WASHINGTON, September 19 — The Pentagon has quietly widened the legal corridor through which current and former personnel can talk about unidentified anomalous phenomena, issuing what it calls a “targeted legal waiver” that shields them from civil and administrative enforcement if they speak to the White House-directed effort known as PURSUE. The waiver, announced on September 14 and not made public, covers “service members, civilian personnel, and contractors” who hold UAP-related national defence information.
It “supersedes civil and administrative enforcement provisions” of nondisclosure agreements and special access program agreements, but only “strictly for communications directed to the PURSUE team.” PURSUE has been publishing UFO files on war.gov since May 2026. Under the hood, the technical reality is narrower than the headline.
Individuals who signed secrecy agreements can now share what they know with PURSUE without being sued or losing their security clearance. The protections do not extend to speaking with Congress, the press, or the public. The release says nothing about criminal law, and covers only agreements “previously executed within the United States.”
A memo, a deadline, and a hole
The move followed signals from President Donald Trump, who over the summer reportedly directed the Defence Department and the intelligence community to waive UAP-related NDAs. On July 31, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas sent a memo to 18 intelligence chiefs declaring that any NDAs “prohibiting disclosure to the President, or designees like PURSUE, are no longer in force.” The memo cited a “Presidential Direction” it never quoted and gave the intelligence community 30 days to set up its own procedures. That deadline passed in August.
The White House directed a request for comment to the Defence Department, whose spokesperson said it had no additional comment outside the press release and referred further questions to the White House. Dylan Borland is unmoved.
A former Air Force geospatial intelligence specialist who told a House Oversight task force that he watched a roughly 100-foot triangular craft lift silently off the flight line at Langley Air Force Base in 2012, Borland said the new directive “changes nothing.” Nearly half a dozen times during that hearing he said he could only answer questions — such as whether a private company he worked for was reverse engineering nonhuman technology — inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.
At one point he cited fear of being charged under the Espionage Act. “Bad-faith actors are talking about, ‘Oh, this allows whistleblowers to go and talk to the public.’ No, it doesn’t,” Borland told WIRED.
“It’s one more place to go.” He noted that existing whistleblowers were already told their NDAs were waived and they were legally allowed to talk to AARO, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, created in 2022 to investigate UAP reports and serve as the official channel for whistleblowers. The new directive, he said, essentially “just repeated what we’ve been told for three, four years.”
The channel that already existed
A provision Congress passed in December 2022 already states that an authorised UAP disclosure — meaning one made through AARO — “shall not be subject to a nondisclosure agreement,” complies with classification rules, and “is not a violation” of the relevant section of the Espionage Act.
Borland used that channel, meeting with AARO in March 2023, but withheld sources and methods because he considered the agency’s public assessments up to then “a misrepresentation of the truth.” In August 2023, after a former intelligence officer testified about an alleged decades-long crash-retrieval program, Borland filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general over what he says he knew and the retaliation he says he faced.
Since then, he wrote in his statement to Congress, he has “been prevented from resuming my prior employment” and remains “blacklisted from certain agencies within the Intelligence Community.” Other UAP whistleblowers have reported break-ins at their homes and leaked personal details. The new waiver covers only those who have worked with the Pentagon, leaving what Borland called a “CIA-sized hole.” “I’m glad that they’re waiving NDAs for everybody who was on the [Defence Department] side.
It doesn’t change the [Intelligence Community] side,” he said, pointing to the need for similar protections at the National Security Agency, the FBI, and other intelligence and science agencies. AARO’s credibility with the whistleblower community has been strained, especially after its former director publicly questioned whistleblowers’ credibility and its March 2024 historical report found no evidence the government had ever recovered alien technology.
What to watch next is whether the intelligence community’s own procedures, due in August and still unseen, ever surface — and whether the waiver’s silence on Congress and the press holds as the PURSUE files keep landing on war.gov.
