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 faced similar issues after coming forward, from break-ins at their homes to leaked personal details.
The new waiver also only covers those who have worked with the Pentagon, leaving a CIA-sized hole in it.
“I’m glad that they’re waiving NDAs for everybody who was on the [Defense Department] side,” Borland says. “It doesn’t change the [Intelligence Community] side.”
He pointed to the need to offer similar protections to the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies beyond just the CIA, including the National Security Agency, FBI, and others, as well as science agencies like NASA.
Marik von Rennenkampff, a former State Department analyst and Obama-era Pentagon appointee now at the Sol Foundation, a UAP research nonprofit, agrees with that sentiment because of where whistleblowers say the secrets about nonhuman technology are kept. He points to a specific unit in the CIA that’s “allegedly—allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, I can’t stress that enough—the quarterback for this alleged legacy effort.”
“What has been announced publicly does not cover the core of the alleged legacy program yet,” von Rennenkampff tells WIRED.
There’s a second gap that no memo can close. Many of the people alleged to hold this information work for private contractors, and the government can’t waive an NDA it isn’t party to. Only the 2022 statute addresses those types of agreements, and only for disclosures made through the official AARO channel.
Despite these shortcomings, UAP researchers and whistleblowers point to, von Rennenkampff argues this week’s announcement is still important.
“After 80 years of government denial, obfuscation, and ridicule on this topic, there’s now true political capital invested in this,” he says. Unlike AARO, PURSUE is a “presidentially directed initiative” that is reporting ultimately to political appointees in the White House, “versus career bureaucrats.”
“It shows that the Trump administration is taking extraordinary claims about retrievals of a craft of nonhuman origins seriously,” he says. There’s a phrase in the release that von Rennenkampff says is another curious detail, particularly given how “wordsmithed to hell” government statements about UAP generally are. The Pentagon wrote that “individuals with direct knowledge of UAP-related programs” have historically feared legal liability for speaking.
“It doesn’t say people with partial knowledge, half knowledge, alleging knowledge,” he says. “It says people with direct knowledge.”
Borland’s hope is that PURSUE answers to someone with the power to act on what it hears. He points to White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller—who Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently confirmed is working on the UAP portfolio—as someone who would signal the White House is doing more than paying lip service to the topic.
Beyond that, Borland has an offer.
“There’s enough smoke, and there’s enough people behind the scenes,” he says, referring to himself and other whistleblowers. “If Stephen Miller and Trump wanted to actually know some stuff, they could call us into the White House right now, and I can throw down, and so can the rest of them.”