Senate Amendment 797, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, co-sponsored by Schumer, Rounds, Rubio, Gillibrand, Young, and Heinrich, modeled on the JFK Records Act, codified 22 definitions. Non-human intelligence means any sentient intelligent non-human lifeform regardless of nature or ultimate origin that may be presumed responsible for UAP or of which the Federal Government has become aware. The bill asserted eminent domain over recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of NHI in private hands. The Senate passed it; conference stripped the review board and eminent domain, leaving a records collection.
The story of the phrase: flying saucer was too silly, extraterrestrial too committed, alien too cinematic, so the grown-ups in the hearing rooms needed a word that meant the thing without saying the thing. NHI is a lawyer's alien: it covers beings from space, from the ocean, from another dimension, from the future, from anywhere, because the drafters deliberately wrote regardless of nature or ultimate origin. The language is a net built wide enough to catch whatever it is they think they might catch.
The claim: the legislation is itself the disclosure. Governments do not define recovery boards for leprechauns; the mere existence of legacy program language, covering crash retrieval and reverse engineering predating the act, tells you what the drafters believe exists. The counter is procedural: the language came from believers' testimony, Grusch's 2023 hearing claims, and legislatures define things that do not exist all the time, that is what half of tort law is.
Does a government write eminent domain over alien bodies for a thing it believes does not exist, or for a thing it cannot afford to be caught unprepared for?