John Greenewald: That's right everybody. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in and making this your live stream or your
podcast of choice. My name is John Greenewald, Jr, owner, and
creator of the black vault.com. And this is a pretty fun story,
one of which that I broke today. And that is all about how the
Department of Defense is denying what I believe are key records
on the creation of their UFO office, I'm using that as a
nickname. Let me pull up some visuals for you guys and kind of
go over the story itself. For those of you who are watching on
social media. This is a story that I dropped early this
morning. And essentially, this is going into great detail about
what I just got through the Freedom of Information Act. Now
some of you who are either new to this channel, or you think
you've heard this story, it does sound very familiar to something
I wrote about a week, week and a half ago, that got mainstream
coverage around the globe, I was very excited to see that,
because it's a very important topic UAP as a whole UFOs as a
whole, but also the secrecy surrounding it. That was a
different story. However, that was all about the Navy admitting
that there are UFO videos, in addition to what we've seen
publicly, but they are denying all of us access to it. So what
what this story is all about was me going after documents on the
original, and I will say original, prior to what's called
the aeoi MSG, or let me make sure I get this acronym right
the airborne object identification and management
synchronization group, a handful, mouthful. Prior to that
there was the UAP Task Force, you may have re heard that
referred to as the UAP TF. But it seemed like that was a very
informal, very unstructured effort to look into UAP that has
kind of exploded with public interest here in the last five
years or so. So the UAP ATF kind of came together they were
looking into these things. But in November of 2021, a much more
structured effort called the aeoi MSG, or how they pronounced
it phonetically ame SOG. Don't ask me why, during the UA P
hearings, they refer to it as ame SOG. That essentially was a
much more structured effort to look into UAP the potential
threats that they posed, and try to understand exactly what it
was. Now, it seems like as soon as that was created, and
seemingly like not even off the ground, the aim SOG was renamed.
So before I go into the story, let me preface it with some of
you who may be thinking, hey, this is old. Well, keep in mind
when I filed this Freedom of Information Act request, it was
actually the day after they issued the announcement, this
memo here signed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen
Hicks, that established ame SOG. So I had filed the next day. So
arrow, which is the new one. Acronyms are getting insane,
trust me, you're spot on by thinking that it was that didn't
even exist yet. So the FOIA request was all about ame SOG,
because that was the only thing that existed at the time. But
then also, they searched for records about the creation of
it. My request and let me read it specifically to you scroll to
exactly what it said. I sought after all records pertaining to
the airborne object identification management
synchronization group or aim SOG and the airborne object
identification and management executive council. I have no
idea how they pronounce that acronym. That was essentially a
group in addition to ame SOG that offered some oversight and
some direction for ame SOG. The request I also stipulated to
include, but not be limited to all letters, memos, emails sent
to and from related parties. I also put in the in the FOIA
request that I that I agreed to have the FOIA officer
essentially use their best judgment on who to search
because I wouldn't know that unless I worked within the DOD
so I kind of let their their FOIA officer decide that it's a
little risky, obviously, but you know, The A lot of times FOIA
officers will help you and do their best efforts. So I thought
that that was okay in this, in this case, also asked for
mission statements, PowerPoint presentations, draft documents
about the creation of those two groups, etc. Now,
what was the response was that they found, according to them 50
pages total. So everything that I named up here, they found 50
pages responsive to that. The question mark is what was
withheld because they were withholding 23 of those 50 pages
in full. And according to their letter, they were currently
improperly classified in the interest of national security.
So here we go, again, with that national security, that they did
not want to tell you or I or show your eye any of this
material, or excuse me, about half of the material that they
denied because of national security reasons. What's
interesting is they also broke down the part of the executive
order 135 to six again, in plain English, that essentially means
the it defined secrecy, it defines classification levels.
And they break it down by saying what applies from that are
sections 1.4 A, which are military plans, weapons systems
and operations. 1.4 see intelligence activities,
including special activities, intelligence sources, or
methods, and 1.4 G, vulnerabilities or capabilities
of systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans
or protection services relating to national security. So that is
their reasoning for denying those 23 pages in full. So we
won't see those. Now I have appealed, I'll just jump ahead
to that part of the story. So I am fighting for them. But
essentially, for national security reasons, they did not
want to tell me, they did release 27 pages, I'll kind of
quickly go over some of them. But first, I want to talk to the
key parts of this. And in those 27 pages, I can tell you that
the meat of what was there, what I call the main core of it, were
emails that were sent back and forth, essentially about the
creation of AIM SOG and trying to determine the scope and the
mission. That's obviously what goes into the pre planning for
them that led to that memo that I already showed you
establishing the group problem was that the majority of it was
all blacked out. So even though they withheld the 23 pages in
full, they didn't even Black it out, they just withheld them.
