The 2023-2026 UAP Disclosure Timeline

About The 2023-2026 UAP Disclosure Timeline

The 2023 to 2026 stretch produced the most sustained congressional attention to unidentified aerial phenomena in United States history, and it ended with a sitting Florida congresswoman, Anna Paulina Luna, telling her Twitter followers in April 2026 that she had been reading 1 Enoch and thought they should too. The phrase 'Book of Enoch' spiked in Google searches that week to a level it had not reached since the Dead Sea Scrolls publication debates of the 1990s. The readers arriving at Satyori right now are, in significant part, people who watched a congressional hearing, heard a podcast, or saw Luna's post and typed 'what is the Book of Enoch' into a search bar. This page is the chronological timeline of what happened politically, who testified to what, and how an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text ended up in that conversation.

What this page is, and what it is not. This is not a page arguing that the United States government has confirmed non-human craft. It is not a page arguing that the whistleblower claims are fabricated. It is a dated record of documented congressional activity, public testimony, the bills introduced, the amendments that passed and the ones that did not, and the cultural spillover into texts like 1 Enoch. Where a claim is disputed, the page names the dispute. Where testimony has not been corroborated, the page says so. Where a specific figure or vote count would require a citation I cannot verify in this draft, the page uses general phrasing and names the general source. Readers who want the Satyori library view of the ancient texts involved will find linked entries to Enoch, the Watchers, the Nephilim, the Book of Enoch, and ancient astronaut theory at the end.

The pre-2023 foundation. The current disclosure cycle did not begin in 2023. It began in December 2017, when The New York Times published a report by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean revealing the existence of a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, known as AATIP, and publishing Navy gun-camera footage that had been filmed off the coast of San Diego in 2004. That footage, later labeled with the names Tic Tac, Gimbal, and GoFast, showed objects whose motion Navy pilots and radar operators described as inconsistent with known aircraft. The Department of Defense confirmed the authenticity of the videos in April 2020, an acknowledgment that mattered because it closed the older skeptical move of dismissing such footage as civilian hoaxes.

Behind the 2017 Times article sat a longer institutional history. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and its predecessor the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) run through Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), a Bigelow Aerospace subsidiary, beginning in 2008, had been funded quietly under a line item in the Defense appropriations process at the request of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and with the support of Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. Luis Elizondo has said publicly that he ran the program's unclassified mission within the Pentagon from 2010 until his resignation in October 2017, and that he resigned in part to press for public attention to the issue. The existence of the program was contested by the Department of Defense, which at various points said that funding had ended and at other points acknowledged that related work continued under other names. The 2017 article, and the subsequent release of the Navy gun-camera footage by the To the Stars Academy group that Elizondo joined after leaving government, is the moment at which that institutional history entered public view.

In December 2020, Congress included a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act directing the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, to produce an unclassified report on unidentified aerial phenomena. That report, the 'Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,' was delivered in June 2021. It described 144 reported incidents from 2004 through 2021 and concluded that in most cases the available data were insufficient to identify the phenomena, while stating that a small subset showed unusual flight characteristics. The report did not affirm a non-human origin, and it did not rule one out. It did establish, as a matter of official government record, that the United States military had been tracking objects it could not explain.

AARO and the 2022 hearings. In July 2022, the Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO, as the successor structure to AATIP and related efforts. Sean Kirkpatrick was named as its first director. In May 2022, the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation held the first open congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena in more than fifty years. Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, testified in public. The hearing was narrow in scope and measured in tone, but it broke a long silence.

The same general period saw the public testimony of Ryan Graves, a former Navy F/A-18F pilot, and David Fravor, the retired Navy commander who led the 2004 Tic Tac incident. Graves described near-daily encounters during training exercises off the Atlantic coast in 2014 and 2015. Fravor's account of the Tic Tac encounter, originally reported in the 2017 Times article, was repeated under a different set of public pressures by 2022. The USS Omaha incident of 2019, in which Navy personnel reported and filmed a spherical object moving across the water and descending beneath the surface off the coast of California, entered public awareness through journalist Jeremy Corbell and the documentary filmmaker George Knapp. By late 2022, the public material on unidentified aerial phenomena was no longer limited to a single 2004 case.

