A meeting, on paper
A Pentagon UAP investigator and a Harvard astrophysicist traded a run of emails in late 2022 that ended in a face-to-face meeting. That much is documented. What happened afterward is, for the most part, not.
The document at the center of this is an email chain between Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and Dr. Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who heads the Galileo Project. The Black Vault obtained it through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case OSD/JS 23-F-0010 and published it on January 25, 2024. The file runs 30 pages and 8 megabytes (MB): a bounded set of emails, not a report and not a transcript of what the two men said once they were in the same room. The correspondence itself is dated to the closing months of 2022.
What the emails describe
Within that stretch, Loeb sends Kirkpatrick material from his own work: notes on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) reportedly observed over Ukraine, and on the discovery of interstellar meteors, objects passing through the solar system fast enough to have originated outside it. On the Ukraine reports, Loeb writes that he isn’t sure what to make of them: Ukraine, he notes, is in the middle of a war with a great deal of human activity filling its skies, which would create plenty of noise for anyone trying to pick out something that wasn’t man-made. The emails also settle logistics: Kirkpatrick and Loeb arrange to meet in person on October 3, 2022. The record shows what each man sent the other. It does not show what was said once they sat down.
Where the correspondence stops
The released chain contains nothing dated after October 3, 2022: no summary of the meeting, no follow-up email, no note on next steps. Kirkpatrick and Loeb did not stop working together, though. The two are listed as co-authors on a draft paper, “Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” dated March 7, 2023, and hosted on Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics website, arguing that any UAP explanation has to fit within known physics and known forms of matter and radiation. It is not a FOIA document and was never part of this release. Five months separate the last email in the file and a finished draft manuscript carrying both their names, and nothing in the file bridges the two.
A separate file, older than the meeting
A second, unconnected release concerns the Galileo Project itself rather than the Kirkpatrick-Loeb exchange. Writer Jack Brewer first flagged an FBI file on the project in early January, cited in The Black Vault’s reporting under FBI FOIA case number 1616197-000, though the site’s own document archive lists the same release under the label 23-F-0010, the number also attached to the OSD/JS email chain. That labeling is not reconciled anywhere in the source material. What is clear is the content’s age: the file reaches back to 2021, roughly a year before Kirkpatrick first wrote to Loeb.
What the four pages don’t say
Of 27 pages in the FBI’s file, 4 were released and 23 were withheld in full, citing FOIA exemptions: the legal grounds under which an agency may lawfully hold back part or all of a record, often to protect an ongoing investigation, a source, or a method. Those 4 public pages say nothing about why the Bureau opened a file on the Galileo Project: no predicate is stated, no referral named, no complainant appears. That is a fact about the four pages that exist, not a claim about the twenty-three that don’t. The exemption citation tells a reader the FBI gave a legal reason to withhold; it does not say what the withheld pages contain.
The loose ends
Taken together, the two releases leave several specific things unanswered rather than one large mystery. There is no correspondence in the FOIA record after October 3, 2022, despite the paper that followed in March 2023. The FBI’s reason for opening a Galileo Project file is nowhere stated in the released pages. The “UAP in Ukraine” reports Loeb references are never detailed further in either release. And the case numbering is inconsistent within the source itself: 23-F-0010 for the emails, and, depending on where in The Black Vault’s own material you look, either 1616197-000 or that same 23-F-0010 for the FBI file.
What The Black Vault says now
The Black Vault states it has appealed both FOIA determinations, seeking release of the withheld material; as of its reporting, both appeals remain pending. Separately, the outlet’s own writeup floats an interpretation: that the FBI’s early interest in the Galileo Project might reflect a broader government effort to engage with Loeb’s research. That is offered there as a suggestion, not as something drawn from the four released pages, and nothing in either file supports or rules it out.
What’s actually known
Two document sets exist, both dated and sourced to specific FOIA cases. One shows a Pentagon UAP official and a Harvard scientist arranging, and apparently keeping, a meeting. The other shows the FBI holding a file on that scientist’s research project a year before the meeting was arranged. Neither document says why the FBI file was opened, why the email trail ends where it does, or how the correspondence connects to a paper the same two men published five months later. What remains are two document sets, several open questions, and no resolution yet from either pending appeal.