United States.UAP Governance Board · ODNI (June 15, 2026)

On June 17, 2026, an ODNI official confirmed to DefenseScoop the existence of the UAP Governance Board (GB) and indicated it had held its first meeting on June 15. According to the official statement, the GB was established by ODNI, the FBI, and the Department of War (DOW) in response to the executive directive signed by President Trump on February 20, 2026, which ordered the identification and public release of government UAP records. The GB's public charter defines three objectives: (1) serve as a cohesive interagency body against national security threats posed by UAP, using each member agency's unique capabilities and authorities; (2) integrate and optimize interagency processes for investigating UAP incidents and data collection procedures to provide more effective support to AARO; (3) coordinate the timely declassification of UAP information under E.O. 13526. The GB's composition was not disclosed: the ODNI statement names no member. The GB convenes representatives from military, law enforcement, the Intelligence Community (IC), and civilian agencies.

The GB is structured as the superior authority over external advisory groups, including the UAP Science Advisory Council (SAC) chaired by Avi Loeb (Harvard), who was appointed on June 12, 2026 after being tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, the FBI, and the IC to constitute and chair that council. The hierarchical relationship is documented by Loeb himself: the SAC reports to the GB and its members hold no access to classified information nor any legal authority; all data shared with the SAC is unclassified. Per Loeb, the team 'holds no access to any classified information and no legal authority whatsoever.'

The establishment of the GB was covered on June 16, 2026 by Above the Norm News under the headline 'A New Board Now Controls the UFO Files. Its Own Scientists Aren't Allowed to See Them,' which highlighted the structural asymmetry: the GB — with full classified access — controls what is declassified and when, while the scientists' SAC operates on unclassified data only. Liberation Times covered the announcement as the establishment of a new interagency architecture for coordinating investigations and declassification. MeriTalk covered it from a federal technology governance perspective.

The UAP Governance Board is the highest-ranking institutional control node in the Trump administration's 2026 UAP disclosure architecture, positioned between the presidential directive (Feb 2026), the PURSUE portal (May–Jun 2026), AARO, and the SAC. Its analytical weight is threefold. First, the GB centralizes declassification authority: while PURSUE published three tranches of reviewed files (May–Jun 2026) and the SAC deliberates on unclassified data, the GB controls what moves from the classified to the public regime, at what pace, and in what format — it is the information gate. Second, the anonymity of its members is a design signal, not an omission: ODNI declared the charter but named no one, reproducing the opacity model that characterizes IC components (SIGINT, HUMINT) vis-à-vis public scrutiny. A GB operating without public nomination means it is not politically accountable to media or the disclosure ecosystem, only to the interagency chain of command. Third, the classified/unclassified asymmetry between the GB and the SAC is analytically revealing: it places the SAC in a position to legitimize the disclosure process without having access to the substance being disclosed. If the GB retains significant material, the SAC cannot detect it; if the GB releases curated material, the SAC receives it as if complete. This makes the SAC a controlled epistemic interface, not an independent verification body.