2023: the Grusch hearing. The pivot year was 2023. In June of that year, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published an article in The Debrief introducing David Charles Grusch, a former intelligence officer with service in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, who had filed a protected disclosure with the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. Grusch alleged, in his capacity as a whistleblower, that the United States was in possession of craft and biological material of non-human origin, held inside a compartmented program he said was shielded from congressional oversight. He did not claim firsthand recovery. He claimed to have been told of the program by a number of current and former officials who had firsthand knowledge, and he said he had reported what he was told through the proper channels.

On July 26, 2023, a joint hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation (chair Nancy Mace) and the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs (chair Glenn Grothman) held a public hearing with Grusch, Fravor, and Graves as witnesses. The hearing was carried live by cable news and streamed on the committee's YouTube channel, where it accumulated several million views within days. Grusch testified under oath, though the specific operational claims remained confined to classified settings with the Inspector General and select committee staff rather than to the open hearing. His public testimony focused on process: that the program existed, that he had reported it, that the ICIG had found his complaint credible and urgent, and that reprisal had followed. Representatives from both parties, including Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, and Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, pressed the witnesses on what oversight existed and what more was possible.

The Pentagon's response, delivered through Susan Gough as a spokesperson, was that AARO had found no verifiable evidence of any program involving the recovery or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial material. That denial was, and remains, the on-the-record position of the Department of Defense. The Grusch account has not been confirmed, and it has not been conclusively falsified. It has, as a matter of public record, been taken seriously by the ICIG and by a bipartisan set of members of Congress.

The Schumer-Rounds amendment. The legislative consequence of the 2023 hearing was the UAP Disclosure Act, introduced in the Senate by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. The amendment drew, by its authors' acknowledgment, on the legal architecture of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. It proposed a review board with authority over records related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including records held by private contractors, and it proposed the use of eminent domain to recover material held outside government custody. The amendment passed the Senate as part of the larger bill. In conference, and under opposition reported to include senior House Armed Services Committee members, the amendment was substantially reduced before the final version of the NDAA became law. Schumer publicly expressed frustration with the reduction. The reduced version nevertheless established, as a matter of federal law, an interagency records review process for UAP-related documents and put modest sunshine obligations on the executive branch.

2024: the November hearing. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee, under the leadership of then-Chairman James Comer with Representative Nancy Mace chairing the subcommittee session, held a second public hearing. The witness panel was different from the 2023 roster. Luis Elizondo, formerly associated with AATIP, testified to his own account of the program and of what he said he had seen in classified settings. Timothy Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral and former acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gave a public account of having received email evidence, during his Navy service, of Navy UAP encounters, including the 2015 USS Theodore Roosevelt "Go Fast" incident, and spoke to his own assessment that the phenomena under discussion deserved serious scientific and policy attention. Michael Shellenberger, the journalist and author, presented what he described as independent sourcing that partially corroborated the Grusch narrative, and named, in reporting he had published separately, figures including the physicist Eric Davis. Michael Gold, a former NASA official, testified to the institutional and legal questions the disclosure discussion raised.

The 2024 hearing differed from the 2023 hearing in tone. Witnesses were more willing to describe, in public, not only the existence of the phenomena but also the institutional resistance they said they had encountered when attempting to raise the matter through official channels. The hearing produced no immediate legislative vehicle of the size of the Schumer-Rounds amendment, but it deepened the bipartisan base for continued oversight activity. Representatives Burchett of Tennessee and Luna of Florida, by this point familiar figures in the issue, were joined by Eric Burlison of Missouri and others in calling for further hearings and broader declassification.

2025: the Luna Rogan appearance and the Moskowitz task force. In 2025, the center of gravity shifted into extended Senate and House committee work, podcast-driven public engagement, and the slow accumulation of further corroborating or contested witness accounts. On August 13, 2025, Representative Anna Paulina Luna appeared on episode 2365 of The Joe Rogan Experience. In that conversation, which ran more than three hours, Luna discussed the UAP issue, the congressional oversight she and colleagues had been pursuing, and, in a passage that drew wider attention, her reading of 1 Enoch. Luna described the text as part of the context in which she had come to understand the phenomena under discussion. That appearance was one of several moments during 2025 when the disclosure conversation intersected, in the public arena, with ancient textual material.

