Matthew Brown puts Immaculate Constellation at the White House

The Pentagon denial of Immaculate Constellation has held since October 2024. Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough said in a statement to NewsNation that the DoD has "no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called 'IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION.'" The Office of the Director of National Intelligence folded that denial into a one-page FOIA release that same fall. A separate FOIA response, from the Office of the Secretary of War / Joint Staff (the "Department of War" is a secondary title authorised for the DoD under Executive Order 14347 of September 2025, with the statutory name still "Department of Defense") under case 25-F-3827, declined on 26 January 2026 to run any search. "A search was not conducted as they confirmed the subject matter itself does not exist," the office said.

That line has carried the official story on the UAP program that a 12-page congressional document names Immaculate Constellation.

A second witness has put the same claim at the White House.

In a 28 July 2026 interview with Chris Farrell's On Watch show at Judicial Watch, Matthew Brown — the former Defense and State Department analyst who authored the Immaculate Constellation report now in the congressional record — placed the program at the White House. Asked what kind of program it is, Brown answered that it "appears to be an operational SAP … ran out of the White House National Security Council." Asked what that means in practice, he said an operational special access program "governs our day-to-day operations in the real world with our military … from phase zero all the way up to the actual conduct of boots on the ground."

If Brown's description is even close to the architecture, the Pentagon's denial does not have to be wrong. It just has to be the wrong answer to a different question. The Department of Defense was asked whether it ran a program with that name. Brown and a second witness — former Air Force officer David Grusch — are now saying the program is not housed there.

How Brown says he found it

Brown told Judicial Watch that he first saw the program in 2018, during what he described as a volunteer file-cleanup duty at the Pentagon.

"I was never formally read into this program," Brown said. "It was something that I discovered … doing some volunteer duty to clean up our files back in 2018 when I was at the Pentagon. Misfiled, clearly, improperly labeled as well. Attempted to report it through, like, sort of my chain of command and got all sorts of strange reactions."

Brown was, at the time, a policy advisor working countering-weapons-of-mass-destruction issues inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with a Top Secret / SCI clearance and a counterintelligence-scope polygraph. He has separately held technical-advisor roles in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and a program-advisor role at the State Department. His TS/SCI access and counterintelligence polygraph are referenced in his public interviews; the specific jobs, tenures and clearance level have been reported by The Daily Mail and ABD Post.

Brown says he sat on what he had seen until 2023, when David Grusch's public allegations put the broader UAP program on the front pages. He then wrote a 12-page report drawn from his own recollection of the materials he had seen, and ran it through a State Department pre-publication review. The review covers material an author draws from their own service; because State does not have classification authority over an NSC program, it is unclear if the manuscript was referred to the NSC for cross-agency review before clearance. The cleared report was delivered to staff on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee in a secure facility in August 2024. The document was entered into the congressional record on 13 November 2024 by Representative Nancy Mace's office, with journalist Michael Shellenberger named in press coverage as the journalist who had passed it on.

Brown went public in 2025, across a three-part interview on the Weaponized podcast with Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp. The July 2026 interview with Judicial Watch is his longest single appearance since then.

What Brown says the program does

In the Judicial Watch interview, Brown described the program as a special access program whose mission sits inside U.S. military operations rather than in research-and-development or intelligence-collection. "It's not about building a bomber or running spies," he said. "It's about, basically, our conduct of warfare from phase zero all the way up to the actual conduct of boots on the ground."

Inside that operational scope, he said, the program had "within its remit the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance of the UAP and … what was labeled as RV or ARV." Brown told Farrell the acronyms were not spelled out in the materials he had seen. He then offered his own reading: that RV and ARV most likely stand for "reconnaissance vehicle" and "advanced reconnaissance vehicle" inside the program files. That definition is different from the more familiar public UAP usage, where ARV usually refers to a so-called Alien Reproduction Vehicle.

Brown also set out a definition for what he called "technologies of unknown origin." The phrase, he said, is "used to categorize … rather straightforward recovered technologies where we do not know the source of those technologies." That definition is close to the language Congress has begun to use in UAP legislation. Brown presents it as a working label inside the program, a description used by people with access to the files, rather than a finished policy category.

