A spokesperson’s inbox, filed away
FOIA Case 20-F-1095 began as a request from The Black Vault, the transparency site run by John Greenewald Jr. who built it in 1996, at age fifteen, into what is now one of the largest public archives of declassified government material. The request asked for any email to or from Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough containing the words “GIMBAL,” “GIMBLE,” “FLIR1,” or “GO FAST.” Those are the informal names attached to three Navy videos that had circulated for years before the Department of Defense confirmed them.
The Department of Defense’s first response came in April 2021: 12 pages, 0.9 megabytes. An appeal followed, and a far larger release came after it: 264 pages at 42 megabytes, which Greenewald published on June 18, 2025, alongside a note explaining the earlier 2021 release and the appeal that preceded it.
Both releases are correspondence, start to finish. There is no video attached, and no analysis of what the footage shows, only emails about the clips, written by and to the person whose job was to answer questions about them.
Why anyone was emailing Susan Gough at all
The footage predates the FOIA case by years. The New York Times published two of the clips, nicknamed FLIR1 and Gimbal, on December 16, 2017, describing encounters between Navy jets and fast-moving, unusually shaped aircraft. A third clip, GoFast, surfaced on a private website in March 2018. For more than a year afterward, the Pentagon said almost nothing official about any of them. In early 2019, Gough told The Black Vault only that the footage had never been formally released and, in her view, should stay that way. By September 2019 she had shifted to confirming the clips were genuinely shot by Navy aviators, describing them as part of a broader pattern of unidentified aircraft turning up in military training areas.
That pattern ended on April 27, 2020, when the Department of Defense issued a statement titled “Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos,” formally acknowledging all three clips. The release did not claim to explain what the objects were; it addressed only the authenticity and origin of the footage itself.
That single press release produced a wave of inquiries, from journalists, from researchers, and from private citizens, all directed at Gough as the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s main point of contact on the subject. The FOIA request at the center of this case was built to capture that traffic.
What’s actually on the 264 pages
The larger release includes internal talking points drafted for Gough’s use, her exchanges with outside journalists, and a spread of commentary running from technical skepticism about the footage to outright accusations that the Pentagon was managing a narrative. Those accusations appear in the file as things correspondents wrote to her, nothing more; no part of the record confirms that any narrative was actually being managed.
Sections of the release are withheld under two standard FOIA exemptions: (b)(5), which protects internal deliberative material such as draft advice and pre-decisional discussion, and (b)(6), which protects personal privacy. Both are routine categories applied across federal FOIA responses generally, not markings specific to this case.
The names that showed up once
Here the two releases diverge in a way worth noting as a simple comparison. The original 2021 release, only 12 pages, turned out to be less redacted than the 264-page set that followed it. Those 12 pages consisted largely of a private email distribution list to which Gough had been added, and the names on that list were visible in a form that does not appear the same way in the later, larger release.
One document shows names the other hides. Put side by side, under the same case number, that is the entire comparison, and it is worth sitting with rather than stretching further.
What the record doesn’t say
Several things stay open. The source does not indicate which redactions under (b)(5) or (b)(6) correspond to which individuals or subjects, so the exact content withheld is not recoverable from the release itself. Nothing in the record explains why the thinner 2021 release omitted material that surfaced years later in the fuller set. And the full membership of the private list Gough was added to is not established beyond the names that happened to be visible in the first, less-redacted release.
These are gaps in the paperwork. They are facts about what was produced and what was withheld, not evidence of what the withheld material contains.
What Greenewald said about it afterward
Three statements belong to Greenewald, made after the documents were released, and are kept separate from what the documents themselves show. In his appeal of April 29, 2021, he argued that 12 pages could not represent the full universe of records responsive to the request, pointing to Gough’s role as OSD’s main contact on the subject and to the scale of the April 2020 announcement as reasons more material should exist.
In a note attached to the 2025 publication, he said he had not initially realized the 2021 release was the less-redacted of the two, and that the private list it exposed was worth a second look. He also cautioned readers directly: not every email in the file originated with DoD or government personnel, since Gough had simply been added to an outside list, and anyone reading the correspondence should check who actually wrote a given message before assuming it came from the Pentagon.
Read it that way, and the file holds together as a record of process, who asked, who answered, who was copied, right up to the point where the redactions begin.