Tom O’Neill did not go to Washington to talk about UFOs. He went to testify about MKULTRA – the CIA’s Cold War behavior-control program – under oath before Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.
Five days before that June 30 hearing, he sat through Disclosure Forum 2026 in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building. When a senior congressional staffer walked him to a private meeting with Democratic minority staff, Liberation Times reports, the conversation turned to UAP.
O’Neill told Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast that the staffer already knew where he had been.
“You’re coming from the disclosure conference, right?”
When O’Neill asked how, the staffer allegedly replied: “We all work together. We know everything that’s going on.”
O’Neill said he stayed agnostic on UAP because his own investigations leave little room for anything else. The staffer’s answer, as O’Neill recalled it, was not agnostic.
“If you knew what we knew, you wouldn’t be agnostic.”
What the Staffer Said About the SCIF
The individual, unnamed in O’Neill’s account, described himself as a senior staffer who accompanies the member he works for into SCIFs – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities used for highly classified briefings.
“I go in, and I see what they see, and it’s terrifying.”
O’Neill asked why released UAP imagery still looks limited or indistinct. The staffer, he said, answered that the government cannot show everything because some of it maps onto capabilities being developed for national defense. O’Neill recalled the staffer saying the United States possesses “recovered crafts and recovered beings,” and that knowledge taken from recovered technology is being used to understand performance that conventional aircraft cannot match.
The argument, as O’Neill paraphrased it, was practical: publishing details of velocity, propulsion, or other unusual performance would hand those same details to adversaries.
O’Neill also said the staffer claimed classified UAP briefings can be psychologically disturbing – that some congressional personnel who enter SCIFs have nightmares, and that staff with that access have been offered psychological support.
The staffer was not named. The conversation was not under oath. It is one journalist describing one escort on the way to a prep meeting. It still lines up, almost word for word, with what other people inside the same buildings have already said in public.
The Hearing He Was Actually There For
On June 30, O’Neill sat as a witness at Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project in Rayburn 2154. The other majority witnesses were historian Stephen Kinzer and, for the minority, former NIH scientist Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi.
O’Neill’s sworn statement was about MKULTRA, not UAP. He told the task force that CIA witnesses in 1977 had called a 25-year effort to control human behavior a colossal failure, and that he believes Congress was never told the truth about what the program achieved.
“I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MKULTRA as a failure.” – Tom O’Neill, June 30, 2026
House Oversight’s wrap-up quotes that line. Fox News covered the Manson and Jolly West portions of the same session. None of that is a UAP disclosure. It is the reason O’Neill was in the building, and why Democratic staff wanted a preview of his testimony.
Liberation Times notes that the Democratic staffers he met were later listed as present for the hearing – and that none of the task force’s five Democratic members actually showed up: Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett, Stephen Lynch, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Summer Lee, and Dave Min.
Who Else Was in the Room That Week
Disclosure Forum 2026, on June 25, was organized by the Disclosure Foundation. Liberation Times names Sen. Mike Rounds and Representatives Luna, Eric Burlison, André Carson, and Suhas Subramanyam, along with former senior Senate staffer Kirk McConnell and former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon.
That is the same circuit that has spent three years pressing crash-retrieval claims in open hearings, closed briefings, and PURSUE file drops. O’Neill said he accepted the invitation because he was already coming to town for MKULTRA, not because he claims UAP expertise.
The recovered-craft language he attributes to the staffer is the same language David Grusch used under oath in 2023: a multi-decade U.S. effort to retrieve and study craft of non-human origin, plus biological material.
Liberation Times has reported versions of this inside Congress before. In 2023 it wrote that Senate Intelligence Committee members had heard whistleblower testimony about hidden legacy UAP programs that, according to multiple sources, had been verified to some extent. In 2022, sources told the same outlet that classified UAP briefings and videos had “altered the lives of those involved.” O’Neill’s nightmare detail is a more specific version of that earlier reporting.
”An Open Secret” in Washington
The same Liberation Times piece quotes barrister Jonathan Caplan KC, speaking to Sky News, on where the argument now sits:
“The debate now is no longer whether this is a real phenomenon or not – in Washington, it’s an open secret that it is. The debate now is trying to force disclosure, because Congress has been misled for 80 years…”
In his book Not for Disclosure, Caplan alleges that a small number of Senate Intelligence Committee members have been briefed, on a highly restricted basis, about the recovery of UAP craft, and that some members of the House Intelligence Committee’s CIA Subcommittee have been given the same information.
None of that names O’Neill’s staffer. It does describe the environment in which a staffer who walks members into SCIFs would be hearing the same briefing language Grusch, Mellon, and members of Luna’s task force have been using in public for years.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 25, 2026 | Disclosure Forum 2026, Kennedy Caucus Room |
| Late June 2026 | O’Neill’s private meeting with Democratic minority staff; alleged SCIF conversation |
| June 30, 2026 | MKULTRA hearing, Rayburn 2154; O’Neill testifies under oath |
| August 2026 | O’Neill recounts the staffer conversation on Heretics |
| September 4, 2026 | Liberation Times publishes the account |
The staffer remains unnamed. No public transcript of the corridor conversation exists. What is on the record is O’Neill’s description, the June 30 hearing, and a growing list of people in the same buildings who have said the classified UAP file is not empty.
Sources: Liberation Times · House Oversight hearing · House Oversight wrap-up · Fox News · O’Neill author page, Little, Brown / Hachette
