AARO Found the UAP and USO Records Congress Asked For and Withheld Every Page: FOIA Case 26-F-1892 (30 September 2026)
AARO searched its systems, found the records on the UAP and USO encounters a House task force had named, and released none of them. It pointed the requester to its public UFO page instead, where the Department has published video for these encounters and, by its own catalogue, no written report for any of them.
What happened
On 30 September 2026 the Department of War refused a Freedom of Information Act request in full. The records exist, AARO searched its own systems and found them, and not one page was released.
The requester was John Greenewald of The Black Vault, who filed on 1 April 2026. That was the day after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets wrote to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth asking for 46 named UAP video files. Greenewald asked the Department for the paperwork behind the same encounters. The response, reference 26-F-1892, came back five months later from the Office of the Secretary of War and Joint Staff FOIA Requester Service Center at 1155 Defense Pentagon.
The operative passage is short. The Office of the Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, "conducted a search of their systems and located records determined to be responsive to your request." The Initial Denial Authority "has determined that the records are withheld in their entirety pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552: (b)(1), information currently and properly classified in the interest of national security."
Two classification grounds are cited under Executive Order 13526: section 1.4(a), military plans, weapons, or operations, and section 1.4(g), vulnerabilities or capability of systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans or protection services relating to the national security. A third withholding runs through a different door. The letter also invokes 5 U.S.C. 552 (b)(3), the exemption for material withheld under another statute, "applying 10 U.S.C. 130c certain 'sensitive information of foreign governments' and certain international organizations."
That last clause is the one worth pausing on. A foreign government information exemption on records about objects over the Persian Gulf, Syria and American coastal water says that at least some of what AARO holds did not originate with the United States alone.
The letter closes with a redirection: "AARO determined that responsive records are publicly available at https://www.war.gov/UFO/." That is the PURSUE page, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, where the Department has published six tranches of declassified material since May 2026. It is a checkable claim, and this archive checked it.
Documents and images
What is the official position?
The congressional letter behind the request is published in full by the Committee itself, so it does not have to be taken on anyone's description. It runs four pages, is dated 31 March 2026, and is signed by Anna Paulina Luna, Chairwoman of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, copied to Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett.
Its reasoning is stated plainly. The Task Force "is continuing its investigation into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," it held a hearing on the subject on 9 September 2025, and "Whistleblowers informed the Task Force that AARO possesses additional video records of potential UAP sightings." It adds that the Task Force "has found responses from AARO, when questioned about UAP sightings and provided data, less than adequate." The delivery deadline it set was 14 April 2026.
Then comes the part that makes this letter unusual. Rather than asking in general terms, it lists 46 numbered video files by title, and those titles carry military callsigns in the clear. Item 3 is "UAP USO formation Wiley 2X Zinc." Item 7 is "Spherical UAP pulsing over water Jacker 2X." Item 15 is "Multiple Spherical UAP USO near Sub. Cactus 1X in and out of water, 3/25/22." Item 19 is "USAF ANG F-16C (callsign AESIR11) shoots down UAP over Lake Huron with Aim-9X, 2/12/23." The list also names Voodoo 4X, Warlock 4X, Hackney 6, Toxic 6, Hellhound 1X, Mad Dog 31, Regulator 73, Greed, Assault 1X and others, along with intelligence report serials such as "IIR 1 655 S0053 23" for several UAP near Columbus, Ohio airport.
The Department's own public position on this material is recorded in the PURSUE manifest, which carries an identical note on each of the relevant records. It describes a separate and earlier approach: "On March 6, 2026, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records allegedly held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) identified a collection of responsive materials held on a classified network." It then adds a caveat the coverage of this story has largely skipped: "Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody."
For the eight minute video at the centre of this page, catalogued DOW-UAP-PR052, the Department states that it "is likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform," that "A user uploaded this video to a classified network in June 2024," and that "This media was digitally altered prior to its upload to a classified network, and is presented as received." Its frame by frame description records four areas of contrast transiting the frame, repeated cuts, contrast filters and zoom changes, and a final degradation in quality. The Department attaches its standard disclaimer that the description should not be read as "an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination."
What the people involved say
AARO's redirection to war.gov/UFO can be tested mechanically, and the test is the substance of this case. The published PURSUE manifest was pulled directly from the Department's own server, 450 records with titles, and every item on the congressional list was searched against it.
The first result cuts against the suspicion. The videos are largely there. Of fourteen distinct requests probed, thirteen have a matching public record: the Iran formation of 26 August 2022 is DOW-UAP-PR050, the Syrian instant acceleration clip is PR051, the USO formation is PR052, the pulsing sphere over water is PR056, the submarine encounter of 25 March 2022 is PR067, the Lake Huron shootdown is PR071, Eglin Air Force Base is PR070, Karaganda is PR072, Columbus, Ohio is PR073, AFSOC Kabul is PR064, and the Persian Gulf formation is PR098. All of them were published on 22 May 2026 in Release 02, four months before the denial letter was written. Only one probe missed, the NGA record of 1 June 2010. So the claim that responsive material is publicly available is not empty, and this archive will not report it as empty.
