Disclosure Forum 2026 — Loeb's 'Orbs Not the Audience,' Mellon Polling, Luna Amnesty EO, Rounds/Schumer NDAA Amendment

On 2026-06-25 the Disclosure Foundation convened the Disclosure Forum 2026 in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building — the first on-the-record institutional UAP convening to seat sitting senators, House members, the Disclosure Foundation board, and the UAP Science Advisory Council chair (Avi Loeb) in the same room. Four substantive threads emerged: Loeb's reframing of the Science Advisory Council from spectacle to calibrated data ('we should keep our eye on the orbs, not the audience'); a Mellon keynote citing ~90% bipartisan polling for greater UAP transparency; Rep. Anna Paulina Luna stating she is working with the Trump White House on a whistleblower amnesty program — possibly via executive order — for a named list of UAP whistleblowers; and Sen. Mike Rounds confirming that he and Sen. Chuck Schumer are again cosponsoring UAP Disclosure Act language as an FY2027 NDAA amendment (the fourth such attempt). The Council records each thread as Watching, names the artifact tests by which each will be re-scored within thirty days, and resists the temptation to call the Forum 'historic' — the historic test is whether the four threads produce citable artifacts (an EO text, a bill number, an advisory-council vote, polling crosstabs) on a defined deadline.

What Was Reported

On 2026-06-25, from approximately 09:00 to 16:30 ET, the Disclosure Foundation convened the Disclosure Forum 2026 in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. The Forum was billed by its organisers, in the Disclosure Foundation’s pre-event press release of 12 June, as the first all-day, on-the-record convening to seat sitting U.S. senators, House members, former intelligence officials, the Disclosure Foundation board, and the newly stood-up UAP Science Advisory Council chair, Prof. Avi Loeb, in the same room.

The public speaker roster, as carried in the Foundation’s forum page and confirmed by NewsNation’s day-of report, included:

• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — Senate Armed Services Committee.
• Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) — Senate Armed Services Committee.
• Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) — Chair, House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.
• Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — House Oversight Committee.
• Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) — House Oversight Committee.
• Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) — House Oversight Committee.
• Rep. André Carson (D-IN) — House Intelligence Committee.
• Christopher Mellon — Disclosure Foundation chairman; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
• Prof. Avi Loeb (Harvard) — Disclosure Foundation board; chair, UAP Science Advisory Council (Case #00500).
• Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet (USN, ret.) — Disclosure Foundation board; UAP Science Advisory Council member.

The Council records four substantive threads from the day’s record. Each is filed individually below so that, as artifacts arrive — an executive-order text, a bill number, a vote, a methodology release — the threads can be independently re-scored without re-litigating the case as a whole.

Thread 1 — Loeb: “We should keep our eye on the orbs, not the audience”

In his Forum remarks and in two companion Medium essays published in the run-up to the Forum (A UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. and Reality Should Not Be Classified), Avi Loeb articulated the disciplinary frame the UAP Science Advisory Council intends to operate under. The frame is the Council’s working slogan, stated verbatim by Loeb at the Forum and reproduced in the Disclosure Foundation’s Science Advisory Council page:

“We should keep our eye on the orbs, not the audience.”

Loeb’s argument, in compressed form: the extraterrestrial-origin question is in principle adjudicable by calibrated satellite imagery, multi-modal sensor returns, and testable material, and is in principle not adjudicable by social-media speculation, partisan posture, or anecdotal witness narrative alone. The Advisory Council’s remit, as Loeb framed it at the Forum, is to argue for the instrumentation and the data-handling discipline that would let the question be resolved on the merits — independently of the audience around it.

The Council reads the framing as Loeb publicly softening — though not retracting — the structural critique articulated in Case #00500, where the Council recorded the chair-volunteered contradiction that “the people attached to the program for credibility cannot see the evidence the program is built on.” Loeb’s Forum framing does not resolve that contradiction; it does signal that he intends to stay inside the structure and push the Council’s work product toward a discipline that, if the Governance Board chooses to declassify primary sensor data, the Advisory Council would be in position to evaluate.

The Council’s verdict on this thread: Watching. The thread re-scores when the UAP Science Advisory Council issues its first formal recommendation or vote on the public record. Until then, Loeb’s framing is a posture, not a deliverable.

Thread 2 — Mellon: “It is wiser to prepare for the future than to conceal it”

Christopher Mellon, the Disclosure Foundation chairman and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, delivered the Forum’s keynote framing the question of UAP transparency as a question of public-property law as much as national security. Per the NewsNation Forum takeaways summary, Mellon cited cross-party polling carried under Disclosure Foundation auspices: approximately 90% of both Republican and Democratic respondents say the U.S. government should release more UAP information. Mellon framed any recovered UAP technology as belonging to the public, not to the classified programs holding it, and offered the formulation now circulating from the Forum record:

“It is wiser to prepare for the future than to conceal it.”

