The Package
The file itself is unremarkable to look at: 23 pages, about 1 megabyte, released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to Abbas Michael Dharamsey, a researcher who files requests on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) cases. The Black Vault, run by researcher John Greenewald, verified and published the release on March 6, 2024. Inside is a declassified written summary of an Air Force encounter and a hand-drawn rendering of the lead object, labeled UAP-1 in the paperwork. Most of the remaining pages are redacted. A video tied to the same incident exists, the Air Force told Dharamsey, but it was withheld in full under FOIA Exemption (b)(1). That is the whole of what arrived: a summary, a sketch, and a formal refusal on the footage.
January 26, 2023
According to the summary, a U.S. Air Force pilot on a test mission over the Gulf of Mexico, flying out of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, gained radar lock on four separate objects. The pilot made visual contact with one of them and captured it on sensor as a screen grab. That object, UAP-1, is described in the summary as roughly the size and shape of an Apollo spacecraft, with an orange-reddish glowing underside and a three-dimensional, cone-shaped top made of segmented gunmetal-gray panels. The drawing released alongside the summary shows a pear-shaped form, hand-annotated: gunmetal at one end, gray at the other, a reddish center section, and a note near the bottom that appears to read “blurry air.” The remaining three objects were never seen. They came through only as radar returns, tracked but unphotographed.
The Radar Goes Down
As the aircraft closed to within 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) of UAP-1, the pilot’s radar malfunctioned and stayed down for the rest of the mission. A post-mission technical review followed, as it would for any equipment failure on a military aircraft. The review found that a circuit breaker had tripped. It did not find out why. Maintenance technicians, the summary states, were unable to conclusively diagnose the fault. A documented failure paired with a documented investigation that reached a dead end, not a mystery created by someone failing to look.
No Explanation Offered
Nowhere in the released material does anyone put a name to what the pilot reported. No weather balloon, no drone, no training aircraft, no faulty instrument reading is offered as an identification for any of the four objects. The cause of the radar failure is recorded as undetermined. The file does not fail to explain the radar failure; it states plainly that an explanation could not be reached.
What the File Doesn’t Settle
Separately from the FOIA material, the Air Force is reported to have submitted its own account of the incident to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon’s clearinghouse for UAP reports, after the sensor malfunction. That reporting establishes that AARO was told about the case. What the FOIA release itself does not establish is what, if anything, came of it: there is no document in the 23 pages confirming whether AARO opened a formal review, closed one, or reached any conclusion. Two other points remain open as well. The withheld video has never been shown publicly, so no one outside the chain of custody has been able to set it against the drawing and say whether they match. And the documents do not confirm whether the image Representative Matt Gaetz viewed during a visit to Eglin came from this same video, as a still or a screen grab, or from some other source entirely. Dharamsey has said he intends to file further FOIA requests aimed at pinning down the AARO question.
The Redaction, Not the Content
FOIA Exemption (b)(1) permits an agency to withhold material that is properly classified for reasons of national defense or foreign policy. Invoking it here says nothing about what is on the video. It is not an admission that the footage shows something extraordinary, and it is not a cover for something mundane either. The exemption describes a category of withholding; it does not describe what the footage contains.
Afterward: What People Said
Everything past this point comes from people talking, not from the file. Testifying before a congressional subcommittee on July 26, 2023, Gaetz described the image he was shown as an “orb,” part of what he called a “clear diamond formation” of four craft. That word, orb, does not match the cone-shaped description in the written summary, and the released material does not account for the difference. Dharamsey, after receiving the FOIA documents, said the drawing shows “an object that does not look of any origin I can denote.” He has also told The Black Vault that he plans to appeal for release of the video itself, to look into whether the object could have a human-made origin, and to pursue the AARO question through additional requests.
Close: The Shape of What’s Missing
What the case comes to, on paper, is a verified FOIA release, a precise written description of something a pilot says he tracked, a radar system that failed at 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) and was never explained, and a video that a small number of people have seen and the public has not. AARO was told about the incident, separately from this release; what it did with that information is not in the file. Dharamsey’s follow-up requests remain pending. The record stops there, not because something was removed past that point, but because that is as far as it goes.