The Pentagon’s UFO office keeps a running list of case numbers. In the spring of 2023, a sliver of that list reached the public, and it turned out to contain almost nothing but the numbers themselves. The Request John Greenewald runs The Black Vault, an archive of declassified U.S. government material built largely through the … Read more
The Record A memorandum can announce the end of one organization and the start of another without describing a single incident. The document at the center of this entry does exactly that. The Memo Itself The source is a two-page Deputy Secretary of Defense memorandum dated November 23, 2021, signed by Kathleen Hicks, released and … Read more
A Document Everyone Has Already Seen The Hottel memo is one of the most-viewed pages in the FBI’s own online reading room, the Vault. It first reached the public in the 1970s, after Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the federal law that lets anyone ask a … Read more
The Message in the Negotiation Window A ransom negotiation message quoted in a federal advisory gets straight to the point. The attackers told their victim they had noticed the company “has stocks,” and that if it did not engage them, they would leak the data to “the Nasdaq” and see what happened to the share … Read more
Two versions, one morning A government report titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” reached Congress in two forms on June 25, 2021: an unclassified version, posted the same day on the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and a classified version delivered only to the relevant congressional committees. This piece … Read more
A spokesperson’s inbox, filed away FOIA Case 20-F-1095 began as a request from The Black Vault, the transparency site run by John Greenewald Jr. who built it in 1996, at age fifteen, into what is now one of the largest public archives of declassified government material. The request asked for any email to or from … Read more
Drones Over the Fence Line Twenty-Four Pages On November 7, 2024, researcher John Greenewald of The Black Vault filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), asking for everything the agency had shared with the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which compiles annual reports on drone and … Read more
A Decade of Small Releases For a little over ten years, the National Security Agency answered requests about a project called Intellipedia the ordinary way: page by page, some of it blacked out, but released. Then, in 2023, it stopped answering at all. Intellipedia is a set of three internal wikis built by the Office … Read more
The U.S. Pacific Fleet spent weeks searching its own files for records of a reported 2019 drone encounter. When the Navy’s own legal office later asked how that search had been run, the command that ran it could not say. What surfaced, and when On January 27, 2022, the FOIA research site The Black Vault … Read more
A dog named after a rank Commander is a German Shepherd, the Biden family’s dog, who arrived at the White House in 2021. What follows is not a judgment about his temperament and not something collected from rumor. It is what a specific federal records release documents, and only that: a Freedom of Information Act … Read more
