Congress asked MITRE for every UAP record since 1930. MITRE is searching.

Rep. Eric Burlison's 10-page demand gives the FFRDC operator 45 days to produce unclassified UAP records, name what it destroyed, and brief cleared staff. The deadline lands in early July.

On May 22, Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri sent a 10-page letter to executives at the MITRE Corporation, the not-for-profit that runs federally funded research centers for the Pentagon, the FAA, and other agencies. The letter demands records on unidentified anomalous phenomena in any form MITRE has ever touched: created, received, analyzed, transferred, destroyed, or withheld. The window runs back to 1930.

Five days later, MITRE confirmed to DefenseScoop that staff were already searching its archives. "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," a spokesperson said.

What the letter requires

The enclosure lists more than 40 production requests. Burlison wants MITRE to appoint a senior official to coordinate the response, issue a preservation hold, build an index of where responsive records live, and hand over unclassified material in native electronic format with metadata intact. Classified or sponsor-controlled records get flagged and routed to a classified briefing for cleared committee staff. Unclassified records are due within 45 days, which puts the deadline in early July.

The requests reach into detection and tracking work across air, space, maritime, undersea, electromagnetic, radar, optical, and infrared domains, plus AI models, materials analysis, and any program "known, alleged, or described as a legacy crash-retrieval or reverse-engineering effort." The letter also asks MITRE to identify UAP-related work involving Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Battelle, Bigelow Aerospace, and a half dozen other contractors by name.

"This inquiry does not require MITRE to accept any particular conclusion about the origin or nature of UAP," Burlison wrote. "It requires MITRE to tell Congress what it knows, what it holds, what it has held, what it has transferred, what it has destroyed or was directed to destroy."

Why MITRE

MITRE operates FFRDCs: research centers funded by the government but run privately. That structure keeps most of their records outside the Freedom of Information Act. Whistleblowers have alleged for years that sensitive UAP material sits in contractor networks for exactly that reason, where Congress and the public cannot reach it. A member of Burlison's team told DefenseScoop the letter was built on advice from whistleblowers, disclosure advocacy groups, and people working inside FFRDCs.