In June 2024, four figures from the defence, intelligence, and scientific establishments launched the UAP Disclosure Fund in Washington, DC: Luis Elizondo, former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon; Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and former Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Garry Nolan, professor of pathology at Stanford University; and Colonel Karl Nell (retired), US Army. In October 2025 the organisation rebranded as the Disclosure Foundation, reflecting an expanded mission built on three pillars: policy leadership, legal action, and public education.
Mellon serves as chairman of the board. Jordan Flowers, a Princeton and Columbia Business School graduate with two decades in corporate finance, serves as executive director. The advisory board includes Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (retired), Kirk McConnell (former Senate Armed Services Committee staff), Avi Loeb (Harvard), Harold Puthoff (EarthTech International), Mike Gold (former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Policy), and Carlos Eire (Yale).
The Policy Record
The Foundation publishes a Policy Brief series. Four have appeared since January 2025. The second, by advisory board member Dillon Guthrie, is a legal analysis of congressional UAP oversight published in Volume 16 of the Harvard National Security Journal. The article examines five areas of official UAP action: legislation defining UAP, AARO’s activities and congressional reporting, declassification through the National Archives, whistleblower immunity provisions, and prior statutory limits on undisclosed UAP activities. It has been described as the first legal scholarship in the emerging field of UAP studies.
On 12 November 2024, the Foundation submitted a letter to Congress signed by 29 scientists, national security professionals, and military veterans from institutions including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Rice University, SUNY Albany, and the Department of Defense. The letter called for Congress to pass the UAP Disclosure Act and establish an independent review board empowered to examine all UAP data regardless of classification. Signatories included Garry Nolan, Avi Loeb, Michio Kaku (City College of New York), I. Charles McCullough III (former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community), Ryan Graves, Alex Dietrich, and Luis Elizondo.
The Foundation’s Disclosure Forum 2026, scheduled for 25 June in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building, brings together Senators Mike Rounds and Kirsten Gillibrand, Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Eric Burlison, Tim Burchett, and Suhas Subramanyam, alongside foundation leaders, academics, and national security professionals. The venue is the same room in which the Senate held the Watergate and Iran-Contra hearings.
The Legal Record
The Foundation’s chief legal officer, Hunt Willis, leads a litigation strategy that uses Freedom of Information Act requests, mandatory declassification reviews, and appeals to compel the release of government UAP records.
The flagship achievement came in May 2026. The Foundation’s legal team filed a FOIA request with the National Security Agency for supporting material referenced in the declassified 1980 “Yeates Memo,” an affidavit submitted by the NSA’s chief policy officer in the case Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. NSA. The NSA denied the request in its entirety. The Foundation appealed. The NSA appeals authority acknowledged the blanket denial was improper. The result was the production of hundreds of pages of documents spanning multiple decades, nearly all previously classified TOP SECRET UMBRA, the highest baseline national security classification combined with a codeword designating highly sensitive signals intelligence.
The released documents include radar tracking data, visual sighting reports, altitude and heading records, military scramble orders, and entries describing objects exhibiting controlled behaviour at altitudes exceeding 70,000 feet. Willis stated: “It is simply unacceptable for security classification exemptions to remain on government documents that pre-date the Civil Rights Act.”
The Foundation has submitted additional mandatory declassification review requests for classified briefings that federal law mandated Congress receive, and is challenging further NSA redactions.
From the Archive
The Disclosure Foundation’s network overlaps with nearly every organisation the archive has documented this session:
- The Sol Foundation, which Nolan co-founded. Mellon chairs the Disclosure Foundation and spoke at Sol symposia.
- Americans for Safe Aerospace, where Graves, Gold, and McConnell serve both organisations. Graves signed the Expert Letter.
- The Black Vault, a second approach to the same institutional resistance. The Black Vault files individual FOIA requests; the Disclosure Foundation files appeals and mandatory declassification reviews.
- Avi Loeb, advisory board member, announced in June 2026 to lead a new UAP Science Advisory Council.
- New Paradigm Institute, which pursues disclosure through legal and legislative channels from a different institutional position.
