A newly released Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provides limited insight into internal communications involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), despite a broad request targeting multiple keywords tied to the subject. The request, submitted on May 23, 2024, sought all emails to, from, or copied to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm containing terms such as “UAP,” “UFO,” “AARO,” and “Grusch,” among others. It also explicitly requested any associated attachments and directed the agency to search both classified and unclassified systems. According to the DOE’s final response, the search, which was conducted by the…
Author: John Greenewald
A newly released collection of records from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), provides insight into how the agency handled public backlash, media inquiries, and internal discussions surrounding a controversy involving late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Commissioner Brendan Carr, and broader First Amendment concerns. The controversy centered on public remarks made by FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr in response to political commentary delivered during Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues. Carr publicly criticized aspects of the content, raising concerns about media standards and bias, which in turn prompted debate over whether such criticism from a sitting FCC…
Two separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of the Navy, both filed nearly a year apart and scoped differently, have yielded the same single responsive record: a chain of emails detailing a March 2022 briefing on the Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). The outcome raises questions not only about the scope of the Navy’s search, but also about the content and context of the briefing itself. The names of the individuals who participated in the briefings are fully redacted from the released records. The first…
Just days after former President Donald Trump publicly stated that he wanted to order the release of UFO and UAP-related files, the U.S. Navy formally denied an appeal seeking the release of 78 photographs designated as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP). The decision, dated February 24, 2026, upholds a prior full denial of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Black Vault in September 2022 under case number DON-NAVY-2022-012661. The appeal was assigned tracking number 2026-NavyAppeal-000123. The original request sought “all photographs with the designation of ‘unidentified aerial phenomena or ‘UAP’ as archived by the U.S. Navy.” In…
The Central Intelligence Agency has completed a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Black Vault in August 2013, releasing records in April 2025 under case F-2013-02345, nearly twelve years after the request was submitted. (The Black Vault has a large backlog of documents that have yet to be put online, hence the delay in getting this document published). The records consist of the CIA’s June 27, 2013, response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) regarding the Committee’s Study of the Agency’s former Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) Program. A previous version of this same document was…