A newly completed Freedom of Information Act release from the U.S. Navy provides hundreds of pages of detailed technical, cost and mission analysis from a late-1970s effort to determine what the next generation of naval vehicles might look like, which includes nuclear-powered aircraft designed to remain on station for days, 80-knot surface-effect ships, enormous lighter-than-air vehicles, wing-in-ground-effect craft and unconventional high-speed warships. The records concern the Advanced Naval Vehicles Concepts Evaluation, or ANVCE, Project, a Navy study begun in 1975 to help shape research and development for the 1980–2000 period. The project ultimately examined nine broad vehicle concepts through more…
Author: John Greenewald
Background Before the modern era, cryptography was concerned solely with message confidentiality (i.e., encryption)—conversion of messages from a comprehensible form into an incomprehensible one and back again at the other end, rendering it unreadable by interceptors or eavesdroppers without secret knowledge (namely the key needed for decryption of that message). Encryption attempted to ensure secrecy in communications, such as those of spies, military leaders, and diplomats. In recent decades, the field has expanded beyond confidentiality concerns to include techniques for message integrity checking, sender/receiver identity authentication, digital signatures, interactive proofs and secure computation, among others. Below, you will find the…
A newly released collection of records from the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office provides a substantially more detailed look at the government-sponsored UAP research workshop held outside Washington, D.C., in August 2025, including a working agenda identifying speakers and panelists, previously unreleased correspondence concerning foreign participation, and evidence that AARO was already discussing a follow-on workshop months before the first event took place. The records also document a separate Pentagon engagement with representatives of Uruguay’s official UAP investigative organization, including plans for reciprocal mission briefings, discussions about future collaboration, lunch with senior AARO personnel and a private Pentagon tour. The…
The Department of the Navy has released more than 1,300 pages of emails and related records involving former Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray, opening a broad window into government communications surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena during a pivotal period in the Pentagon’s modern UAP effort. The records were obtained by The Black Vault through a Freedom of Information Act request filed on May 24, 2022. The request sought emails sent to, from, copied to or blind-copied to Bray containing terms including “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” “UAP,” “UAPTF,” “UFO,” “AATIP,” “AAWSAP” and several related phrases. More than four years later,…
Newly released Central Intelligence Agency records provide the most complete look yet at two separate attempts by Jeffrey Epstein, which were more than a decade apart, to determine what information the CIA maintained about him. The records were obtained by The Black Vault after case numbers for Epstein’s Privacy Act requests surfaced within the broader government release of Epstein-related files. Rather than requesting CIA records about Epstein specifically, The Black Vault used those case identifiers, listed as P-1999-02450 and P-2011-00673, to seek the records generated during the processing of the two cases. This also stemmed from a public call to…