Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) originally filed in June 2021, The Black Vault has just obtained the official release of an email chain involving Luis Elizondo, the alleged former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and Neill Tipton, a defense official who previously worked as the Director of Defense Intelligence, Collection and Special Programs. A portion of these emails was initially published by Popular Mechanics in 2020, then later seen as part of a Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG) complaint submitted by Elizondo in 2021, then later published by the NY Post…
Author: John Greenewald
In April 2021, during the Crew-2 mission’s historic journey to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was briefly thought to be on a collision course with an unidentified object. NASA’s preliminary assessment categorized this event as a potential conjunction, prompting astronauts to suit up for extra safety. However, after a detailed investigation, it was labeled a false alarm, sparking intrigue about the nature of the incident and raising questions on the identification and tracking of space debris. Now, newly released documents rom Space Command (SPACECOM), obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request originally filed by…
The attack on the French oil tanker Limburg occurred on October 6, 2002, off the coast of Yemen. The tanker was en route to the port of Mina al-Dabah on the Arabian Sea to collect a shipment of crude oil. As it approached its destination, a small boat laden with explosives rammed into the ship’s starboard side. This resulted in a massive explosion and fire that breached the tanker’s hull, causing substantial damage and spilling thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Aden. The attack killed a Bulgarian crew member and injured several others. The explosion also created…
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has published a new document addressing the impact of forced perspective and parallax effects on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) observations. Their paper, “Effect of Forced Perspective and Parallax View on UAP Observations”, offers insight into how these optical illusions can distort estimates of UAP size, speed, and location, providing important context for the public and analysts alike. They shared the document via X in the following post: https://twitter.com/DoD_AARO/status/1788223137277952196 The paper begins by acknowledging that no single explanation can account for all UAP reports, but it emphasizes that forced perspective and parallax often play a…
Background When Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are processed by the FBI, they will sometimes send CD’s (or printed pages) of “pre-processed pages”. This speeds up processing time, and generally (according to the FBI) the pre-processed pages that were released in previous FOIA requests, generally satisfies each respective request. If the pre-processed package does not seem to contain what a requester is looking for, they can then go after additional pages, and file another request (which generally gets tacked on to the first case number, unless 30+ days pass). In April of 2017, I went after what I believed…