What specific UAP incidents since 2004 have been briefed to Congress under the 2026 NDAA mandates?
Executive summary
The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the Pentagon’s All‑Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to brief Congress on UAP intercepts by U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) and NORAD going back to Jan. 1, 2004, and to include the number, location, nature, procedures followed and data collected for those intercepts [1] [2]. Available reporting and official releases describe the new mandate and related oversight steps, but do not identify any specific UAP incidents that have already been briefed to Congress under the FY2026 NDAA obligations. Where reporting names incidents, it does so in contexts predating or parallel to the new NDAA requirement rather than as documentation of NDAA‑driven briefings [3] [4].
1. What the FY2026 NDAA specifically demands of the Pentagon
The conference text added explicit language directing AARO to provide expanded congressional briefings focused on intercepts conducted by Northcom and NORAD, with briefs to include the “number, location, and nature” of intercepts, descriptions of procedures and protocols followed, and any data collected or analyzed; the statute also requires the first briefing to include intercepts since Jan. 1, 2004 that have not previously been reported to Congress [1] [2]. The bill further asks AARO to consolidate classification guidance for UAP programs and account for those guides in its annual report, and it aims to reduce duplicative reporting pathways into AARO [1] [2].
2. What public reporting shows has been delivered so far — and the gap
Defense Department press releases confirm that the DOD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have delivered AARO’s annual UAP report to Congress, and that the department has been briefing congressional committees on UAP generally, but these materials and publicly reported hearings do not map to a verifiable list of “intercepts” compiled and released under the new FY2026 briefing mandate [3] [4]. Journalistic and policy accounts emphasize that the NDAA requirement compels AARO to produce a consolidated, retrospective accounting, but none of the provided sources contain a publicly available catalog of specific Northcom/NORAD intercepts that have been briefed under the FY2026 directive [1] [5].
3. Why there’s no public list of incidents yet — classification, process and politics
Multiple sources note Congress’s long concern that UAP‑related information has sometimes been withheld or over‑classified, which is precisely what the FY2026 language seeks to address by mandating briefings and classification reviews; advocates and former officials pushing for disclosure influenced the inclusion of these measures [6] [7] [5]. At the same time, the legislation contemplates consolidated classification matrices and obligated briefings to congressional leadership and defense committees, suggesting that many such intercepts may remain in classified channels even as oversight increases [1] [8].
4. Competing narratives and actor incentives to watch
Transparency advocates and organizations such as the rebranded UAP Disclosure Fund have celebrated the NDAA changes as overdue fixes and actively pushed for specific reporting mechanisms, while some lawmakers and committee staff emphasize protecting sources, methods, and sensitive defense capabilities—creating a tension over what gets publicly disclosed versus what is only briefed in secure settings [5] [9]. Congressional leaders have publicly asserted that information has been withheld from lawmakers in the past, a claim that motivates the new briefings but also raises questions about what internal records will be deemed releasable [6].
5. Bottom line: what can be definitively said today
The FY2026 NDAA establishes a statutory duty for AARO and the Pentagon to brief Congress on Northcom/NORAD intercepts since 2004 and to address classification issues, but the reporting examined for this analysis contains no explicit list or named incidents that have been briefed to Congress under that 2026 mandate; public confirmation of specific intercepts briefed under the new law is therefore not available in the provided sources [1] [2] [3]. Future AARO briefings, mandated deadlines (including related Pentagon briefing timelines cited by committees), and subsequent public or declassified disclosures will be the sources to watch for an authoritative inventory of incidents [8] [1].