Across 2025, Representative Jared Moskowitz, along with colleagues from both parties, advanced work toward what was described in reporting as a bipartisan UAP task force within the House. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Senator Mike Rounds continued pressing for declassification and records access on the Senate side. Sean Kirkpatrick stepped down from AARO in late 2023, and by 2025 AARO was led by Jon Kosloski, who issued further unclassified reports continuing the AARO practice of resolving a portion of cases as known objects and leaving a smaller portion unresolved. The Shellenberger reporting during this period, along with further statements by Gallaudet and independent reporting on Eric Davis, continued to fill in, or dispute, parts of the broader Grusch picture. Partial corroboration is a phrase that covers real territory. It also covers real gaps. By the end of 2025, the disclosure narrative had moved from being carried principally by one named whistleblower to being carried by a broader set of figures, each with their own partial account and their own scope of first-hand knowledge.

2026 through April: Luna's post and the Enoch spike. In April 2026, Representative Anna Paulina Luna published a post on Twitter, now X, directing readers to 1 Enoch. The post reframed the Enoch reference from the conversational aside it had been on the Rogan program into a direct public recommendation. Within days, Google Trends data showed 'Book of Enoch' rising to a multi-year high. The wider disclosure conversation had been moving toward ancient texts for some time, but Luna's post compressed that movement into a single cultural moment.

The April 2026 moment is the proximate reason a reader arrives at Satyori today wanting to know what the Book of Enoch is. The Rogan appearance in August 2025 is the reason that reader may already be familiar with Luna's interest in the text. Both events are real. Web search, at the time of this draft, surfaces the Rogan appearance more readily than the April 2026 post, because podcast episodes accumulate inbound links faster than Twitter posts do and because Twitter content is more difficult to index at scale. That indexing asymmetry is a limit of search engines, not a falsification of the event. A careful reader will find both moments, the August 2025 Rogan conversation and the April 2026 X post, in the record.

Why an ancient text is in a modern political conversation. The question of why Luna, and more broadly a segment of the disclosure conversation, has turned to 1 Enoch is a question worth answering plainly. 1 Enoch is a Jewish apocalyptic text, composed in stages from roughly the third century BCE through the first century CE, that describes the descent of a group of heavenly beings called the Watchers, their instruction of humans in metallurgy, cosmetics, weapons, sorcery, and astrology, and their fathering of a hybrid race, the Nephilim, on human women. The text was preserved as canonical scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, was widely read in Second Temple Judaism, was cited by the New Testament epistle of Jude, and was excluded from later rabbinic and western Christian canons. Eleven copies were found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A reader approaching 1 Enoch fresh is reading a text in which non-human intelligences visit Earth, transmit forbidden technology to humans, and produce hybrids. The textual parallel to the disclosure conversation, whatever one thinks of the disclosure claims, is not invented by modern readers. It is in the text.

The tradition of reading ancient texts through this lens. The lens through which ancient texts are read as records of non-human contact has a history. Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968, is the starting point of the modern tradition. Zecharia Sitchin's Earth Chronicles series, beginning with The 12th Planet in 1976, developed the Sumerian Anunnaki reading. Mauro Biglino, a former translator for the Vatican's Edizioni San Paolo edition of the Hebrew Bible, contributed a translation-level argument that the Hebrew word elohim, often rendered in English as 'God' or 'gods,' refers in the Hebrew text itself to concrete beings rather than an abstract deity. Graham Hancock, though more associated with catastrophist prehistory than with direct non-human contact, contributed a wider interpretive frame in which the assumption of a single linear rise of civilization is loosened. Billy Carson and other contemporary figures have continued and extended this line. Satyori treats this as a named interpretive tradition, traces its lineage, and neither advocates for it as truth nor dismisses it as pseudoscience. The reader decides.

