Nathan Reeve, The Record
Seven months of paperwork from NASA contains two answers to the same question, and they don’t agree with each other. The subject was a three-year window of congressional briefings on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA’s first answer was that no such briefings had ever taken place. Its second answer, delivered months later, said otherwise.
The Request
On September 22, 2024, John Greenewald Jr. who runs the transparency site The Black Vault, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with NASA. He asked for all records, including video and photographic material, tied to congressional briefings, classified or unclassified, on findings made by JWST. The request specified a search window running from 2021 through the date of processing, close to three years, and covered either chamber of Congress. NASA logged it as case 25-00860-F-HQ, reference 25-00003-A-OGC.
NASA’s first answer came on October 9, 2024. The agency stated that no records existed of any congressional briefings, classified or unclassified, on discoveries made by JWST. Greenewald appealed. On April 22, 2025, NASA granted that appeal and reversed its position, stating that records responsive to the request had in fact been located. The decision offered no further detail at that stage.
The Video and the Non-Answer
The request had its origin in a video posted September 17, 2024, by a YouTube channel called Psicoactivo Podcast, which produces near-daily content about UFOs and other purported signs of alien life. The video claimed JWST had detected a large object roughly 10 light-years from Earth, moving toward the planet on what it called an unnatural trajectory, and that Congress had been briefed while the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense investigated. It cited no sources for any of these claims.
The story spread on X, YouTube, and TikTok in the days that followed. On September 21, 2024, journalist Matt Laslo, posting as @AskaPol_UAPs, asked Rep. Andre Carson, who had previously chaired a congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, whether he had attended a classified briefing on the JWST findings. Carson did not answer. Laslo published the non-response on September 22, 2024, the same day Greenewald filed his FOIA request with NASA.
The Ordinary Explanation
On October 2, 2024, the fact-checking outlet Snopes examined the claim and found no statement from NASA, no confirmation from any other space agency, and nothing from any branch of Congress. Snopes allowed that agencies sometimes sit on findings until they are confirmed, but weighed against a single video with no sourcing at all, it concluded the claim was “unfounded and likely false.” There wasn’t a sourcing problem to weigh here; there was simply nothing behind the video at all.
NASA’s October response pointed the same way. If Congress had been briefed, classified or not, a record of that briefing should have turned up in a search covering three years. NASA said none did. A fact-check and a FOIA search reached the same place independently. At that point in the timeline, the ordinary explanation, an unsourced video generating a rumor with no paper trail behind it, had no documented problem.
The Reversal
On April 22, 2025, that changed, and NASA granted The Black Vault’s appeal, stating that responsive records existed after all. The decision did not describe what those records contained. It did not state whether they were classified, or at what level. It did not connect them to the object described in the September 2024 video, or to any named briefing, date, or member of Congress. Nor did it address why a search covering the identical three-year window had earlier come back empty.
What the decision changes is narrow and specific: a finding of “no records” was withdrawn and replaced with a finding that records exist. What happened inside NASA’s process between October 2024 and April 2025 is not written down anywhere in that decision.
What Is Not in the File
Three things stay open as of the April 2025 reversal. The content and classification status of the newly acknowledged records: neither is described. The gap between the two searches: the file gives no account of why the first one failed and the second one succeeded. And Rep. Carson’s position: he has never, in this record or anywhere else in it, confirmed or denied attending a classified briefing on JWST. Each is a gap in the paperwork. None of them is filled in by inference here.
What Greenewald Said Afterward
On April 23, 2025, Greenewald posted on X that he already knew of “at least one” document among the records NASA had just acknowledged. That is a statement from the requester, made the day after the appeal decision, not a record NASA produced. The material available does not include the document, does not describe it, and offers no independent confirmation of the claim. It belongs to Greenewald, not to the file it followed.
The Record Since
NASA’s FOIA office remanded the case for further processing on May 14, 2025, and ran a follow-up search through its Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs. In August 2025 it released a set of briefing slides, but nearly all of the content beneath the slide headings was withheld under FOIA Exemption (b)(5), a provision covering internal, pre-decisional deliberations that does not by itself mean the withheld material is classified. Headings such as “Themes” and “More Questions” survived; the text under them mostly did not. After The Black Vault filed a second appeal over the redactions, NASA issued a supplemental release on March 27, 2026, disclosing more of the “Themes” section. What it showed was institutional optimism about JWST’s capabilities, including references to “Habitable Worlds” and “vast potential,” not a confirmation or denial of the 2024 rumor. What NASA anticipated hearing from lawmakers, and how it planned to frame those conversations internally, remains withheld. The Black Vault’s second appeal over that withholding has not yet produced a published result.