions that the Trump administration is preparing a UFO disclosure event, the time for a long-awaited reckoning may have come.
Rep. Luna
Representative Luna has been at the forefront of parliamentary UFO disclosure efforts for years, using ground investigations and hearings to try to pierce the veil of secrecy that shrouds the topic. The straightforwardness of her latest tweet marks a new level of escalation:
‘I will be recommending to the Chairman of DOGE, @timburchett, that we completely disband and defund AARO.’
This new move by Luna is not out of the ordinary; in an interview with Jillian Michaels the same week, she stated:
We have dealt with an agency, not the CIA, that specifically has an internal task force, that is looking into all this stuff and as soon as we get the official on paper declassification order, I want to do a press conference with all the information that we are told and shown in that briefing, because it’s important for people to know but the federal government’s never going to tell you if they can’t explain something.
For years, parliamentarians interested in UFOs have doubted the repeated claims of the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. They have managed to hear directly from whistleblowers and other agencies, but they lack the authority to declassify any information.
Every single member of congress that has gone into that briefing that we had, has come out and said, excuse my language, we're like : “holy shit”. So there's some interesting stuff you'll get; you're definitely going to see a lot of interesting footage a lot of photos, firsthand accounts from certain people that will be out in those reports.
Regarding alleged casualties and injuries caused by UAP, she added :
Service people have been injured by these UAPs but they're not getting the care they need because it's like the the the whole thing doesn't exist.
AARO’s communication and influence
These statements are a far cry from the last historical report published by the AARO. That report was widely criticised by experts such as Christopher Mellon and Robert Powell due to its numerous errors and problematic sourcing, while its author, Dr Kirkpatrick, claimed to have received sufficient information from the administration. Not to mention that the US administration, alongside the UK, France and Russia, has been investigating UAP incursions since at least the end of WWII and has published extensive reports on the subject.
Alongside these very strange inaccuracies, communication between the AARO and experts has been dubious at best. The widely reported closed-door briefings and press conferences for state-aligned groups have raised questions about the AARO’s strategy.
In an interview with Ross Coulthart, Reed Summers made the following statement regarding the possibility of AARO being used to control communication about UAPs to the public:
To my understanding, yes, that would be a deathstroke to the disclosure process. We would not see the data.
To my knowledge, AARO has proposed funding to international groups as well across Europe. And they are offering money to some and not to others. And the presence of money from a billion, multi-hundred billion dollar enterprise in a resource-starved civilian space could be very dangerous. It could distort the entire research agenda.
Independent groups collaborating with AARO have been extremely discreet about their involvement. This is probably due to the reputational cost of working with an office that has been criticised by whistleblowers for its use of information and conduct, and which has even failed to recover direct proof.
Hours after hearing of Elizondo’s evidence, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force’s investigations unit cordoned the office and gathered with a drill to break open the safe. As they approached it, they realized the drawer wasn’t actually locked. When they opened it, they found yet another surprise: It was empty.
Communication with the AARO, channeled though Pentagon’s spokesperson Susan Gough, have been strangely disrupted. While French, Belgian and UK defense have been extremely prompt to respond to questions from Sentinel News, our editorial team has been waiting for years the answers to a serie of Yes or No questions from the US Department of War. Susan Gough is also known as the author of The Evolution of Strategic Influence. In that work, the author defines strategic influence as “the deliberate, conscious coordination or integration of all government informational activities designed to influence the opinions, attitudes and behaviour of foreign groups in ways that will promote U.S. national objectives, combined with other elements of national power to achieve maximum psychological effect.”
President Trump
With the domain names alien.gov and aliens.gov being reserved the same week that actor Dennis Quaid declared that Trump had told him, ‘You know I’m going to release the files’ regarding aliens, and with the pressure in the White House seemingly increasing, one can only wonder how much pressure there is in the halls of the CIA, the Department of War and the Department of Energy, all of which have been involved in covering up UFOs according to whistleblowers.
