Nathan Reeve

The Paper That Exists The document is real. Twenty pages, two megabytes, produced by the U.S. Navy, covering Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the UAP Task Force (UAPTF). It was delivered to the U.S. Congress in October 2019. That much is established and not in dispute. John Greenewald of The Black Vault obtained it through a … Read more

Four Series, Not One Story The National Archives in London holds four separate bodies of paper on the end of slavery in the British colonies, and reading only one of them gives an incomplete picture. The Act itself, along with compensation claim forms and the Commissioners’ rules issued in 1835 and 1836, sits under catalogue … Read more

A House Built for a Consul Höfði House in Reykjavik was built in 1909 for the French consul, then passed through a poet’s hands and the British Embassy before the city bought it in 1958 for official receptions. The building’s modest history makes an unlikely setting for what followed there. On October 11 and 12, … Read more

A Telegram Marked FLASH Telegram No. 1626, internally numbered Tel. No. 622, went from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the British Embassy in Washington on July 21, 1969, by the American date. It carries a double classification: RESTRICTED, meaning limited circulation within government, and CYPHER/CAT A FLASH, meaning it was sent in code and … Read more

On October 27, 1955, a CIA scientist sat down to interview a sitting United States Senator about something that had happened on a train. The senator was Richard B. Russell Jr. Democrat of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The interviewer was Herbert Scoville Jr. then Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, joined by … Read more

‘The Most Terrible Weapon’ and ‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’ The Posting The National Security Archive, a research institute in Washington, D.C. published a posting on August 8, 2022, titled “77th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings: Revisiting the Record.” It supplements an earlier Archive posting, “The Atomic Bomb and the End of World … Read more

A Communications Chief’s Inbox, Opened by Request Federal agencies answer requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets any member of the public ask a U.S. government agency to search and release its records, by running a search and handing over what matches. In 2021, someone filed such a request … Read more

A task force built to track unidentified aerial phenomena was shut down in November 2021, and the paperwork explaining why never names a single sighting. It states only that the existing approach had not worked, and that something better was coming. What the document records is a reorganization, not a revelation. A Memo That Closes … Read more

John Greenewald Jr., who runs the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) archive The Black Vault, has spent years filing requests with federal agencies and posting whatever comes back, unedited. Two of those requests, aimed at the same corner of the aerospace world, produced results that do not line up with each other, and the FBI’s … Read more

A.P.3257 and the Northern Corridor A photograph of storage hangars sits partway through a British Air Ministry report on the Berlin Airlift, captioned as nothing more dramatic than a hedge against failed rail deliveries. The hangars are the least interesting thing in the file. Elsewhere, in a single clause about flight corridors, the report mentions … Read more