John Greenewald
Founder of The Black Vault, FOIA requester
- Document Release
Navy Releases 1,300+ Pages of Scott Bray UAP Emails Via FOIA; 302 Pages Withheld in Full
The Department of the Navy released more than 1,300 pages of emails and related records involving former Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray on September 23, 2026, following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Black Vault on May 24, 2022. The request, filed under FOIA case number DON-NAVY-2022-008648, sought all emails sent to, from, or copied to Bray containing terms including "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," "UAP," "UAPTF," "UFO," "AATIP," and "AAWSAP." Of the 1,321 responsive pages located, 302 were withheld in their entirety, while 1,019 were released with redactions under multiple FOIA exemptions. The released records provide extensive documentary insight into the Navy and Pentagon's internal UAP communications during the period in which the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was established and grew into a formal government effort. The correspondence names a wide range of senior officials and covers congressional briefings, public-affairs strategy, the April 2020 release of Navy UAP videos, the 2021 ODNI UAP assessment, classification questions, and media inquiries. Bray himself testified publicly before a House Intelligence subcommittee on May 17, 2022, alongside Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, in the first open congressional UAP hearing in decades.
- Document Release
FOIA Release Reveals Participants, Foreign Outreach, and Follow-On Plans Behind AARO's August 2025 Private UAP Workshop
Records released to The Black Vault under FOIA case 26-F-1773 provide the most detailed public accounting to date of AARO's invitation-only UAP research workshop held August 5–6, 2025, at Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), 2650 Park Tower Drive, Suite 700, Vienna, Virginia. The 91-page release, reported by John Greenewald on September 25, 2026, includes a working agenda naming speakers and panelists absent from AARO's published white paper, correspondence documenting a separate Pentagon engagement with Uruguay's official UAP commission (CRIDOVNI), and an internal reference to a planned follow-on workshop in early 2026 — written before the first event had occurred. The release adds institutional and personnel detail to what AARO's February 2026 white paper ("2025 UAP Workshop: Narrative Data, Infrastructures, and Analysis") had already disclosed about the workshop's methodological focus: standardizing narrative UAP data, linking disparate databases, and applying AI and machine learning to large datasets. AARO withheld 19 of 89 responsive pages in full under FOIA Exemption (b)(5) as deliberative inter- or intra-agency communications, and redacted portions of the remaining 70 pages. The records do not establish the identities of all 40 participants, the outcome of proposed CRIDOVNI collaboration, or whether the contemplated early-2026 follow-on workshop took place.