The Immaculate Constellation report, Brown said in the same interview, covers more than the one program. "The report is basically a summary of an investigation I undertook internally while I was within the U.S. government," he said. "There's seven categories of evidence basically proving, right, the reality of UAP, NHI and …" — the transcript cuts off there — "Immaculate Constellation is the headline grabber, but it's only one category there. There's other domains of intelligence … wrapped up in that report that are not Immaculate Constellation but are dealing with UAP."

That internal structure matters for the public record. It suggests the public 12-page document is one slice of a longer file, and that the program's name is being used in the public debate as a stand-in for a broader set of categories Brown is unwilling to enumerate.

Grusch's May 2026 confirmation

Brown is not alone in pointing the program away from the Pentagon. In a 5 May 2026 interview with Judicial Watch, David Grusch — the former Air Force intelligence officer whose 2023 disclosure of a UAP retrieval and reverse-engineering effort triggered the current congressional UAP push — answered a question about the program by saying: "I have to be very careful about discussing that code word, but, like I said, it was an old NSC activity, right?"

In the same interview, Grusch laid out the legal architecture that, in his telling, makes a White House program hard for Congress to find. The White House, he said, "can establish a SAP that does not fall under covert actions, which means there are no legal requirements to inform leaders like the Speaker of the House or the majority leader." Such a program, he added, "can involve housing … programs within the Department of Energy and limiting knowledge to a select few at the NSC and the president, with oversight carried out from McLean across the Potomac." McLean, Virginia, is the location of the CIA's headquarters.

Grusch also described a moment during a congressional exchange with Representative Nancy Mace. "The moment she mentioned Immaculate Constellation," he said, "you could almost hear the shredders starting up down the hall."

Taken together, the two interviews point at the same arrangement: a UAP-related program, with operational reach into military activity, run from the Executive Office of the President rather than from the Defense Department, and with a legal pathway that, in Grusch's description, can be set up without notifying Congress.

What the Pentagon denial is — and is not — saying

The official denials, in chronological order, are as follows:

• 22 October 2024 — NewsNation publishes Shellenberger's story. Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough responds: "The Department of Defense has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called 'IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION.'"
• 6 November 2024 — ODNI approves FOIA release DF-2025-00021, a one-page document that summarises press coverage of the program and includes the Gough denial. ODNI's own search returned "no records responsive to the request."
• Late 2024 / early 2025 — Sean Kirkpatrick, then the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), tells the New York Post there is no such program, and that he had access to all unacknowledged SAPs and discussed them with the SAP Central Office.
• 26 January 2026 — the Office of the Secretary of War / Joint Staff, responding to a separate FOIA request, declines to run any search. "A search was not conducted as they confirmed the subject matter itself does not exist, and an extensive email search on the custodian would not yield responsive records."

Each of those statements is a denial of a DoD SAP with the name Immaculate Constellation. None of them addresses a National Security Council program, a Department of Energy-hosted program, or a non-covert White House SAP. Brown's account does not contradict the Gough statement; it narrows what the Gough statement covers. The DoD was asked about its own records. Brown is now saying the program sits in a different office.

Kirkpatrick's denial carries a jurisdictional limit. AARO is a DoD office. Kirkpatrick told the New York Post that his access was to DoD unacknowledged SAPs, discussed with the DoD SAP Central Office. Whether the program Brown describes — an NSC operational SAP — would be in the set a DoD office is positioned to see is the question the denial does not address.

The legal framework

Grusch's May 2026 description sketches a legal architecture. It is his interpretation of where a UAP program could sit, not a widely recognised statutory category.

Special access programs are governed by 10 U.S.C. § 119. The statute requires the Secretary of Defense to establish policies for SAPs "within the Department of Defense" and to report them to the congressional defense committees. Covert actions, by contrast, are governed by 50 U.S.C. § 3093, which requires the President to report them in a timely manner to the Gang of Eight — the House Speaker, the House minority leader, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees.

Grusch's argument in the May interview is that a third category exists in the gap between those statutes: a special access program that is not a covert action. Such a program, he said, "does not fall under covert actions, which means there are no legal requirements to inform leaders like the Speaker of the House or the majority leader." In his telling, it would be run from the Executive Office of the President, with the Department of Energy and the intelligence community providing operational and technical cover.

