Hunt Willis

Overview

Hunt Willis is an American attorney who has become part of the legal infrastructure of the post-2017 UAP disclosure movement. He is the Chief Legal Officer of the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit formed in the mid-2020s by merging several earlier disclosure-advocacy groups. He is best known, to the extent he is known at all, as a co-author of a policy brief aimed at Congress, policymakers and prospective whistleblowers, which argues that lawmakers are "fully authorized to receive classified information" about unidentified anomalous phenomena. He is not an investigator, witness or theorist. His role is that of a lawyer working on the procedural side of the question of how, and under what legal cover, a government insider could speak.

The public record on him is thin. This entry sticks to what can be attributed to named publications and says plainly where the record stops.

Early life and background

Little verifiable biographical material is public. No birth year, education or early career is documented in the sources consulted for this entry, and the Foundation's own team page did not list him when it was checked for this entry. A bio circulated in connection with a 2026 Disclosure Foundation livestream, reproduced on a Reddit forum rather than a primary site, describes him as an attorney and shareholder at the law firm Martin & Jones, PLLC and as the founder of the Disclosure Advocacy Group. That is secondhand and should be treated as provisional until confirmed from a firm or Foundation page.

The Disclosure Advocacy Group is the more informative detail. It was a legal nonprofit working on UAP transparency, and it later became one of the constituent organizations of the Foundation.

Career: from advocacy group to Foundation

Willis has described the Disclosure Foundation, in an interview with the outlet Complex, as the product of a merger of three organizations under a single umbrella:

• the UAP Disclosure Fund (UAPDF), a civil-society group chaired by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon, announced in a May 2025 post that framed its mission as supporting congressional oversight of UAP and opposing "excessive secrecy";
• the Disclosure Advocacy Group, the legal nonprofit that Willis is reported to have founded; and
• the UAP Caucus, a data-driven analytical project.

Once merged, the Foundation took on a broader remit: legislative advocacy, whistleblower protection and support for scientific study. By mid-2026 it was also running projects such as a volunteer review of NASA archives for anomalous imagery, announced in a June 2026 press release that named executive director Jordan Flowers and a committee including former NASA official Mike Gold and astrophysicist Travis Taylor. Willis is not named in that release; his part is legal rather than scientific.

He was also listed for a Foundation livestream "Ask Me Anything" on 14 June 2026 alongside Mellon and Flowers, hosted by journalist Leslie Kean, where he was introduced as Chief Legal Officer.

Major contributions: the congressional-disclosure brief

The one substantive, independently reported item attached to his name appeared in DefenseScoop in July 2025, in coverage of disclosure advocates' push to expand UAP provisions in the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The article identifies Willis and Kirk McConnell as members of the UAP Disclosure Fund's leadership and reports that they had co-authored, with Mellon, an upcoming policy brief.

According to DefenseScoop, the brief is directed at Congress, policymakers and potential whistleblowers. It targets what its authors regard as a widespread misconception: that a person with knowledge of classified UAP-related programs cannot lawfully share the details with members of Congress in a closed setting. The brief's position is that lawmakers are fully authorized to receive classified information, so a prospective source need not assume that speaking to a committee is a crime.

This fits a longer-running theme in the disclosure debate. Earlier whistleblowers, most prominently David Grusch, took protected-disclosure routes through the Intelligence Community Inspector General and then testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023. The legislative vehicle most associated with the Foundation's allies is the UAP Disclosure Act, which the UAPDF is reported to support fully. The legal argument in the brief is that the channel to Congress already exists, and that fear and uncertainty about it are the obstacles. Whether the argument fully holds is a matter for practising national-security lawyers. It is plausible as far as it goes, since Congress does receive classified briefings, but an individual's exposure under secrecy agreements and classification law can still depend on the specifics of what is disclosed, to whom and by what route.

The DefenseScoop article reports no remarks by Willis on the NDAA provisions themselves; the NDAA discussion in it is Mellon's.

Reception and criticism

There is very little published reaction to Willis personally, favourable or critical. Reaction to the organisation he serves is divided along familiar lines. Supporters see the Foundation as a serious, lawyered, nonpartisan effort to professionalise a field long dominated by anecdote. Sceptics note that the Foundation's leadership overlaps with people who have promoted claims of non-human craft recovery that remain unsubstantiated in public, and that advocacy for whistleblower pathways presupposes that there is something to blow the whistle on. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has stated in its historical review that it found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology or of a hidden reverse-engineering programme, which is the main official counterweight to the premise.

Willis's own public framing, from what is available, is procedural rather than speculative: his stated concern is the legal route, not the identity of the phenomenon. That restraint is notable in a field with plenty of confident extraordinary claims, though it also means there is little in the public record to evaluate.

Legacy and current status

As of late 2026 Willis remains Chief Legal Officer of the Disclosure Foundation. His significance lies less in any individual action than in what his role represents: UAP disclosure has moved from a field of witnesses and authors to one with law firms, nonprofits, policy briefs and legislative strategy. Whether the legal groundwork he and his colleagues have laid produces actual new testimony, or merely reassures potential witnesses, cannot yet be judged. Readers should also note that earlier versions of this entry credited him with specific lead roles in NDAA drafting and cited historical precedents in his remarks; those claims could not be verified from primary sources and have been removed.

Caveats on sourcing

The Foundation's name has been conflated with the UAP Disclosure Fund in some coverage; DefenseScoop refers to him in the latter capacity in 2025, while the later title of Chief Legal Officer belongs to the merged Foundation. Biographical details such as employer should be checked against primary sources as they become available.

Further reading

For context on the movement he works within, see the Disclosure Foundation site, Christopher Mellon's writing, and coverage of the 2023 House Oversight hearing on UAP.