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.

That allegation is unproven. Government officials say no UAP case has been verified as extraterrestrial, and no agency has confirmed that contractors hold recovered craft or materials. The letter is a demand to check, not a finding.

The 1952 tape

Two weeks before the MITRE letter, on May 8, Burlison wrote separately to MIT Lincoln Laboratory about a reel-to-reel recording catalogued as "AF-ATIC-FILM, 03/52" and labeled "flying saucer talk." The listed briefer is Edward J. Ruppelt, the Air Force officer who coined the term "unidentified flying object." Burlison asked the lab to confirm the tape's status and coordinate preservation with the National Archives. Our lore library traces what happened to Ruppelt's term in the decades after.

The climate around it

The contractor letters land inside a broader push. The PURSUE portal released 226 declassified UAP files across two batches in May, and congressional interest keeps widening past the agencies into the labs that serve them.

There is a harder piece of context. Matthew James Sullivan, an Air Force intelligence officer who planned to testify to Congress about alleged secret UAP programs, died at his home in May 2024. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental drug overdose, a finding first reported this April. Some advocates want the FBI to look again. Nothing connects his death to MITRE or to this letter. It is part of the climate the letter arrived in, and part of why it puts preservation requirements in writing.

What happens next

If MITRE finds nothing, the letter requires a certification describing the search itself: methodology, repositories, custodians, search terms, date ranges, and the official who supervised it. Either way, Congress gets an answer in writing by early July. We will report what it says.