The Council records the polling figure but qualifies it. The Foundation has cited a bipartisan headline in the high-eighties to low-nineties range across multiple appearances by Mellon over the preceding twelve months; what the public record does not yet contain, as of publication, is the primary methodology — sample size, fielding window, instrument, weighting scheme, and crosstabs — for the figure as stated at the Forum. The Council will treat the headline as a citable Council asset only insofar as the Disclosure Foundation publishes the methodology document; until it does, the brief and the case file carry the figure with an explicit methodology gap disclosed.

The Council’s verdict on this thread: Watching. The thread re-scores when the Disclosure Foundation publishes the primary polling methodology and crosstabs. The Council files a standing request to the Foundation for the methodology release.

Thread 3 — Luna: White House negotiating a whistleblower amnesty, possibly by executive order

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Chair of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, stated at the Forum and in a companion NewsNation interview that she is working with the Trump White House on an amnesty program — possibly via executive order — that would grant immunity to a list of named UAP whistleblowers who hold information about recovered non-human craft, biologics, or related programs. Per the NewsNation summary, Luna said:

“We are going to get them immunity and protection.”

The Council records the speech act as Confirmed (Luna said it, on the record, at a venue whose record is public). The Council records the underlying mechanism — an executive order — as Watching, with a falsifiable deadline. As of publication, Luna has named no individual whistleblowers, has not specified the size of the list, and has not committed the White House to a release date for any EO text. The first concrete artifact would be one of:

1. An executive-order text appearing on whitehouse.gov.
2. A Department of Justice or Office of Legal Counsel memorandum implementing or analysing the proposed immunity.
3. A named whistleblower receiving testimony protection on the public record at a congressional hearing.

The Council files an explicit deadline: if no executive-order text, OLC memorandum, or named protected witness appears on the public record by 2026-07-08 (the Roswell anniversary), the Council will re-score the thread toward Inconclusive and record the absence of artifacts as the test result. If an EO text does appear, the Council will record it as the largest single declassification-pipeline development of the year.

The Council’s verdict on this thread: Watching. Falsifiable on 2026-07-08.

Post-Roswell verdict move (Edition #174, 2026-07-08). The pre-registered falsifiability deadline closed on 2026-07-08 at News Desk sweep 06:18 Eastern time. As of that sweep, no executive-order text appears on whitehouse.gov, no filing appears in the Federal Register, no Office of Legal Counsel memorandum has been published, no named protected witness has been placed under testimony protection at any congressional hearing, and no Luna Task Force press release or Luna floor statement names an amnesty vehicle. The Council executes the pre-registered move: the Luna thread of Case #00502 moves from Watching to Inconclusive. The move is narrow by design. Inconclusive here means the Council no longer holds the thread as an active Watching commitment against the Roswell calendar and retains it as an open question on indefinite tempo; it does not mean the amnesty vehicle is falsified. An executive-order text, an OLC memorandum, a named protected witness under testimony protection, or a Luna Task Force statement explaining the missed calendar re-opens the thread at any date after today on new terms. The Council does not adjudicate the internal mechanism — whether the vehicle is still in draft, was never seriously in the pipeline, or was overtaken by other calendar events. The artefact was the test; the artefact did not appear; that is the finding.

Thread 4 — Rounds + Schumer: UAPDA reborn as an FY2027 NDAA amendment

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) confirmed at the Forum, per the NewsNation Forum coverage, that he and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are again cosponsoring the UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA) language as an amendment to the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The Forum statement is the first public, on-the-record commitment by a sitting senator on the Armed Services Committee to the FY2027 NDAA as the operational vehicle.

The Council records the structural history honestly. The UAPDA framework — originally introduced by Sen. Schumer in 2023 with bipartisan cosponsorship including Sen. Rounds — has been the subject of three prior public attempts to enact some form of the language:

1. FY2024 NDAA — the original Schumer-Rounds UAPDA amendment, materially weakened in conference and stripped of the eminent-domain and review-board mechanisms before passage.
2. FY2025 NDAA — re-introduction; failed to pass the conference committee.
3. FY2026 NDAA — re-introduction; the UAPDA language was stripped during conference in October 2025, a deletion publicly acknowledged by Sen. Rounds on the Senate floor.

