Marco Rubio is a US Senator from Florida who has been one of Congress’s most consistent advocates for a coordinated federal response to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). In December 2020, while serving as head of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Rubio pressed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Pentagon to deliver Congress an unclassified report on UAP within a month.1 Having received classified briefings on the subject, he called for a detailed analysis of the phenomena.2
Rubio said publicly that there is a stigma attached to discussing UAP on Capitol Hill, and that some of his Senate colleagues take the topic seriously while others react dismissively.3 He said the stigma should not prevent the government from finding an answer to what the objects are,3 and called for a formal process to take UAP reports seriously and continuously catalogue and analyse incoming data.4
Following the February 2023 2023 ‘Balloongate’ Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) shoot-down controversy, Rubio said this marked the first time in North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s history that a decision had been made to shoot down an object over American airspace, noting that all three downed objects remained unidentified.5 He said the Pentagon’s UAP office had recorded hundreds of similar airborne cases that were not met with the same response.6 He also expressed concern that the United States Department of Defense (DoD) had not been sharing information on those cases with investigators and scientists at the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO),7 and said the underlying worry was whether an adversary had developed a capability that US systems, built to detect missiles and aeroplanes rather than smaller low-altitude objects, were not designed to see.8 Rubio separately criticised the government’s handling of the Chinese Spy Balloon episode involving China and pushed for answers on unidentified objects more broadly.9
On legislation, Rubio worked with Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to establish an office coordinating the reporting and response to unidentified objects,6 and he and Mark Warner, his predecessor as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave strong public support to the UAP provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)), which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in December 2022.10, 11 As acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he supported a proposal for a UAP transparency report despite criticism from those opposed to greater openness,12 and was later named chief sponsor, as chair of the committee, of the bill requiring a Department of Defense UAP report as part of the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act.13 He also joined Republican senators Roy Blunt and Lindsey Graham, and Democratic senators Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich, together with Democratic representative Ruben Gallego and assistance from Christopher K. Mellon and Luis Elizondo, in crafting UAP-related language for the NDAA.14 In the summer of 2023, Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Mike Rounds and Gillibrand sponsored the UAP Disclosure Act.15
According to David Charles Grusch, Rubio and Warner were nervous about escalating their confrontation with the intelligence community bureaucracy over the UAP issue.16 Rubio has continued to figure in UAP-related developments in the Trump administration: he was seated beside Pete Hegseth at a cabinet meeting on 2026-08-11 at which Donald Trump made remarks about releasing extraterrestrial information.17