Now we've got 27 other pages to look at. But sadly, the stuff
that actually would be interesting, is heavily blacked
out. But here's some of the key points that you can determine
from this that I thought was kind of interesting, a new name
got got put into the mix. And for all the FOIA people out
there, I always like to add these little tips and tricks. If
this is your your first type of video, you always look for the
very smallest of nugget in these FOIA requests. Because on the
surface, you look at it and they're all blacked out and you
know, or the majority is blacked out and go Well that's really
useless. That sucks. And you throw it behind you into the end
of the paper shredder and and forget about it. I always urge
you don't read every single line, look at every single
character because in this particular case, a name was
revealed. Mark Elliott. And when you look into his background,
he's the director for technical collection within the Office of
the Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence. Now why does
this matter? It's just a new name a new government official,
who cares. But this now opens up new avenues to explore through
FOIA. It's a new email box to put requests on. It's a new
person to watch out for. So that's where this kind of
becomes interesting, because this guy seemingly was very
involved in the creation of AIM SOG prior to this, I don't
believe that was known. So that's something that you look
out for that you could easily miss. And let me prove that
point because the next person is this gentleman here, Matthew
Cummings. Now Matthew Cummings, you can see from the documents,
if you look closely, is the Deputy Director technical
collection. That means that he works with this man here and is
his deputy. And it appears that both of those gentlemen played a
role in the creation of AIM SOG yet again, why is that
important? Sounds pretty dry. Some
of you like this. John is really boring. But that's why that's
why you look at this because now this is completely opened up.
But let me prove my point where this guy has shown up in my FOIA
requests before, but he's easily overlooked. In a Department of
Defense Office of the Inspector General, actually two requests,
it yielded a bunch of emails, same instance as like this only
problem was that the majority of it was blacked out. However, one
name was not Matthew Cummings, this gentleman here, but there
was no context whatsoever, we had no idea who he was, he could
just be anybody that was see seed on those Office of the
Inspector General emails, so kind of overlooked it. Not
necessarily overlooked it, but there's nothing you can do with
that. With this, we now know his title, we now know he works
under him, we now know he creates or created or helped
create or something with aim sock. So these are people that
we definitely look into. So again, kind of dry, I totally
get it. I'm not reading the comments, but I'm sure during
this, behind the scenes, if you're if you're joining those,
the comments are like you know, who cares. But that's why you
look for these little avenues to explore, because these new
people appear. And then these are all avenues to research. But
here for me was the more I would say, interesting document that
came out of the release, let me switch screens here, make sure
it comes up. This is the staff summary sheet that was released
with that Kathleen Hicks establishment memo that I that I
again, already showed you in this video. This was attached to
the to that memo in the foyer release. And why I'm saying that
is this was this was never public. From what I understand.
I checked with a couple other researchers that also go after
documents like this. Hey, have you ever seen this attached to
Kathleen Hicks memo? No, nobody that I had spoken with today had
seen it. Now, why is this important? What I can deduce
about these sheets that is essentially on the creation of
an office like aim SOG there's coordinated efforts to to
essentially create such an effort. And sometimes you have a
lot of voices, which the government, it's the Department
of Defense, there's a heck of a lot of cooks in the kitchen. So
these types of sheets allow them to essentially keep track of
those who are being coordinated with and what their feedback may
be. Now be six exemption is privacy. So we don't know the
names, but that's okay. Because these specific departments or I
should say components within the Department of Defense, all
played a role in the coordination for AIM SOG. And
all of these put their input in. And what it shows is really the
extent of how far aim SOG started to stretch throughout
the inside of the DOD. And that's an important. That's an
important distinction, because now we know within these
offices, all these acronyms, they somehow have a hand in
their UFO research effort. And what was true with ame SOG is
likely going to be true with arrow. Now that's a totally
different video, and subject in itself. But regardless, you can
see where I'm going with this, because now we have a blueprint
back to my FOIA people out there. Now we have a roadmap of
what components to search, because you can't just file a
request to the DOD and say I want all emails searched for
this keyword or that keyword, because there are so many
different components within the DOD. So they'll come back to you
and say, Hey, this is too broad. The DoD has a very wide ranging
department with many components and branches and offices, and so
on and so forth. So this is the roadmap. And that's why pages
like this are incredibly important. But when you scroll
down, you'll see here the subject, aim SOG establishment.
This is prior to that November memo memo, so you're obviously
seeing the work to establish that that aim SOG effort because
it had not been made public at this point. Here's the purpose
to obtain the Deputy Secretary's approval to establish the
airborne object identification and management synchronization
group aim SOG as the successor to the unidentified aerial
phenomena Task Force or UAP. ATF we already went over that
background. The Department of the Navy has run the UAP ATF
since August of 2020. However, the recent report on UAP by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
highlighted that the
scope of the problem extends significantly beyond the purview
of the Navy and warrants a broader approach. In June 2021.
