The Release
A government slide deck describing a classified NASA briefing on unidentified aerial phenomena surfaced through two requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets the public ask federal agencies for their records. The result, sent to The Black Vault’s John Greenewald by the U.S. Navy on October 10, 2024, is a 16-page, 2.3-megabyte document recording a briefing the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force (UAPTF) gave NASA officials in September and October 2020.
The first request, filed in 2021, asked for “all communications, emails or otherwise, between the UAP Task Force, and NASA.” It surfaced NASA FOIA Case 21-HQ-F-00507, confirming the UAPTF had asked NASA for a briefing that September. A second request, filed in 2022, went further, asking specifically for the “classified slide deck on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), created by Jay Stratton,” reportedly shown to NASA and possibly other agencies in October 2020. The resulting file is held in the Navy’s own FOIA reading room, under Case Files, UAP Info, UAP Documents, labeled “NASA Brief Redacted.”
NASA records had already named the officials present: International Space Station (ISS) Program Manager Joel Montalbano, Export Control and Interagency Liaison Division Director Margaret Kieffer, former Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs Suzanne Gillen, and Mike Gold, then Acting Associate Administrator for the Office of International and Interagency Relations. NASA’s own records describe the session as a secure video teleconference held at the UAPTF’s request. The deck itself is credited to Jay Stratton, a career intelligence officer who later became the Task Force’s first director.
The Slide on the Tic Tac
One slide addresses the November 14, 2004, encounter involving the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, the incident now widely known as the “Tic Tac” case. It describes the object as “solid white, smooth,” with no visible wings or pylons, and a reported length of about 46 feet (14 meters). It states that the sighting was corroborated through debriefs of aircrew and other personnel present at the time. That is the entirety of what this document says about the object itself: a physical description and a note that witnesses were debriefed, with nothing on sensor data, flight path, or how it reportedly moved.
The Method, As Named
Elsewhere in the deck, the UAPTF describes its general approach to sightings as a “multi-sensor approach,” combining technical collection with operator reporting, with the resulting data shared across other government partners. That is a claim about method across the Task Force’s caseload as a whole. The Tic Tac slide makes a narrower statement: despite the debrief corroboration, it says limited data was available at the time for a full technical analysis of the 2004 case. These are not the same claim. The deck never says the multi-sensor approach was applied retroactively to the Nimitz encounter, only that the data on hand at the time of the briefing was not enough to settle it.
“Unknown Weather or Other Natural Phenomena”
A slide titled “Potential Explanations” lists three possible causes for UAP sightings. Two are redacted. The one left visible reads: “unknown weather or other natural phenomena.”
The slide offers this as one of three general categories for UAP sightings overall, not as a finding tied to a single case. Nothing in the document ties it, or the two redacted explanations beside it, to the Tic Tac incident. Reading it as an answer to the Nimitz case would require a connection the record does not make. A few pages earlier, the Tic Tac slide says only that the data on that case was limited, and the deck never links the two.
What’s Redacted, and Under What
The two withheld explanations are marked under FOIA Exemption (b)(1), which covers classified national-defense and foreign-policy information, and Exemption (b)(5), which covers deliberative-process material, meaning internal agency discussion not meant for release. Citing an exemption says the withheld text falls into one of those categories. It does not say what the text itself reads. The same pattern holds for the deck’s photographs: the slides are described as including images tied to UAP sightings, but nearly all remain classified, with a single photograph left visible and nothing in the record describing what the rest show.
The Silence After 2004
The deck does not say whether the Navy, the UAPTF, or any other agency gathered further technical data on the Tic Tac incident in the years between the 2004 encounter and the 2020 briefing. That absence is not a statement. The document does not claim nothing further was collected; it simply never addresses the question in either direction. The “multi-sensor approach” named earlier in the deck is also never detailed beyond its own label, with no list of sensor types and no account of how operator reports and technical collection are weighed against each other. Both gaps, the collection record after 2004 and the substance behind the method’s name, remain open in the document itself, not answers withheld on purpose.
What Greenewald Said About It
John Greenewald, who obtained the release through The Black Vault, called it publicly “a rare glimpse into the collaboration between the UAP Task Force and NASA,” and said further documents would be published as they surface. That is his own characterization of the release, offered after the fact. It is not a conclusion contained inside the slide deck, which makes no claim anywhere in its sixteen pages about what the briefing represents beyond its own contents.
What the deck itself shows is narrower: a briefing took place, a slide on the Tic Tac case existed within it, and most of the explanatory material and photographs surrounding that slide remain classified under exemptions that describe categories of information, not the information itself.