Congressman Eric Burlison Demanded MITRE’s UFO Records. They Go Back to 1930.

On May 22, 2026, Republican congressman Eric Burlison sent a 10-page letter to the leadership of The MITRE Corporation. It asked the federally funded research giant to produce every record it holds related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, and it set the start date for that search at 1930. According to DefenseScoop, which obtained the correspondence five days later, MITRE has confirmed that its people are already reviewing the archives.

That is the part worth sitting with. A sitting member of Congress asked one of the most secretive research contractors in the United States to open nearly a century of files on UFOs, and instead of refusing outright, the contractor said it would look.

What Burlison actually asked for

The letter was not a vague request for cooperation. Burlison, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, attached more than 40 specific production requests as an enclosure. Together they cover documents, data, and physical materials relating to UAP, unidentified aerospace and undersea phenomena, transmedium events, technologies of unknown origin, anomalous recovered materials, and what the letter describes as alleged legacy crash-retrieval or reverse-engineering efforts.

The phrase “back to 1930” is doing a lot of work. It signals that Burlison is not interested only in the modern Pentagon programs that have dominated the headlines. He is asking for the paper trail that predates them, the decades when the United States was quietly building the contractor apparatus that now sits at the center of the disclosure fight.

The letter set a 45-day deadline for unclassified responsive records, and it asked for them in native electronic format with complete metadata. In plain terms, Burlison does not want printouts. He wants the original files, with the data that shows when they were made and who touched them.

Why MITRE, and why it matters

MITRE is what is known as a federally funded research and development center, an FFRDC. These organizations operate in an unusual space. They are private, but they exist almost entirely to serve government agencies, often on the most sensitive technical problems the state has. That arrangement has historically kept their internal records at arm’s length from the kind of public-records laws that apply to the agencies themselves.

That is exactly the gap Burlison appears to be targeting. For years, transparency advocates have argued that if recovered materials or reverse-engineering programs exist, the evidence would not sit in a tidy government filing cabinet. It would sit with the contractors. By going directly at an FFRDC, Burlison is testing whether that wall can be pushed.

According to DefenseScoop, the letter was informed by whistleblowers and FFRDC insiders, and it did not stop at MITRE. The requests reference UAP-related work potentially involving a long list of major contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, SAIC, Leidos, Battelle, The Aerospace Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, and Bigelow Aerospace.

What MITRE said

MITRE did not deny holding relevant material, and it did not slam the door. A company spokesperson told DefenseScoop that insiders were reviewing the archives, and added a careful line: “If any relevant material is found, we will coordinate with the federal agencies responsible for the work to determine how to best provide any assets.”

Read closely, that sentence is a hedge as much as a promise. MITRE is saying it will look, but that anything it finds will be handed back to the agencies that commissioned the work, not released directly to Congress or the public. The contractor is positioning itself as a custodian, not a discloser. Whether that satisfies Burlison is another question entirely.

The bigger fight behind the letter

The MITRE letter did not appear in a vacuum. It landed at the moment the broader disclosure effort hit a wall. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, the bill that would have required federal agencies to declassify their UAP records and publish them, was left out of the final 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. After a year of momentum, the most ambitious piece of disclosure legislation simply did not make the cut.

That stall is the context for everything Burlison is now doing. With the broad law shelved, the strategy has shifted from a single sweeping mandate to a series of direct, document-level demands aimed at the specific institutions believed to be holding the material. Burlison has also raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas, for both cooperative and uncooperative witnesses, if the letters do not produce results.

He has reportedly followed the same trail to other names, including RAND, the Aerospace Corporation, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, from which he requested a classified 1952 briefing video referred to as a “flying saucer talk.” The approach is narrower than a single law, but it is also harder to ignore. A bill can be quietly dropped from a larger package. A 10-page interrogatory with a 45-day clock and a subpoena threat behind it is a different kind of pressure.

What happens next

The 45-day deadline puts MITRE’s first response in early July 2026. What it produces, or declines to produce, will say a great deal about how far this method can go. If the contractor returns a meaningful set of records, it sets a precedent that the others on Burlison’s list will struggle to escape. If it returns very little, the question becomes whether Congress has the will to convert its letters into subpoenas.

For now, the documented facts are narrow but real. A congressman asked. A major contractor said it would look. And the search reaches back to 1930. The interesting part is no longer whether the records are requested. It is whether anyone will be allowed to read what comes back.