The National Security Council (NSC) is the body within The White House that advises the President of the United States on national security matters. Its earliest documented involvement in the study of unidentified phenomena dates to 1953, when it asked the scientist Howard Robertson to conduct what became known as the Robertson Panel, a review that was classified top secret.1
A separate document connects the council to the broader Cold War intelligence establishment: a letter from Richard Drain, secretary of the CIA Intelligence Advisory Committee, addressed to James Lay, secretary of the NSC.2 According to testimony from Thomas Wilson, another individual named on a Contractor bigot list held a position at the NSC while also serving as a Senior Executive Service (SES) employee at the United States Pentagon.3 The remote viewer Joseph McMoneagle has said he provided professional intelligence and informational support to the NSC over the course of his career.4
Several accounts place the NSC, together with the White House, as the authority for Department of Defense special access programs on unidentified phenomena. In written testimony dated 2024-11-13, Luis Elizondo stated that in his last government position he managed a Special Access Program on behalf of the White House and the NSC.5 Elsewhere he has described a programme he ran as managing national-level special-access programs directly for the NSC and the White House,6 and said he held the clearances needed to work with both bodies.7 Around 2014 he worked on a programme at Guantanamo Bay for the White House and the NSC.8 Elizondo has also said that Jay Stratton received requests for briefings from NSC members, who went on to brief Donald Trump at some level on UAP.9
The council’s most publicly visible role in UAP matters followed the shoot-down of three unidentified objects over US airspace in February 2023, when NSC spokesman John Kirby said that President Joe Biden had created an interagency team to investigate them,10 an episode later folded into the 2023 ‘Balloongate’ Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) shoot-down controversy. That team was tasked with studying the broader policy implications for the detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose safety or security risks.11 According to “In Plain Sight,” Karine Jean-Pierre and Kirby gave a White House press briefing on the shot-down objects on 2023-02-13.12 When reporters pressed Kirby on why gun-camera footage of the shoot-downs could not be released, he told them to ask the Pentagon.13
A commentator identified as UAP Gerb has said that a data set associated with a council convened by Avi Loeb is alleged to derive from an NSC activity called Immaculate Constellation, said to have been established in 2017.14 The same commentator has said they believe the Immaculate Constellation activity serves as a repository for high-quality imagery intelligence and signals intelligence relating to both non-human technical vehicles and reproduction vehicles.15