The second result is where the letter and the release part company. Every one of those video records has an empty PDF Pairing column. The manifest uses that column to link a video to the written mission report that documents it, and across the whole corpus 100 of the 134 video records carry no paired document at all. Greenewald was not asking for footage. In his own words in the thread where he published the determination, "The documents that were denied were documents, written material (a long list that I requested of various types of reports) were ENTIRELY withheld. So, the visual imagery released with very little context is a facade of transparency." The manifest supports him on the narrow factual point: for these encounters the Department has published pictures and no paperwork.
The third result was not expected. Running the congressional letter's callsigns against the public manifest returns almost nothing. Of 23 callsigns and codewords printed in the clear by the Committee, zero appear anywhere in the 450 published titles. One apparent hit, Mercury, turned out to be NASA's Project Mercury in a set of 1960s audio records and is a false positive.
The reason is visible in the titles themselves. Thirty three published records carry a literal redaction marker, and the marker is applied 40 times: PR052 is published as "UAP USO Formation [CALLSIGN] (Mission)," PR067 as "Multiple Spherical UAP USO near Sub. [CALLSIGN] 2022/03/25 in and out of water," PR056 as "Spherical UAP pulsing over water [CALLSIGN]." The Department also redacts two platform names as [Platform] and, once, a weapon as [Weapon System].
That single [Weapon System] instance is the sharpest illustration available. The Department published the Lake Huron record as "USAF ANG F-16C (callsign [CALLSIGN]) Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023." The congressional letter, published by the House on its own website, supplies both blanks: callsign AESIR11, weapon Aim-9X. A committee of Congress has printed in the open the two facts the executive branch masked on the same event.
One small correction belongs to the letter rather than the Department. Items 13 and 14 are textually identical, both reading "USCG C-144 UAP 2 Tic Tac IR hot, 4/24/24." The Department's records show two distinct files, PR065 titled "USCG C-144 Tyndall UAP 2 TIC TAC IR hot 24 April 2024" and PR066 titled "USCG C-144 Tyndall UAP 1 TIC TAC IR hot 24 April 2024." The duplication is a drafting slip in the congressional list, and the Pentagon's own catalogue is the thing that resolves it. The Department's titles also add a location the letter omits, Tyndall, which is a US Air Force base on the Florida panhandle.
Is the AARO Found the UAP and USO Records Congress Asked For and Withheld Every Page: FOIA Case 26-F-1892 (30 September 2026) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the deflating reading, and it is stronger than the headline suggests. Nothing here establishes that AARO is concealing evidence of anything anomalous. A FOIA office telling a requester that responsive records are classified in their entirety is the single most routine outcome in the system, and the two Executive Order 13526 grounds cited, military plans and operations and system vulnerabilities, are exactly what would be invoked for sensor performance data gathered on operational missions over Iran, Syria and the Persian Gulf, regardless of what the sensors were pointed at. Mission reports of this kind carry platform, altitude, sensor type, grid coordinates and squadron, and those fields are classified because of what they reveal about American collection capability, not because of what crossed the frame.
The Department's own caveat deserves the same weight. Its statement that "Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody," and its note that the PR052 video "was digitally altered prior to its upload to a classified network," describe a collection of files of uncertain origin sitting on a classified network, not a curated archive of verified encounters. A user uploaded the eight minute USO video in June 2024. Who shot it, when, and where are not stated by the Department anywhere in the public record.
Nor is the redaction of callsigns sinister on its face. Callsigns map to units, and units map to deployments and operating patterns. Masking them in a public release while a congressional committee holds them under its own authority is the normal division of labour between an oversight body and an executive agency, and the Committee's choice to print them is the Committee's prerogative under House Rule X, which the letter cites.
Pass two, and taking the case at its strongest. The specific finding on this page is narrow and holds regardless of what the objects were. AARO's final response points the requester to a public page as though it answers his request, and on the Department's own published catalogue that page contains video for these encounters and no written record for any of them. The pointer is accurate about the medium the requester did not ask for and silent about the medium he did.
The 10 U.S.C. 130c citation is the most interesting line in the letter and the least discussed. The Department invoked a foreign government information statute to help withhold records about these encounters. The archive is not in a position to say which encounters drove that citation or which government is involved, and it will not guess, but the citation is in the Department's own words and it sits alongside a growing documentary trail of foreign participation in American UAP work, including the Uruguayan and Australian presence in AARO's 2025 workshop records.
The honest limits of this page should be stated plainly. The determination letter was read at full resolution from the image The Black Vault published when it broke the story, not from a separately hosted PDF, so the reference number 26-F-1892 and the 30 September 2026 date are the handles by which anyone can request or verify it. The congressional letter, by contrast, was downloaded directly from oversight.house.gov and text mined, so every quotation from it here is from the primary document. The Office of the Law Revision Counsel website was serving a maintenance page while this was written, so 10 U.S.C. 130c is described only as the Department's letter describes it and its statutory text was not independently read. The earlier request of 6 March 2026 by eight House members is reported here as the Department's manifest reports it and was not separately verified. And nobody outside the classified network has seen the withheld records, including this archive.
There is no sighting to tier here. The underlying encounters, some of which are documented separately in this archive, keep their own assessments. What is recorded on this page is a dated act of government: the records were found, and they were withheld in full.
Sources
- oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/UAP-Request-Letter-FINAL.pdf
- oversight.house.gov/release/luna-continues-transparency-investigation-into-uaps
- www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1wyesy1/aaro_says_it_found_records_on_uapuso_cases/
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv?release=6
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1007708/
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1007779/
- www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/
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