That reading of the architecture is not in the public statutory record. It is consistent with how executive-branch classification decisions can be structured in practice — a president can classify information through executive order, and an SAP can be hosted at different agencies with different reporting lines. Whether the gap Grusch describes actually contains a UAP program is the question the two whistleblowers are now asking Congress to ask. As of August 2026, no public congressional committee has done so on the record. Brown told Judicial Watch he met with Senate Intelligence Committee staff in August 2024. He said the promised follow-up meetings never happened.

The personal cost

Brown's account of the program's existence is paired with a personal account of what he says happened after he tried to escalate it.

In the Judicial Watch interview, Brown described what he called a home invasion incident. "My wife and I were at home asleep," he said. "Nothing of value was taken. Our photographs were laid out, my grandfather's ashes taken out of the house and placed by the trash. … Not a robbery, definitely a message, unfortunately." Brown said he did not connect the incident to his reporting on Immaculate Constellation at the time, but that in retrospect it was "pretty clear what that was about."

He is not the only UAP whistleblower to describe that kind of contact. David Grusch has separately alleged that he has faced retaliation after coming forward. The patterns are similar; the alleged perpetrators are not named in either account, and no public evidence has been produced linking either incident to any organized group.

What is still unverified

The Immaculate Constellation report is a 12-page document written by Brown, pre-publication-cleared by the State Department without redactions, and entered into the congressional record by Representative Nancy Mace. Its existence is on the record. Its contents are an allegation.

What remains unverified as of August 2026:

• Whether a program matching Brown's description has ever existed inside the Executive Office of the President, the National Security Council, the Department of Energy, or the intelligence community.
• Whether any of the "seven categories of evidence" Brown references have been independently corroborated by a second witness with comparable access.
• Whether Brown and Grusch's accounts of the program's architecture are consistent in detail, not only in direction. No congressional committee has publicly pressed the question since Brown's August 2024 meeting with Senate Intelligence Committee staff; Representative Nancy Mace, who entered the original report into the congressional record, has not publicly commented on Brown's July 2026 NSC claim.
• Whether the ODNI's "no responsive records" finding and the Department of War's January 2026 refusal to search reflect a DoD-wide position, or the position of the specific offices that handled the requests.

The Pentagon's statement that it has no record of a DoD SAP with the name Immaculate Constellation still stands. The next test of that statement is whether a congressional inquiry, or a properly scoped FOIA request to the National Security Council, the Department of Energy, or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, can produce records that the Defense Department's index cannot reach.

Brown's July 2026 interview, and Grusch's May 2026 confirmation, have moved that question from a denial-versus-claim argument into a question about which office in the U.S. government is being asked.

Related UAP Logbook notes

• David Grusch and the Immaculate Constellation gap — Grusch's May 2026 Judicial Watch account and the White House / NSC custody question.
• The "I cannot discuss this" sentence, in five UAP witnesses' words — Brown's refusal pattern sits inside the wider whistleblower vocabulary.
• Congress, UFO disclosure, and UAP oversight — the cluster hub for the disclosure timeline.
• Latest UFO files released: where to check first — the running tally of DOD, ODNI and AARO releases against which a new request would be measured.

Sources

• Judicial Watch / Chris Farrell's On Watch: "Whistleblower Matt Brown on 'Immaculate Constellation' and UAPs," published 28 July 2026.
• YouTube mirror of the Judicial Watch / Chris Farrell interview with Matthew Brown, 28 July 2026.
• YouTube: David Grusch interview with Chris Farrell, Judicial Watch, 5 May 2026.
• Congressional supporting document: "UC - Mace - Report - Immaculate Constellation - Pentagon," entered 13 November 2024.
• ODNI FOIA release DF-2025-00021: Immaculate Constellation description from unclassified press, approved for release 6 November 2024.
• The Black Vault: "Pentagon Refuses to Search for 'Immaculate Constellation' Emails," 26 January 2026 FOIA response.
• Daily Mail: "EXCLUSIVE: Identity of whistleblower who exposed 'secret Pentagon UFO program' revealed," 2025.
• International Business Times UK: "UFO Whistleblower Claims Humans Are Sharing Earth," 2025 — covers the home-invasion account in its second-hand reporting.
• 10 U.S.C. § 119: Special access programs.
• 50 U.S.C. § 3093: Presidential approval and reporting of covert actions.