Deputy Deputy Secretary Hicks requested the Undersecretary of
Defense for intelligence and security to Liver a plan to
formalize the mission of the UAP TF into an enduring activity.
Aim SOG was the result. When you get into the discussion heading,
all of that is exempted from release B five is essentially
internal deliberation. That's kind of the the nutshell
explanation. And it goes much more in depth in the legal
jargon, but I won't bore you to death. But essentially, they're
saying that this is internal deliberation, they're still
establishing ame songs, so they don't want to tell you what
they're discussing. Same with the recommendations here, under
B five, the acting director for technical collection, I believe
that would be Elliott, but maybe somebody was acting director at
this time, I don't know. But regardless, they redacted that
for for privacy reasons. And then down here, the attachments,
Action Memo for the DEP sec, def or Deputy Secretary of Defense.
And it goes throughout the others, all of which, which I'll
show you here in a minute, were released in the FOIA, the draft
implementation guidance for reference only. That was not I
believe that that is one of the documents withheld. So you can
see that these little nuggets become very, very valuable to
trying to figure out where to go next. Now I do have a nother
case for Arrow, very similar to this, we'll see what that
yields. And this specific request, which let me pull up
the documents which are here. Let me zoom in so you can see
it. So as the release letter, I have an update from the DoD that
they searched for records on this case through December of
2021. So the records that were created, after that, I created a
case for those, then for the arrow material that will be at
the end of AIM SOG through today will, you know to the date of
processing the request. So you can see it gets a little
complicated, you have to keep track of which request is going
to which timeframe, because if you lose track of that, and you
can lose information, because there's something really killer
happened in January of 2022. About aim SOG, this request
would not have yielded that really cool event, or document
or PowerPoint presentation. So you have to continually follow
up to see where that cut off date is. And then create new
requests. So make sure that if you are filing FOIA request to
do that. So here's some of the information that was released.
This is again, that foyer release packet. This is
everything. This is Kathleen Hicks memo, we don't have to go
through it in detail, I invite you to read it. But this is
where that staff summary sheet that I just went over was
attached. So that's again, very cool, because that has never
been in the public domain before. Here are the emails
which then again become interesting, because a lot of it
is redacted a lot of the information that would be key to
understanding the scope of aeoi, MSG, and how it was created. Why
exactly why it was created, what were they seeing on the inside,
that led them up to the establishment of the office, all
of that is likely bantered in here. But but the majority of it
is redacted. We can also determine that the effort was
created in a secret environment. That is, again, the
classification secret. So it is at that level. Let me see if you
could see this on your screen, they likely printed this out
used black marker then scanned it in, it's not any secret that
we can see the secret designation. But again, you can
at least verify the security classification level of this
entire effort. You can see here no foreign that's no foreign
intelligence. So they want to make sure that no one outside
the United States gets us this information. So I'm not going to
go make this a deep dive and go through every email. Because you
can see a lot of it is you know, some banter back and forth and
stuff that you know, will be kind of pointless to go over.
But one of the big things I would say that was interesting
to me anyway. And I'll go back to the article itself to show
you
was this here, this is called a classification block. And this
accompanies a lot of emails generally at the top bottom or
both. It shows you the classification of what you're
dealing with, who classified it and under what authority. So if
you're communicating within the Pentagon, on a secure server,
you get something that is secret. Generally you will see a
classification block on who classified it and what authority
or where it was derived from. You can see here Matthew
Cummings was the one classifying the some of this material, it
shows that again, he's got a hand in it, he's not just see
seed, because he's in whatever office that essentially, I think
that he probably has a bigger role in this than just being on
a cc list. The classification was derived from the Defense
Intelligence Agency security classification guide, data 2007.
