Daniel Sheehan was co-counsel for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case at the Supreme Court in 1971. He served as chief counsel in Karen Silkwood’s lawsuit against the Kerr-McGee Corporation, winning a $10.5 million jury verdict upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984. He co-founded the Christic Institute, a public interest law firm that litigated nuclear safety, civil rights, and Central American human rights cases for over a decade. In 2023 he formally launched the New Paradigm Institute to apply five decades of constitutional litigation experience to a new subject: compelling government disclosure of information related to unidentified anomalous phenomena and protecting the individuals who come forward to report it.
NPI is an initiative of the Romero Institute, the successor to the Christic Institute, based in Santa Cruz, California. Its executive director is Sara Nelson, who has worked alongside Sheehan since the Silkwood case. The organisation operates through six functions: targeted litigation to compel disclosure, grassroots organising through the Citizens for Disclosure network, fact-based investigation, public education, legislative policy advocacy, and legal assistance for UAP whistleblowers.
The Legal Record
Sheehan’s career establishes the institutional credibility NPI brings to UAP litigation. He holds a law degree from Harvard Law School (1970), where he co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review. His early practice included First Amendment work on the Pentagon Papers, representation of Watergate burglar James McCord (who revealed Nixon’s covert operations unit), and civil rights cases including the Greensboro massacre judgment against the Ku Klux Klan and the Greensboro Police Department.
The Silkwood case (filed 1976) was his most consequential. Karen Silkwood, a nuclear technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Corporation’s Oklahoma fuel fabrication site, died in a suspicious car crash in November 1974 while carrying documents alleging safety violations. Sheehan, acting from his position as general counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters, assembled a coalition including the National Organisation for Women, the ACLU, and the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. The jury awarded $10.5 million. The Supreme Court upheld the verdict in a 5 to 4 decision in January 1984, removing federal preemption barriers to state punitive awards in nuclear cases.
The documentary record also includes the Christic Institute’s Iran-Contra civil RICO lawsuit (Avirgan v. Hull, filed 1986), which alleged a covert network linking arms trafficking, assassination, and drug smuggling across Central America. The case was dismissed in June 1988 by US District Judge James Lawrence King, who ruled it was based on “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge.” The court ordered the Christic Institute to pay over one million dollars in attorneys’ fees and costs. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the sanctions in 1991; the Supreme Court declined to review. The financial collapse that followed led to the Christic Institute’s dissolution by 1992 and the revocation of its tax-exempt status.
Sheehan and Nelson subsequently reconstituted their practice as the Romero Institute, named after murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. Sheehan’s later work includes a decade of legal representation for the Lakota People’s Law Project and the Standing Rock Sioux during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
The UAP Practice
Sheehan’s engagement with the UAP subject predates NPI by decades. In the spring of 1977, he served as special counsel to the Congressional Research Service’s Science and Technology Division during a review of government UFO evidence requested by President Jimmy Carter. In his March 2024 Open Letter, published on the NPI website, Sheehan stated he was shown classified Project Blue Book photographs during this review and provided his account under oath to AARO Director Dr Sean Kirkpatrick. AARO’s March 2024 report to Congress stated it had found “no evidence of extraterrestrial origin.”
In 1994, Sheehan defended Harvard psychiatrist John Mack during an eighteen-month faculty tribunal that challenged Mack’s research on UFO encounter testimonies. The case resolved in Mack’s favour. In 2001, Sheehan served as general counsel to Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, which coordinated sworn testimony from former military and government personnel before members of Congress.
In May 2021, Sheehan filed a 64-page complaint with the Pentagon’s Inspector General on behalf of Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, alleging that senior Defense Department officials had engaged in a coordinated campaign to discredit Elizondo after he went public with UAP programme information. The complaint was reported by Politico.
NPI’s current litigation strategy is explicitly framed as a response to legislative setbacks. During Congressional negotiations of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, provisions from the bipartisan UAP Disclosure Act, sponsored by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, were stripped from the final bill. NPI’s position is that litigation must now compel what legislation has so far failed to achieve.
Citizens for Disclosure
NPI’s grassroots arm, Citizens for Disclosure, is organising chapters across 45 US states. The network’s first public action was a rally at Senator Schumer’s New York office. Its campaigns include a national advertising series targeting different constituencies, a petition to the United Nations for a Global UAP Working Group, and direct engagement with members of Congress on disclosure legislation and whistleblower protection.
NPI advocated publicly for passage of the UAP Disclosure Act and for the Enhanced UAP Whistleblower Protection Act introduced in May 2025. Its Open Letter of March 2024 called for public congressional hearings and the passage of a “UAP Controlled Disclosure Act.”
From the Archive
NPI’s legal and advocacy work connects to the archive’s coverage of the US disclosure process:
- Americans for Safe Aerospace, where ASA addresses pilot testimony and NPI addresses whistleblower legal protection. Ryan Graves testified on flight safety; Sheehan filed the Elizondo Inspector General complaint.
- The Black Vault, where Greenewald uses FOIA and NPI uses constitutional litigation. Both seek to compel government transparency.
- The Sol Foundation, whose policy white papers and NPI’s litigation strategy represent complementary approaches to the same institutional resistance.