The Rounds-confirmed FY2027 attempt is therefore the fourth attempt, and the Council does not pretend that the structural history of three prior failures will not condition the fourth. What is new is the explicit naming of the vehicle (FY2027 NDAA) and the concrete date marker (FY2027 NDAA conference, late 2026). What is unchanged is the conference-committee chokepoint that stripped the language in each of the prior three cycles.

The Council’s verdict on this thread: Watching, with the structural failure history clearly named. The thread re-scores at the FY2027 NDAA conference outcome (expected late 2026 to early 2027).

The Forum as Institutional Event

Independently of any of the four threads above, the Forum itself is a discrete institutional datum. The Kennedy Caucus Room — the venue used for the Watergate hearings, the Titanic and Pearl Harbor investigations, and many of the 21st-century Senate intelligence hearings — was selected by the Forum’s institutional sponsors for a UAP convening. The venue choice is itself a public statement: this was an institutional inquiry framing, not a press-conference framing.

The Disclosure Foundation also used the Forum to honour Rep. Luna, Rep. Burlison, Rep. Burchett, and Rep. Carson for sustained transparency work on the public record. The Council records the recognitions as a discrete sidebar; they are not the lede.

Post-Forum addendum (Edition #165, 2026-06-27). The Council’s initial Forum reading filed four substantive threads — Loeb, Mellon, Luna, Rounds/Schumer. A fifth thread has since been filed under a discrete case file: Rep. Burlison’s 24 June 2026 confirmation that MIT Lincoln Laboratory has acknowledged custody of, and agreed to transfer, the named 1952 UAP-related film AF-ATIC-FILM, 03/52 (Flying Saucer Talk, briefed by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt). The Lincoln Lab thread was reiterated on the Forum panel record on 25 June. The Council reads the Forum frame as four policy threads plus one artifact-acknowledgement thread. The Lincoln Lab thread is the only Forum-adjacent thread to date that has produced a concession at the artifact-acknowledgement level (named identifier, named custodian, named transfer commitment) rather than the policy-commitment level. Case #00503 carries the split verdict (Custody = Confirmed, Contents = Inconclusive, Transfer completion = Watching).

The Forum was the institutional follow-up venue to the 9 June 2026 Capitol Hill UAP disclosure rally. The rally was held outside the Russell Senate Office Building; the Forum was held inside the same building’s Kennedy Caucus Room sixteen days later. The architectural progression — from outside the institution to inside the institution’s most freighted room — is the Forum organisers’ first answer to the rally’s standing question of where the institutional follow-through would land.

What The Council Says

The Council reads the Disclosure Forum 2026 against its standing test for institutional UAP events: is the speech act on the record, is the structural claim falsifiable, and does the released material change the evidentiary baseline?

On the record. All four threads are on the record. Loeb’s framing is in two Medium essays and the Disclosure Foundation’s Advisory Council page. Mellon’s polling claim is in NewsNation coverage and (pending) the Foundation’s methodology release. Luna’s amnesty / EO claim is in NewsNation interview and Forum remarks. The Rounds/Schumer FY2027 NDAA amendment is in NewsNation Forum coverage and named on the public Forum record. The Council records the speech acts as Confirmed.

The structural claims. Each of the four threads carries a structural claim that the next thirty to ninety days will adjudicate. Loeb’s framing is adjudicated by the Advisory Council’s first formal recommendation. Mellon’s polling claim is adjudicated by the Foundation’s methodology release. Luna’s amnesty claim is adjudicated by an EO text, OLC memorandum, or named protected witness. The Rounds/Schumer amendment is adjudicated by the FY2027 NDAA conference outcome.

The evidentiary baseline. The Forum itself did not declassify any UAP record. It did not produce a sensor dataset, a witness deposition under penalty of perjury, or a calibrated imagery package. The Council does not record the Forum as a movement of the evidentiary baseline; it records the Forum as the institutional venue in which four concurrent movements were committed to on the public record. The baseline moves when the artifacts arrive.

The Council declines to call the Forum “historic.” The historic test is whether the four threads produce citable artifacts within thirty days. The Council files those tests below.

What Would Change The Verdict

The Council treats the case verdict as falsifiable across the four threads. The following artifacts each independently re-score the corresponding thread:

1. An executive-order text on whistleblower amnesty appearing on whitehouse.gov before 2026-07-08 — moves Thread 3 (Luna) toward Confirmed-EO-mechanism.
2. A Department of Justice or OLC memorandum implementing or analysing the Luna amnesty proposal — moves Thread 3 toward Confirmed-policy-instrument.
3. A named UAPDA / NDAA amendment bill text appearing on congress.gov with the Rounds and Schumer cosponsorship attached, and a markup schedule — moves Thread 4 toward Confirmed-legislative-vehicle, while the structural failure history remains in the record.
4. A formal recommendation or vote from the UAP Science Advisory Council on the public record — moves Thread 1 toward Confirmed-advisory-output.
5. A Disclosure Foundation polling methodology release — moves Thread 2 toward Confirmed-citable-polling-asset.
6. Thirty-day silence on all four threads with no EO, no bill number, no recommendation, and no methodology release — moves the case-level verdict toward Inconclusive-commitment-without-artifacts, and the Council will record the silence as such.