Yes, I'm going after that. I don't think that's been released
before. So you always, you know, essentially look for those
little nuggets. And you can see here that the classified
material, they aim to keep it all classified until 2046. I
always aim to change that with the FOIA. And yes, I have many
success stories, when it comes to that a lot of people think
that you can't do that, that once it says that it's not going
to be declassified for decades, that they stick with it. That's
not true, I've got quite a few examples of that, I also have a
lot of failures. So that happens as well. So if you're going to
go after a document, declassification mandatory
declassification reviews, that is something to be prepared for
it because it happens, you get shot down, they don't want to
give it to you, and it's quite the fight. Last thing that I'll
go over before I end this, this update to you is what didn't
they include, and how many documents were then Well, we
know that the page count, we know that 23 pages were
withholding withheld and full. What does that mean? You know,
how many documents is that is it could that be something else,
I'm not really sure I do have a message into the DOD to try and
break that down. I have appealed this case, as I said, that way,
we can try and get some kind of additional release, we'll see
how that goes. But you can see these were the files that were
that were sent to me, as part of that release packet, I'm showing
you six that were actually seven. The seventh was just my
request, I nobody really cares about that. So I deleted that
PDF on the screenshot. But you'll see here the final
response letter, and then all of the attached documents, which I
just kind of quickly went over in brief, I'll go back and go
through the end. But you'll see the document numbers 1235, and
10, you note the missing numbers. So that gives you an
idea of how many are missing, which would be 4678. And nine,
that gives us a again, an indication of what they're
withholding. And that plays a role in the appeal. So that that
gives you some kind of indicator of how they've they've withheld
material. As I kind of again, went over those were the emails,
I invite you to download all of those that's in the show notes
below that that'll link over to my article, you'll have much
more detail, including the documents themselves. You'll see
some of the other memos. This was Kathleen Hicks, memo that
she had sent out to she didn't say aim SOG. But she was
essentially telling them to create something like aim SOG.
And then you fast forward to November, that's when it was
established. So this was that memorandum that came out in
June, when the UAP report was was released to the public. This
to me was more interesting than the UAP report itself, even
though that was valuable for other reasons. This I found
fascinating because this led to aim SOG. And now arrow. Last is
the congressional language. So internally at the DOD, they were
circulating a document that included all of the UAP related
language again, I won't go through it and make this a deep
dive. But you can see they they were watching all of this, the
highlight was, I don't think relevant to this, if I remember,
this was all about just something unrelated to UAP. But
it came up in my request. And then later, you'll see the UAP
Task Force, language and so on. So a lot of different bills and
verbiage that was combined into this packet. So it all came up
into my request, which all led to aim SOG.
So that's the update a lot of fun to write these stories. I
know sometimes they're not always international breaking
news gonna go viral type stories. But these are
incredibly important to showcase the ever increasing secrecy,
about UAP and UFOs. I have another video on this channel.
If this is your first time here. Make sure that you go to to the
YouTube listing of all the videos. And something that I
published in just the last week or so was all about the secrecy
and how even though some people think we're in this era of
transparency, quite the contrary. We're not and you can
see that from the Navy decisions. You can see that from
from what I just went over with you now and And as we continue
to chisel away as much as we can, and we find these little
nuggets, we're also seeing that increasing layer of secrecy that
just, in my opinion is clamping down harder and harder on this
topic, despite hearing Congress say the words, unidentified
aerial phenomena and, and people are seeing it in congressional
language. This is the result. And it's a lot of secrecy. I'm
going to end you with this. A lot of people will think a lot
of what a lot of people think that throw we'll call them shots
at me my biggest haters. They think FOIA is a waste of time.
And they think that stories like this are just, you know, Biden,
the time until the congressional language hall passes, and
there's immunity, and everybody's going to come
forward. And there's just going to be this new era of
transparency. Here's the the response that I have that I
think a lot of people don't recognize, and I just saw a clip
the other day, it was between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci
unrelated to UAP, obviously, but it was about the Senate
requesting information from the NIH and getting denied that
information. Do you know what they did? They filed FOIA
requests. And in that congressional hearing, Rand Paul
talked about the FOIA requests that he filed, and or his
office, whoever, you know, signed it, but the senators file
FOIA requests to. So so many think that the Senate just has
this wielding power to say, alright, DOD, I want you to give
me those videos, and we're gonna release them to the public. They
don't, they fall back on the FOIA just as much. And Paul
actually had said to Fauci, therefore, your requests were
being denied. So it does not matter if you're a senator or
congressman, or some guy who lives in a black vault, you're
all treated the same. And it is the FOIA that defines what is
going to be declassified. Or at least it's routed to the the
executive orders and security classification guides on what
determines a public release of information versus secrecy and
more secrecy and more secrecy. So I know we want to hang on to
come on Senator, whomever, to start demanding answers. But as
proven time and time again, it doesn't matter if they're a
senator, a lot of that will happen behind closed doors. And
if they do want public transparency or answers, and
agencies can still push back and they still fall back to FOIA. So
all the haters out there that want to keep trashing FOIA. You
can wait for the senators if you'd like but listen to them
because they use the FOIA as a tool as well. And I recommend
all of you to do the same. I'm always interested in your
comments. If you're watching here on YouTube, make sure you
look below, give a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel if
you're not already. And post your views, your questions. Even
your disagreement with me, it's all good. Just keep it
respectful. I'm always interested in that. And if you
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That said thank you guys so much for listening and watching. This
is John Greenewald Jr signing off, and we'll see you next
time.