Two FOIA requests, filed by the same researcher roughly a year apart and worded in different ways, searched the Navy’s email systems and came back with the identical answer: one file. Not a similar file. The same file, redacted the same way, both times. That is the entire discovery here, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not prove before going further.
Two Requests, One File
The first request, case number DON-NAVY-2021-007791, asked the Department of the Navy for all emails sent to, from, or copied to Brennan P. McKernan, identified in the request’s own language as “CIV USN DCNO N2N6,” that contained the keyword “ELIZONDO.” The second, DON-NAVY-2022-007539, widened the net: emails involving McKernan and Luis Elizondo “as a private citizen.” Both requests directed the Navy to search its classified and unclassified networks, SIPRNET and JWICS (the Secret and Top Secret-level intelligence networks) and NIPRNET (the unclassified network). In both cases, the Navy’s response was identical in substance: one responsive record was found. The Black Vault, a FOIA-focused research outlet, published both results together on March 4, 2026.
What the Chain Describes
That single record is an email chain with a header reading, in part, “[Non-DoD Source] Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) / Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOISMG) Presentation,” sent at 12:44 PM on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. The acronym in that header, AOISMG, is a letter transposition of AOIMSG, the office’s actual name as established elsewhere in the record; the discrepancy sits in the subject line as released and is not explained further. The chain arranges a briefing scheduled for March 23, 2022, in Roosevelt Hall on the National War College campus at Fort McNair. The agenda describes three sessions: one unclassified, running roughly 50 to 55 minutes with a 15-minute question period, followed by two sessions classified at the TS-SCI level, meaning Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information. Subject matter named in the chain includes congressional reports, the phrase “adversary overmatch,” and “Tic-Tac” incidents, plural. None of this is interpretation. It is what the document says was scheduled to happen.
What “One Responsive Record” Actually Confirms
Navy FOIA officers certified that they searched exhaustively under both keyword scopes and turned up only this chain. That is a narrow finding. It means the term “Elizondo” appears somewhere in the chain’s headers, metadata, or body, since the first request required that keyword to return anything at all. It also implies McKernan’s identifying information intersected with the search, since both requests were scoped to his correspondence. What it does not mean is that either man attended the briefing, organized it, or spoke at it. McKernan’s name does not visibly appear anywhere in the released text; his presence in the record is inferred entirely from the fact that the search, built around his inbox, returned this file and nothing else. The search result is the only fact in hand, and it supports presence in the correspondence, not a role in the event.
The Standing DoD Position
The Department of Defense has maintained for years that AATIP (the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which the record above spells as “Advance”) had a limited scope, and separately, that Elizondo was never assigned responsibilities within it, a position officials have repeated and never formally withdrawn. The Pentagon has also acknowledged, in later statements, that the program drew on a wide variety of information sources, including UAP reports. The March 2022 briefing’s own title pairs AATIP’s name directly with AOIMSG, its successor office, inside what the agenda describes as official DoD-channel correspondence, years after the program was said to have ended and after Elizondo’s 2017 resignation. That pairing does not contradict the Pentagon’s position outright. It also does not sit easily alongside it, and no document in this release settles the tension either way.
What the Redactions Withhold
The identities of the sender, the recipients, and the party labeled “[Non-DoD Source],” who appears to have forwarded the original invitation into Navy email channels, are withheld in full. The Navy applied FOIA Exemption (b)(6), the exemption covering personal privacy, to all of it. That exemption is a routine mechanism, used across thousands of unrelated FOIA releases for ordinary reasons having nothing to do with this case. Naming the exemption explains the legal basis for the redaction. It does not explain why this particular correspondence needed it, and the file offers nothing further on that point.
The Unanswered Specifics
Four things stay open. Whether “Tic-Tac incidents,” written in the plural, refers to more than one distinct encounter or is loose phrasing in an internal email is not resolved; no other named incident besides the well-documented 2004 USS Nimitz case is known to have circulated publicly under that label at the time of the briefing. Whether congressional staffers, reported elsewhere to have attended briefings of this kind, actually appear on any list for this one cannot be checked, because no attendee list was released. Whether additional records describing the same briefing sit in other Navy components or other agencies entirely is unknown. And The Black Vault has filed a further FOIA request aimed specifically at this event, with no results posted as of the March 2026 release.
Said Afterward, Not Shown Here
Politico reported in June 2021 that Brennan McKernan directed the Pentagon’s UAP task force. That reporting sits entirely outside this FOIA release. The email chain itself does not state his title, his role, or whether he was in the room on March 23, 2022. It is worth keeping that fence up: a claim made in one outlet’s reporting is not the same category of fact as a line in a released document, even when both concern the same person.
What remains, after both requests and both searches, is one email chain that proves a briefing titled “AATIP/AOIMSG Presentation” was scheduled to happen at Fort McNair, and very little else. The names are gone. The attendee list was never released. The second FOIA request aimed squarely at this event is still open. That is the current state of the paperwork, and for now it is the whole record.