An F/A-18 Pilot, a Senate Briefing, and a Document the Navy Said Didn’t Exist
A researcher asked the Navy for a specific internal email. The Navy said no such record existed. Two FOIA requests and roughly two years later, the document surfaced anyway, naming a fighter squadron, a Senate committee, and a date, but very little else.
What Greenewald Got, and How Long It Took
In June 2019, John Greenewald Jr. who runs the FOIA archive The Black Vault, published Navy emails obtained under an earlier request targeting the correspondence of Joseph Gradisher, spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare. Buried in those emails was a passing reference to an Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA) “weekly e-mail” mentioning a UAP briefing for Senate staffers. Greenewald filed a targeted request for that specific weekly email, which the Navy logged as case DON-NAVY-2019-008880.
The first answer was “no records,” despite other, already-released Navy emails referring to the document directly. Why the initial search missed a document the Navy’s own emails referenced is not explained anywhere in the file. By the time Greenewald had done enough additional research to push back, the appeal window on that case had closed, so rather than appeal, he filed a new, more detailed request. That produced the document, though it arrived without attachments the PDF itself referred to, requiring a further request before they came through. Greenewald says The Black Vault had been chasing the document for two years before he published it, in Episode 87, on November 18, 2021.
What the Document Actually Says
The document is an OLA weekly email, the kind of routine legislative-affairs summary that would ordinarily draw no attention. One line in it does: on January 16, 2019, an F/A-18 pilot from VFA-103 met with professional staff members (PSMs) of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). The email frames this as a previously unrevealed briefing centered on an encounter the pilot reported while operating in airspace off the U.S. East Coast.
That is the extent of what has surfaced. The excerpt gives a date for the meeting and a squadron for the pilot, but no name, no separate date for the encounter itself, no location more specific than “off the U.S. East Coast,” no altitude, no duration, and no description of what was seen. Whether the weekly email says anything further has not been made public.
What Was Never Investigated
The Black Vault’s role stops at the paperwork: filing requests, refiling when one failed, chasing missing attachments. Greenewald did not interview the pilot, did not independently confirm the Senate briefing beyond what the document states, and did not investigate the encounter itself. Nothing in the released material includes a Navy review, an internal assessment, or any finding about what happened. The document establishes that a meeting occurred and that OLA thought it worth a line in a routine staff summary, that is the outer edge of what the paper trail shows.
Greenewald has said that on November 17, 2021, he asked the Pentagon to comment on the briefing, the pilot, or the encounter. The Pentagon’s classification citation ended the inquiry without addressing the substance.
No Explanation Offered
Nowhere in this paper trail does anyone offer an account of what the pilot reported. There is no balloon, no drone, no test flight, no misread instrument, no named program put forward as an explanation. The Pentagon’s 2021 response did not address the sighting; it declined to discuss it because the underlying briefing was classified, which describes handling, not content. No mundane explanation appears in the record, and no exotic one does either. On this point the file is simply silent.
What’s Still Open, Itemized
The pilot’s identity: not given, only the unit, VFA-103, appears in the document. The date of the encounter: not stated separately from the January 16, 2019, meeting date. The location: given only as airspace off the U.S. East Coast, with no coordinates, altitude, or named range. The full email: only one line of it has been reported, so whether the OLA weekly contained additional description is unknown. The briefing itself: what the pilot told the SASC staff, and whether it led to any follow-up, is not stated. The Navy’s reasoning: why the original search returned “no records,” and what changed to produce the document later, is not explained in the correspondence.
One further caution belongs here. A separate account, reported by other outlets in April 2022, describes a different F/A-18 pilot, connected to the 2015 “Gimbal” video, briefing Senate staffers in 2019. That case came out of a later Black Vault release. Nothing in this record ties it to the January 16, 2019, meeting described here, and the two should not be treated as the same story until that link is documented.
The Shape of the Gap
A two-year FOIA fight that ends in one paragraph, no names, and a classification citation is not unusual in records work. Agencies sometimes narrow a release to protect a briefed party’s identity, sometimes withhold detail because a classification review is still open, and sometimes just move slowly because that is how records offices function. All three are ordinary reasons for a thin release. None of them is confirmed by anything in this file, and nothing here indicates which, if any, applies.
What Greenewald obtained, after two FOIA filings and two years, is confirmation that a briefing took place, on a named date, involving a named squadron, in front of a named Senate committee’s staff. It is not confirmation of what the pilot saw. The document verifies that a meeting happened. It does not describe the event the meeting was about. That is what the record holds: a confirmed reference, not a confirmed event.