Key takeaways
- David Grusch, Dylan Borland and Matthew Brown have publicly asked President Trump to waive their non-disclosure agreements so they can tell the public what they say they saw inside classified UAP programmes
- The Pentagon's 14 September 2026 waiver only protects disclosures made to official PURSUE representatives. It does not allow public statements, and it covers Department of War personnel, not the intelligence agencies
- Grusch says he has seen photographs and video of recovery operations 'with my own two eyes'. Borland says the US has recovered 'materials and entities'. Neither claim has been verified
- Rep. Eric Burlison backs the request. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs the declassification task force, says her focus is on protecting witnesses, not pressing for public release
- A presidential waiver would remove the legal barrier to speaking. It would not declassify anything, and it would not make the claims true
Jump to section 6 sections
- UFO Whistleblowers Ask Trump for Immunity: What Happened
- Who Are the Three UFO Whistleblowers? Grusch, Borland and Brown
- Pentagon UAP NDA Waiver: What the 14 September Order Actually Allows
- Can Trump Give UFO Whistleblowers Immunity?
- What Congress Is Saying: Burlison and Luna
- What Happens Next for UAP Disclosure
Three of the best-known UFO whistleblowers in the United States have stopped waiting for the system and gone straight to the President. In a New York Post story published on Saturday 19 September 2026, David Grusch, Dylan Borland and Matthew Brown asked Donald Trump to waive their non-disclosure agreements and give them immunity. They want to say in public what they have so far only said behind closed doors.
The timing is not an accident. Five days earlier the Pentagon had issued its own UAP waiver, the one that follows President Trump's July order and the ODNI memo in August. Read the small print and it lets witnesses talk to a government task force, and only to a government task force. The three men are saying that isn't what they meant. This post looks at what they've asked for, what the Pentagon has actually granted, and why the gap between the two is the real story.
UFO Whistleblowers Ask Trump for Immunity: What Happened
On 19 September 2026, UFO whistleblowers David Grusch, Dylan Borland and Matthew Brown publicly asked President Trump to waive their non-disclosure agreements and grant them immunity, so they can describe what they say they saw inside classified UAP programmes. The request was coordinated by James Fox, the documentary maker behind The Phenomenon and The Program, who also hosted the Capitol steps press conference in June where Grusch stood with four members of Congress. Fox released a video in which Grusch speaks to the camera: "Mr. President, give us the authorization and we're ready to go."
Fox told the Post: "For the first time in history you have a direct public plea, not private, to the president of the United States, to have their NDAs waived and have them protected, so they can disclose what they know to the American population." His summary of the ask: "All they need is immunity from the president. Just the stroke of a pen. He's got the authority to do it."
Each of the three says he saw something inside a classified programme that he is legally barred from describing. Grusch says he has seen photographs and video of recovery operations involving craft and what he called non-human occupants "with my own two eyes". Borland went further, telling the Post: "We've recovered materials and entities, biologics." Brown asked the President to confirm "one simple fact: we are not alone."
Those are claims, not findings. Nothing in the six batches of Pentagon UFO files released since May supports them, and the men themselves say the evidence is classified. That is the bind: the only way to check what they're saying is to release the material they say they can't talk about.
Who Are the Three UFO Whistleblowers? Grusch, Borland and Brown
David Grusch is a former US Air Force intelligence officer who served at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. Congressional records list him as the NRO's representative to the UAP Task Force. In July 2023 he told a House Oversight subcommittee, under oath, that the United States has run a decades-long programme to recover and reverse-engineer craft of non-human origin. He said the detail was classified and could only be given in a secure setting. He has since named specific files to intelligence oversight bodies and now works in Rep. Eric Burlison's office as an adviser.
Dylan Borland is a US Air Force veteran. Some of this weekend's coverage says he testified to Congress in 2024; the record shows he appeared before the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on 9 September 2025. His account is of a silent triangular craft hovering low over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2012, which he says interfered with his phone before accelerating away. Langley shares its runways with NASA's Langley Research Center, which is where the "NASA hangar" in the headlines comes from. It is one of a long line of black triangle sightings at US military bases, and Borland has said reporting it cost him his career. His quote to the Post was blunt: Trump "needs to rip the Band-Aid off himself and needs to go out there and confirm we're not alone."
