What Came Back Under Case 25-F-2554 A single sentence in a 2019 email states that a Navy official personally escorted a group of pilots into Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s front office, the staff suite attached to the Secretary’s own office, to brief on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). It is a plain sentence, and it … Read more
Case 23-F-0946: What Was Cleared, and What Wasn’t A government agency can confirm a document was cleared for public release without a reader ever seeing a single word of it. That is the position a recent FOIA release leaves David Grusch’s paperwork in, and the gap it leaves open is documented in its own right, … Read more
A FOIA Release, Forty-Five Pages Long The Black Vault, a transparency site run by researcher John Greenewald Jr., filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets members of the public compel release of federal records, asking the U.S. Secret Service how it had handled an unusual candidate for federal … Read more
In one of the incidents described in a UK government threat advisory published January 26, 2023, an attacker did not just send a poisoned link and wait for someone to click it. According to a report by the Iran-focused researchers at Certfa Lab, cited in the advisory, an operator working for a group tracked as … Read more
A Pentagon roundtable does not usually leave a public trace. This one did, because no camera was in the room: reporters were briefed off-camera on October 31, 2023, and the record of what was said exists only because researcher John Greenewald obtained a transcript and posted it on The Black Vault the following day. There … Read more
The paper that becomes a U.S. banknote starts, administratively, as a contract. In 2020 the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was working through a ten-year deal for that paper, and a routine audit of the winning bidder’s own numbers flagged problems the government’s inspectors did not fully resolve in the document they produced. The report … Read more
A government document can be released twice: once with the secrecy mostly intact, and later with a little less of it. That is the case with a 2008 summary explaining how the National Security Agency’s biggest surveillance authority actually operates. The record shows what changed between the two releases. It does not show why, or … Read more
A family near a gully Los Alamos crews called Hot Canyon spent weeks after a 1945 nuclear test being checked by military doctors, without being told what for. Two hundred and sixty miles (418 km) away, in Trinidad, Colorado, an instrument recorded gamma radiation from the same event. Both facts sit in the same set … Read more
The Letter The paperwork on Agatha Christie’s disappearance comes down to one document. It is catalogued at The National Archives as HO 45/25904, a letter from William Kenward, Deputy Chief Constable of the Surrey Constabulary, to Arthur Lewis Dixon at the Home Office in Whitehall, dated February 9, 1927. Kenward did not write it to … Read more
A wire antenna a thousand feet long, suspended in open air on an insulating tower, sounds like something out of a weapons test range rather than a laboratory parking lot. In 1973 it was exactly that: a machine built to recreate the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear detonation without detonating anything. Two Volumes, No History … Read more
