Two requests, two and a half years apart
John Greenewald, who runs the FOIA research site The Black Vault, filed case 22-F-0249, a Freedom of Information Act request, against the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. The target was paperwork on the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, a Pentagon body set up to coordinate the Department of Defense’s handling of UAP, the military’s term for unidentified aerial phenomena. The Department released the first batch on May 16, 2023: 33 pages, 6.5 megabytes. A second batch followed on November 21, 2025, more than two and a half years later: 49 pages, 5.6 megabytes.
Together the two releases make up OSD Public Affairs briefing cards, Joint Staff and OUSD(I&S) coordination packages (the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security), internal staffing sheets, and memoranda signed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense. That is the full inventory. What it documents is administrative: how one small Pentagon office got built, on paper, over roughly two years.
How AOIMSG came to exist, on paper
The documents place AOIMSG in a line of succession. On November 23, 2021, the Deputy Secretary of Defense signed a memorandum establishing AOIMSG as the replacement for the Navy’s existing UAP Task Force, with a mandate to synchronize detection and identification efforts across the Department and other federal agencies for objects in restricted military airspace. The same memo created an oversight body, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Executive Council, with the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security as lead official. The coordination packages show that structure moving through several offices for sign-off before AOIMSG’s shape was finalized. AOIMSG itself did not last long: a fiscal year 2022 defense authorization act required a broader office, and the Department stood up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, on July 20, 2022, to take over AOIMSG’s intended duties.
The same records settle a question that had sat open since a September 2022 Black Vault profile raised it without an answer: who was actually running AOIMSG. The newly released pages identify Matthew Cummings, an OSD senior advisor for MASINT and GEOINT (measurement-and-signature and geospatial intelligence) and special programs, as the group’s acting director. That is a finding the paperwork settles outright, a name and a chain of approvals confirmed end to end. It is not an account of a sighting or an encounter. The file is organizational, not evidence of anything seen in the sky.
The December 2021 email
One dated item in the file reads differently from the rest. An email from December 9, 2021, its author’s name redacted, reports that Cummings was “not thrilled” with a Public Affairs plan for a media backgrounder meant to help the Department “normalize, standardize, and destigmatize” reporting on UAP in military airspace. The quote is reproduced as it appears in the document. Nothing else in the file says who was on the thread, what specifically Cummings objected to, or whether the backgrounder went forward in the form Public Affairs proposed.
What the record doesn’t explain
Three gaps sit alongside that one finding. The Black Vault states it holds no record of a FOIA appeal, the formal request to reconsider a denial or delay, being filed or granted between the 2023 release and the 2025 one, and no paperwork explaining why the second batch surfaced when it did. That is reported here as an absence in the public record, not as evidence of anything being withheld on purpose.
Several pages in the November 2025 batch are withheld in full, with no description of subject matter and no exemption reasoning beyond a bare citation. A full-page redaction is a fact about the paperwork. It says nothing about what the page contained, and nothing here guesses at it.
Outside the single December 2021 email, the released pages say nothing further about what Cummings’s job actually involved, how long he held it, or where his responsibilities went afterward. The record establishes a title. It does not establish a biography.
The outlet’s reading
The Black Vault argues separately that the repeated renaming of the Pentagon’s UAP-related offices, task force to AOIMSG to AARO, makes the paper trail hard for outside researchers to follow, and reads the December 2021 exchange as evidence of frustration among unnamed senior officials reluctant to engage publicly on the subject. That reading belongs to the outlet, not to the documents. The file records one stated preference, Cummings’s reaction to one specific plan, attributed to him in one email. It does not describe institutional reluctance more broadly, and no released page uses that phrase.
What the file confirms is narrow: a name, a sequence of sign-offs, one quoted sentence from one email. What it leaves open is an appeal nobody can document, pages withheld without explanation, and a director’s record that ends almost as soon as it starts.
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**Edit notes:** The text contained no relative-to-today date references (all dates were already absolute calendar dates), no subject–verb agreement errors, no article errors, no homophone errors, and consistent American spelling and punctuation. No corrections were required; the article is reproduced as submitted.