Nathan Reeve

The Black Vault filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January 2022 seeking the email traffic of Navy program manager Yasir Qureshi, whose name runs through records of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) under directors Jay Stratton and later Brennan McKernan. The task force had existed since August 4, 2020, set up … Read more

The Record on the Eve of a Handshake A single appearance can do more diplomatic work than a formal statement. In the days before the first meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, American diplomats in Seoul were tracking exactly that: how a few relaxed minutes of Kim Jong Il standing beside Chinese … Read more

A Document, Not an Investigation The National Security Archive at George Washington University posted a briefing book on June 5, 2023, titled “The First Six Months of Clinton-Russian Relations: Summits with Yeltsin at Vancouver and Tokyo, 1993.” The material was declassified through mandatory declassification review, a process in which a requester asks the government to … Read more

Some files get released because a court order forces the issue. This one exists because a researcher asked for it, and the Air Force said yes. The paperwork The release is cataloged as FOIA case 2025-01757-F, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the federal law requiring agencies to hand over records on request, subject … Read more

A meeting, on paper A Pentagon UAP investigator and a Harvard astrophysicist traded a run of emails in late 2022 that ended in a face-to-face meeting. That much is documented. What happened afterward is, for the most part, not. The document at the center of this is an email chain between Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, then … Read more

Money that cannot be spent outside a single video game does not usually draw the attention of a tax authority. Fortnite’s in-game currency did, for a stretch that ran at least from October 2019 to February 12, 2020, when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) listed it on a webpage as a form of reportable virtual … Read more

Two waves, one number Russian forces spent much of 2021 massing near Ukraine’s borders in two separate waves: an initial buildup in March and April that partly withdrew by June, and a second buildup beginning in October that, by December, had placed more than 100,000 troops on three sides of the country, including Belarus to … Read more

A partial copy, with a short note attached The National Security Archive’s Guatemala collection includes a two-part document titled “Campaign plan Firmeza 83-1 and Appendix 1 (Intelligence)” (cataloged in the collection’s Spanish-language index as “Documento 10: Plan de Campaña Firmeza 83-1 y Anexo ‘Uno’ (Inteligencia)”), dated August 1983. The posting describes it as a partial … Read more

Seven Signatures, One Report A file that looks like random noise is not the same thing as random noise. One component in the Infamous Chisel malware framework maintains a running log of every file it has already transmitted: up to 16,384 MD5 hashes, written as raw binary data, stored inside a hidden file named google.index. … Read more

What the File Is The title “ANOTHER UAC-0010 STORY” reads like something filed by a researcher who has written enough of these reports to have a naming convention for them. The document was produced by the Cyber Incidents Response Operational Centre, a sub-unit of Ukraine’s State Cyber Protection Centre (SCPC), published in January 2023 with … Read more