A Photograph and a Volume Start with the image. Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter are walking toward an aircraft at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, on February 13, 1977, about to board for the flight back to Andrews Air Force Base. The photograph is held by the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library under the catalog number … Read more
A Slide Deck, Not a Verdict The record here is a 149-page, 8.5-megabyte PowerPoint titled “Lessons Learned: The ATF’s Raid on the Waco Branch Davidian Compound.” It was prepared jointly by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) as an internal review of the February 1993 raid … Read more
The Request and the Document John Greenewald, who runs the public-records site The Black Vault, filed the request as part of a standing effort to pull Defense Intelligence Agency paperwork into public view. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the law that lets the public request copies of federal records, he asked for “all reports … Read more
A Pentagon Office Explains Its Own Math Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick spent a Senate hearing explaining, under oath, how an unidentified object usually turns out to be something ordinary, and how often it doesn’t quite turn out to be anything at all yet. That second category, not the first, is the part of the transcript worth … Read more
A Two-Page Answer John Greenewald Jr., who runs the document archive The Black Vault, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in early December 2019 for any record of an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) inquiry into three widely seen UFO videos. He wanted to know whether the agency had found the … Read more
A line in a briefing book The National Security Archive at George Washington University posted an Electronic Briefing Book titled “Nuclear Weapons and the Law of War” on June 6, 2023. It collects U.S. government records from the negotiation of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a treaty meant to sharpen wartime protections … Read more
The Letter That Asked to Be Burned A single sheet of paper, unsigned, written in a hand its own author tried to disguise, sits today at the National Archives in London under the catalog reference SP 14/216. It carries an instruction near its end: burn this immediately. The document survived anyway, legible after more than … Read more
A Slide, Not a Report Most of what gets called a “UFO document” in this archive is a single page pulled from a thicker file. The USS Stout material is a clean example of that. Researcher John Greenewald obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the law that lets the public ask … Read more
The National Archives in London holds a scattered run of files on football’s World Cup, 1929 to 2023: Foreign Office notes, a Cabinet costing exercise, a trademark registration, a Privy Council proclamation. None were written for historians. Read in order, they track a government bumping into a sport it did not organize and could not … Read more
The Package The file itself is unremarkable to look at: 23 pages, about 1 megabyte, released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to Abbas Michael Dharamsey, a researcher who files requests on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) cases. The Black Vault, run by researcher John Greenewald, verified and published the release on March 6, 2024. … Read more