Rep. Tim Burchett, questioned by Sentinel News’ partner Ask A Pol, declared :
Burchett: Yeah, I hope it’s—I hope it’s going to happen. I hope they don’t get to him and make him pull back. That’s what’s happened in the past. That’s what’s happened with every report that they’ve had. They said they’re going to bring it out and then they don’t. I hope—I talked to the president about it. I hope we get an answer.
Laslo: Do you think—have you gotten signs from the administration or the president that we’re going to get disclosure?
Burchett: President says he’s going to put it out, so — he hasn’t lied to me yet.
This is a grim reminder of the reality of the US administration’s communication management regarding UFOs. According to whistleblower Matthew Brown, the alleged legacy programme, which is responsible for crash retrieval, reverse engineering and controlling information about craft of non-human origin, is under the authority of the National Security Council, which is led by President Trump.
As whistleblowers reports ongoing threats, one can only guess at how far President Trump is willing to expose his own administration’s excesses. He may be considering whether this would be the only issue with a large enough societal impact to eclipse his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.
National Security
Public and media pressure is also increasing. According to reports by ABC and the Washington Post, unidentified ‘drones’ blocked US bases again during a visit by the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. The world’s leading military power seems unable to counter the threat.
U.S. officials detected unidentified drones above the Washington Army base where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth live, according to three people briefed on the situation. Officials have not determined where they came from.
Multiple drones were spotted over Fort Lesley J. McNair on a single night in the last 10 days, the official said, prompting increased security measures and a meeting at the White House to discuss how to respond.
The drones over Fort McNair prompted officials to weigh relocating Rubio and Hegseth, two of the people briefed said.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell declined to discuss the drones.
'“Between March 9-15, 2026, BAFB Security Forces observed multiple waves of 12-15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line, with aircraft displaying non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming,” the document said. “After reaching multiple points across the installation, the drones dispersed across sensitive locations on the base.”
Following the UAP wave in New Jersey, such events have prompted states to act independently of the administration. Connecticut and New Jersey are both considering funding their own UAP research in response to the lack of information from federal authorities.
Misinformation and disinformation
The United States’ success in managing UFO information over the past decades cannot be overstated. In an article published yesterday in The Guardian, Tom Philips, the reporter covering the Varginha case, omitted the recent National Press Club conference organised by James Fox, the director of a documentary about the case. During the conference, witnesses called for an investigation and a full autopsy of the soldier who died following contact with the creature was published. However, according to Tom Philips, this is just a ‘rumour’.
While it would be easy to blame the reporter for his mistakes, the event was barely covered by the media, with Ross Coulthart and Meagan Medick of Newsnation being one of the few exceptions. When information isn’t available, reporters can only report what they first find.
In a report by Harry Turner, an Australian physicist and head of his country’s nuclear intelligence division, he discusses finding the source of a UFO disinformation operation. He explained how that information management was created and why :
The CIA became alarmed at the overloading of military communications during the mass sightings of 1952, and considered the possibility that the USSR may take advantage of such a situation.
As a result, OSI acting through the Robsertson-panel meeting of mid-January 1953, persuaded the USAF to use Project Blue Book as a means of publicly “debunking” UFO’s, and at a later stage to allocate funds for the Avro advanced “saucer” aircraft and the launching of a crash programme into anti-gravity power. To initiate such programmes decades ahead of normal scientific development would indicated that the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of advanced “aircraft” which presumably used a gravity-control method of propulsion.
Dated 25 May 1971, this report demonstrates the importance that the US placed on debunking UFO information. It also explains why, in Western-aligned cultures today, the possibility that non-human craft may already be here is not part of popular culture and remains challenging to address in academic circles.
Outside of these cultures, in South America, Africa and Asia, such debunking was not as effective. Even Canada is considering setting up a public UFO office. The same week that Trump and Obama made comments about aliens and declassification, the PLA published an article in which it was stated that:
That year, an unidentified aerial threat emerged, posing a danger to our air defense security. Wu Hui received orders to take off, piloting his fighter jet to investigate. At 10,000 meters altitude, he executed an extreme climb maneuver and successfully shot down the unauthorized aerial object.
Are we on the verge of another 25-year cycle of disinformation, or are we on the cusp of a new era? Only one person in the White House has the power to decide.