Reading the timeline honestly. A reader who wants to judge the disclosure conversation fairly should hold several things at once. First, the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena with unusual flight characteristics is, at this point, a matter of unclassified United States government record. That is separate from any claim about what the phenomena are. Second, the Grusch account, which makes stronger claims, is under investigation, has been partially corroborated by some sources and disputed by others, and has not been confirmed. Third, the Luna moment, both the 2025 Rogan appearance and the April 2026 X post, is a cultural event that reflects and amplifies genuine public curiosity about how ancient texts describe the same kind of phenomena modern witnesses are describing. None of those three things requires any of the others to be true or false. The disclosure conversation is, in this sense, several conversations at once.

What the Book of Enoch says, briefly. For the reader who arrived here because of Luna's post and wants the shortest possible primer on the text itself, 1 Enoch is a composite of five booklets. The Book of the Watchers, the opening and longest-cited section, describes the descent of two hundred celestial beings onto Mount Hermon, led by Semjaza and Azazel, their oath to take human wives, the birth of the Nephilim, the teaching of weapons and sorcery to humanity, and the resulting divine judgment. The Book of Parables describes the Son of Man and the final judgment. The Astronomical Book describes the movements of the sun, moon, stars, and calendar in detail. The Book of Dream Visions offers symbolic history. The Epistle of Enoch is a final exhortation. The text does not describe craft in the modern sense. It describes beings whose descent is presented as bodily and whose transmission of knowledge is presented as transgressive. A reader who wants the full Satyori treatment of this material can begin at the Book of Enoch entry and move through the Watchers, the Nephilim, and Azazel.

Where this leaves the reader in April 2026. The present moment, in the spring of 2026, is distinct in the disclosure conversation because ancient textual material has been explicitly named by a sitting member of Congress as part of the frame. That has happened before in private conversations, in podcasts, and in books. It has not, in living memory, happened in quite this way, with the text cited by name to a public audience of tens of millions. The reader arriving here now is asking a reasonable question. The text is old, the tradition around the text is older, and the reasons the text is circulating again are visible in the record. The rest of the Satyori library, linked below, is meant for the reader who wants to walk further in.

Significance

Why this timeline matters as a cultural event. The 2023 to 2026 stretch is the first period in United States history in which congressional hearings on unidentified aerial phenomena, a sitting congresswoman reading 1 Enoch on a podcast with millions of listeners, a search-spike on an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text, and a federal records review mechanism established by statute have occurred together inside a thirty-six-month window. None of those four events on its own is unprecedented. Congress held open UAP hearings in 1966 and 1968 under Representative J. Edward Roush. Ancient astronaut writers have reached mass audiences since 1968. Ancient texts go viral periodically, as the Gospel of Judas did in 2006. Records review boards have been established before, most notably the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. The convergence is the event.

What the convergence produces for a reader. The reader arriving at this page is typically trying to resolve a specific piece of confusion: a respected, elected figure said on a widely-heard program that she had been reading a text the reader did not know existed, and the reader wants to know whether the text is real, whether the congresswoman's reading of it is defensible, and how any of it connects to the videos of metallic objects the Navy has released. That cluster of questions is, in the terms of this timeline, not new, but the three pieces meeting in one reader's attention is new. Satyori's function, as a teaching library, is to provide the reader with the parts of the picture the news cycle does not have time to render. The timeline above provides the political record. The linked entries on the Watchers, Nephilim, Enoch, and the Book of Enoch provide the textual record. The entry on ancient astronaut theory provides the interpretive tradition that connects them.

Why measured framing is the right editorial choice here. Two kinds of framing fail the reader. The first is the framing in which any congressional attention to unidentified aerial phenomena is presented as confirmation of non-human craft. That framing collapses the distinction between the Navy's unclassified acknowledgment that certain objects remain unidentified and the stronger claim that the United States government possesses recovered non-human material. The first claim is on the public record. The second is a disputed whistleblower account under investigation. Treating them as equivalent misleads the reader.

The second failing framing is the inverse, in which any attention paid to the disclosure conversation is treated as credulity. That framing requires the reader to dismiss the public testimony of retired flag officers, career intelligence officers, Navy aviators with combat records, and a bipartisan set of members of Congress as either delusion or publicity-seeking. The record does not support that dismissal. The more honest editorial position is to describe what has been documented, name what is disputed, and let the reader hold complexity. That is Satyori's posture here.