Matthew Brown is a former Department of Defense and State Department analyst who later worked as a defence contractor. He wrote the report on a programme he calls Immaculate Constellation, an alleged unacknowledged special access programme that collects high-resolution UAP imagery from across the US government. The report was delivered to Congress in November 2024, and Brown went public as its author on the Weaponized podcast in April and May 2025. The Pentagon has said it has no record of any programme by that name. Brown says the non-disclosure agreements he signed last for life and bar him from disclosing classified information without prior written authorisation from the government. He wants that authorisation from the top.
What links the three is that all of them have already talked to the people the new waiver lets them talk to. Grusch has briefed the intelligence community inspector general and Congress. Borland has testified in public. Brown's report is with the House task force. A waiver that only covers conversations with investigators gives them nothing they don't already have.
Pentagon UAP NDA Waiver: What the 14 September Order Actually Allows
On Monday 14 September 2026 the Department of War announced what it called "targeted legal relief" for UAP witnesses. The release says the waiver "establishes an authorized, legally protected disclosure mechanism for current and former personnel to provide UAP-related National Defense Information to designated" representatives of PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.
Here is what it does. It supersedes the civil and administrative enforcement provisions in non-disclosure agreements and Special Access Program indoctrination agreements, for covered disclosures made directly to PURSUE representatives. In the Pentagon's words, individuals had "cited concerns regarding potential legal liability, loss of clearances, or administrative prosecution stemming from standard NDAs and SAP indoctrination terms." The fix: "this waiver removes those barriers by explicitly authorizing covered disclosures to PURSUE representatives without triggering breach-of-agreement penalties or standard NDA violations."
And here is what it does not do, which is the part that matters this week:
- It does not permit public disclosure. The policy is, in the department's own phrasing, strictly for communications with the PURSUE team.
- It does not cancel the agreements. It lifts specific enforcement provisions for specific conversations.
- It does not grant immunity from criminal prosecution. NDAs are a civil and administrative matter; the Espionage Act is not, and the waiver doesn't mention it.
- It covers Department of War personnel and contractors only. The intelligence agencies, where witnesses like Grusch say the "legacy programmes" sit, come under the ODNI's separate July guidance. Marik von Rennenkampff, a former State and Defense Department official, pointed out on the day that the DoW waiver "apparently does not cover the Intelligence Community" and said the Principal Deputy DNI had indicated an equivalent for the IC is coming.
- It does not say anything about retroactive protection for people who have already spoken out.
The Pentagon did not name its PURSUE representatives, and it didn't answer DefenseScoop's questions about the waiver. Jordan Flowers of the Disclosure Foundation, which represents several would-be witnesses, welcomed it as "a meaningful step toward establishing the facts", while noting his group still helps people submit information to Congress rather than the executive.
So the sequence since July runs: the President directs the agencies to waive NDAs; the ODNI writes it down for 18 intelligence agencies; the Pentagon issues its formal instrument. Each step opens the same door, into a room with government investigators in it and the public outside. Our July post called it "a permission to talk through official channels, nothing more", and nothing since has changed that.
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Can Trump Give UFO Whistleblowers Immunity?
Yes and no. The President can waive NDAs and declassify material with a signature. Immunity from prosecution for publishing classified information is a separate legal question that no President has settled. Three different things are being bundled together here:
- An NDA waiver releases someone from a contract with the government. Trump ordered this in July; the Pentagon issued its version on 14 September.
- Declassification makes the material itself public. Only the President or the originating agency can do it, and it hasn't happened for any of the files these men describe.
- Immunity is a promise not to prosecute. It would have to cover the Espionage Act and similar statutes, not just an NDA.
Fox's line about "the stroke of a pen" is half right. The President sits at the top of the classification system. He can declassify anything, and he can direct agencies to release people from NDAs, which is what the July order did. If Trump wanted Grusch to describe a particular file on television, the straightforward way to do it would be to declassify that file. That is exactly what Grusch and four members of Congress asked for on the Capitol steps in June, and it hasn't happened.