Open Questions

1. Is there a White House EO text drafted but not yet released? Luna’s framing implies negotiation in progress. The Council watches for an OLC referral or a draft EO leak.
2. What is the size of the Luna whistleblower list? No public figure is yet attached. The Council records that the absence of a list size is itself a datum.
3. Will the FY2027 NDAA amendment language match the original 2023 UAPDA — including eminent domain and the review board — or be pre-watered for conference survival? The pre-watered version would be a different bill.
4. Will the Disclosure Foundation release the polling methodology before the FY2027 NDAA conference? The polling is most useful to the legislative push if it is citable on the floor with crosstabs in hand.
5. Does the UAP Science Advisory Council have a meeting cadence? No public cadence has been published. The Forum was the chair’s first public Forum appearance since the Council’s announcement on 2026-06-15.

The Council’s Verdict

Confirmed — on the speech acts. The Disclosure Forum 2026 convened on 2026-06-25 in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building. The four threads above were stated on the public record by the named speakers. The Disclosure Foundation, NewsNation, and Avi Loeb’s Medium posts are the institutional record.

Watching — on the structure of three of four threads. The Council reads the Forum as a real institutional event, not a rally, and as the first venue in which the architecture stood up on 2026-06-15 (Case #00500) was tested in public. Loeb stayed inside the structure and reframed the Advisory Council toward calibrated-data discipline; Rounds committed to the FY2027 NDAA as the legislative vehicle; Mellon committed to the transparency-polling headline pending methodology release. The Loeb, Mellon, and Rounds/Schumer threads remain Watching with their own artefact tests on their own tempos, unchanged by today’s Luna-thread move.

Inconclusive — on the Luna thread specifically, effective Edition #174, 2026-07-08. The pre-registered Roswell-anniversary trigger closed with no executive-order text, no OLC memorandum, no named protected witness, and no Luna Task Force artefact on the public record. The Luna commitment on 2026-06-25 remains Confirmed as a speech act; the structural claim that an amnesty vehicle would materialise on the Roswell calendar moves to Inconclusive per pre-registration. The thread is not falsified — an EO, an OLC memo, a named protected witness, or a Luna statement at any date after today re-opens the thread on new terms — but the Council no longer runs it against a specific calendar.

Inconclusive — on whether the Forum, as such, materially changes the disclosure trajectory. The Forum is a committing venue, not a declassifying venue. The trajectory moves when the artifacts arrive.

The Council files the Disclosure Forum 2026 as the cycle’s clearest example of an institutional venue producing four parallel commitments by named officials, none of which are yet adjudicable. The next thirty days are the test.

Sources

• NewsNation. “UAP Disclosure 2026 Forum Takeaways.” NewsNation, June 2026. newsnationnow.com

• NewsNation. “UFO Experts, Lawmakers Converge on Disclosure Forum.” NewsNation, 25 June 2026. newsnationnow.com

• NewsNation. “Lawmakers Want Immunity for List of UFO Whistleblowers — Rep. Luna.” NewsNation, June 2026. newsnationnow.com

• Loeb, Avi. “A UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S.” Medium, 15 June 2026. avi-loeb.medium.com

• Loeb, Avi. “Reality Should Not Be Classified — A Call for Action on UAP Disclosure.” Medium, June 2026. avi-loeb.medium.com

• Disclosure Foundation. “UAP Science Advisory Council.” disclosure.org/news/uap-science-advisory-council

• Disclosure Foundation. “Disclosure Forum 2026.” forum.disclosure.org

• PR Newswire. “Disclosure Foundation to Convene Senators, Members of Congress and Leading Experts Across Disciplines for Landmark Public Forum on June 25.” PR Newswire, 12 June 2026. prnewswire.com

• The Council. “UAP Governance Board First Meeting + Loeb’s UAP Science Advisory Council.” Case #00500, aliencouncil.com.

• The Council. “Capitol Hill UAP Disclosure Rally — 9 June 2026.” Case #00493, aliencouncil.com.

• The Council. “3I/ATLAS — Twelve Billion Years Old.” Case #00501, aliencouncil.com.