The Request A Freedom of Information request submitted to The National Archives on behalf of an unnamed requester asked for four distinct things about a single file, nothing more. The request was logged under reference CAS-318762 and resolved on March 3, 2026, with the status “some information provided.” Set out plainly, the four questions were: … Read more
A photograph that isn’t what it seems A photograph arrived in England in 1942, the kind any family with a son in a POW camp might have received that year. It shows a man standing, nothing more. Nothing about the print would have told a camp censor, or anyone else, that it was carrying anything … Read more
“In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.” That is General Leslie Groves, speaking about radiation sickness among the survivors of the atomic bombings. “The atomic bomb is the most terrible agent of destruction known to man.” That is a U.S. Navy report, describing the same weapon. Both statements are attributed … Read more
A document can be misfiled in a way that says nothing about whether it’s true. This one is an example. The metadata tag attached to the archive copy reads “OCR of the Document | National Security Archive,” a title that matches nothing in the pages that follow. What’s actually there is a 2022 Ukrainian government … Read more
Two requests, two and a half years apart John Greenewald, who runs the FOIA research site The Black Vault, filed case 22-F-0249, a Freedom of Information Act request, against the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. The target was paperwork on the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG, … Read more
Mount McKinley became Denali on August 30, 2015, when Interior Secretary Sally Jewell signed Secretarial Order No. 3337 in Anchorage, closing a request that Alaska Governor Jay Hammond had filed forty years earlier, in 1975. The order left behind the ordinary residue of any federal decision: emails, meeting minutes, internal back-and-forth between agency staff. In … Read more
Most redactions arrive with their reasoning attached: an exemption number, a line about national security, a note that another agency holds the real interest in the material. The Black Vault’s latest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release on the Elizondo-Tipton email exchange has an exemption number. What it lacks is any explanation for using it, … Read more
A Mailbox, Not an Investigation The request behind this release was narrow by design. It asked the Department of Defense for a copy of every email sent to, from, or copied and blind-copied to Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood that contained one of a short list of terms: “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,” “UAP,” and … Read more
Some documents describe something that was built. This one describes something that was only ever supposed to work on paper, and the paper is specific enough that it reads like an engineering drawing rather than a pitch. A 42-page technical report, filed at a U.S. Navy design center, lays out a ship meant to launch … Read more
The Document A war diary is not built for drama. It exists so that someone years later can reconstruct a unit’s day without needing anyone’s memory: what happened, where, at what time. The diary kept for 40 Commando Royal Marines (40 Cdo RM) during the 1982 Falklands conflict does exactly that. Cataloged as ADM 202/930/1 … Read more