"Immunity" is a different thing, and a harder one. An NDA is a contract, and the government can choose not to enforce it. Disclosing classified national defence information to the public is a criminal matter under statutes that apply whether or not you signed anything. A President can pardon after the fact. Whether he can promise in advance that a specific public disclosure of still-classified material won't be prosecuted, and make that promise stick against a future administration, is not settled, and no President has tried it for this. That is presumably why the whistleblowers want it in writing from the White House rather than from a Pentagon spokesman.
There is a practical problem too. If the three men describe what they say they saw, anyone who wants to check it will need the underlying photographs, video and programme records. Those would still be classified. A public account without the material behind it moves the argument from "they won't let us speak" to "you'll have to take our word for it", which is roughly where it sits today.
None of that makes the request unreasonable. It makes it a request for declassification wearing a different coat. And declassification is the thing the PURSUE releases were supposed to deliver. Six batches and 447 records in, nothing published so far describes the crash-retrieval programmes these three are talking about.
What Congress Is Saying: Burlison and Luna
Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, whose office Grusch works in, backs the request. He told the Post the administration's file releases were historically important and that Trump could be "the most consequential leader in modern times" if he goes further. Burlison has been consistent on this since July. His statement on the NDA directive urged anyone thinking of using it to bring a lawyer and a member of Congress to the meeting. He wasn't sure the waiver would protect testimony given to Congress first.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida chairs the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which is the body that heard Borland last September and holds Brown's report. Her response was noticeably more careful. "We are hoping with these new measures in place people will feel safer to come forward," she told the Post. Her stated priority is protection from retaliation, not pressing for public release. That is a real difference in emphasis between two of the most pro-disclosure members of Congress. It suggests the task force would rather take new testimony in a SCIF, as it planned for the whistleblower Burlison mentioned in July, than push witnesses onto camera before the paperwork is settled.
The Senate is on a different track again. Its subpoenas to defence contractors for legacy UAP programme records, issued in July, aim at the documents rather than the witnesses, which is the route that produces something checkable.
What Happens Next for UAP Disclosure
Three things to watch. First, whether the White House responds at all. No response had been reported by Monday morning, and its recent line on UFOs has been to deny that any "disclosure speech" is planned. Second, whether the ODNI publishes the intelligence-community equivalent of the Pentagon's waiver, which would at least bring the agencies Grusch worked for inside the same tent. Third, whether the next PURSUE batch, due in late October or early November on the current rhythm, contains anything from a first-hand witness rather than seventy-year-old paperwork.
For readers in the UK, the sensible reading is the one we've held since February: the paperwork is real, the process is real, and the claims about recovered craft and bodies remain exactly that. Three men with security clearances and a good deal to lose are saying they've seen proof. The government has built a channel for them to say it privately and has not, so far, let a single piece of it out. Whether that's a cover-up or a classification system doing what classification systems do, the answer is in the files, not the interviews.
If you'd like to read the primary material yourself, every PURSUE document and video is in our browsable Pentagon UFO file archive, and our UAP document archive holds the standout cases from each batch. And if something odd crosses your own sky this week, check our UK aurora forecast and the list of ISS passes tonight first. Those two, plus the best binoculars for stargazing, explain most of what people report.
Sources:
- 'We are not alone': Coalition of UFO whistleblowers call on Trump to let them publicly reveal secrets · New York Post, 19 September 2026
- 'I've Seen This Evidence': Whistleblowers Beg Trump for Immunity · IBTimes UK, 20 September 2026
- Pentagon offers new 'targeted legal relief' for UAP whistleblowers supporting Trump's PURSUE work · DefenseScoop, 14 September 2026
- UAP Transparency Waiver May Shield Insiders From 'Administrative Prosecution' · IBTimes UK, 15 September 2026
- Rep. Eric Burlison statement on President Trump's UAP NDA directive, 29 July 2026
- Dylan Borland written testimony, House Oversight Task Force, 9 September 2025 (PDF)
- What do UFO whistleblowers want Trump to reveal? · Attack of the Fanboy, 19 September 2026
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Ian ClaytonAmateur astronomer and founder of WatchTheStars.co.uk, dedicated to helping others explore the wonders of our universe. Full profile →