Why 1 Enoch, specifically, and not other texts. The Enoch spike around Luna's April 2026 post is not arbitrary. 1 Enoch is the ancient text in which the descent of non-human intelligences, the transmission of forbidden technology, and the production of hybrid offspring are rendered in the greatest narrative detail. The Sumerian Anunnaki literature, which ancient astronaut writers have cited since Sitchin in 1976, is older and in some ways closer to the core claim, but it is also more fragmentary and less narratively available to a general reader. The Book of Genesis mentions the sons of God and the Nephilim briefly in Genesis 6, and Jude alludes to the Watchers narrative, but neither text provides the long, dramatic account that 1 Enoch does. If a reader is reading one ancient text on the assumption that ancient descriptions of non-human contact are worth taking seriously, 1 Enoch is the single best text to read. That is why the reference spiked, and that is why the reference is durable.

Where the Satyori treatment goes next. The timeline page is one hub in a wider set of material. Readers who want the political history further back can go to the entry on Richard Dolan, whose multi-volume UFO history covers the period from 1941 through the present. Readers who want the textual grounding can go to the Book of Enoch. Readers who want the named interpretive tradition can go to ancient astronaut theory, and from there to the pages on Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin. The connective tissue among these entries is the point. The library is more useful than any single page, and the disclosure reader who arrives curious about Luna's reading list will, if the pages do their job, leave with a better map of the landscape they are trying to understand.

Connections

Inside the Satyori library. The disclosure timeline sits at the intersection of three wings of the Satyori library. The first wing is the Enochic neighborhood, organized around Enoch the patriarch, the Watchers, the Nephilim, and Azazel, along with the entries on Semjaza and Methuselah. For the primary source itself, the reader should go to the Book of Enoch.

The interpretive tradition. The second wing is the named lineage of ancient astronaut interpretation. The gateway is ancient astronaut theory, which traces the tradition from 1968 forward. From that page, readers can go to the individual entries on Erich von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin. The entry on the hybridity question provides the theological bridge between the textual account of the Nephilim and the modern disclosure-era framing of hybridization. Readers who want the cross-tradition view of non-human intelligences, which places the Watchers alongside the Sumerian Anunnaki, the Greek Titans, the Hindu Asuras, and other figures, will find that synthesis at the flagship comparative entry in this neighborhood.

The modern disclosure wing. The third wing is the set of entries on the modern UFO and UAP research record. The entry on Richard Dolan is the most extensive treatment of the political and institutional history of United States UFO policy from 1941 through the early disclosure era, and it pairs directly with the timeline on this page for readers who want the longer arc.

The flood and catastrophe neighborhood. The fourth adjacent neighborhood, which interlocks with the Enochic material, is the flood tradition, organized around the Great Flood, Noah, Mount Ararat, and the Black Sea Deluge hypothesis. The Book of Enoch treats the flood as the direct consequence of the Watchers' transgression, which makes the flood neighborhood part of the same textual cycle the disclosure conversation is pointing at.

Cross-cultural comparison. Readers who want to see the Watchers tradition placed beside similar traditions from other cultures should go to giants in world mythology. The pattern of descended non-human beings, their transmission of knowledge to humans, and the resulting hybridity is not unique to the Hebrew apocalyptic tradition. The wider library treats that pattern directly, with each tradition handled on its own terms and then compared.

Figures to watch on the political side. Beyond the Satyori library, readers tracking the political side of the disclosure conversation will want to follow Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Representative Jared Moskowitz of Florida, Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, along with the leadership of the House Oversight Committee in whichever session is current. On the journalistic side, the work of Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Jeremy Corbell, along with reporting by Michael Shellenberger and by George Knapp, forms the spine of the public record. AARO's unclassified reports, released through the Department of Defense, provide the other side of the institutional record and are worth reading directly rather than through summaries. This page will be updated as the disclosure timeline continues to develop, and readers returning to Satyori after future hearings or legislation will find the chronology extended.

Further Reading