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The Five Eyes UAP Caucus Working Group: The Pentagon Meeting of 24 May 2023, and the Answers London and Canberra Gave About It

The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia · 24 May 2023 · Disclosure and Policy · United States

Page one of the agenda for the FVEY Inaugural UAP Caucus Working Group, circulated by email to AARO Director Sean M. Kirkpatrick on 23 May 2023 for the meeting held at the Pentagon the following day. The grey blocks are redactions applied under freedom of information exemption (b)(6), which covers personal privacy. The page sets out the participating agencies, the stated purpose of the caucus, and the morning running order. (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, freedom of information reading room. Rendered from the released PDF at 200 dpi and cropped by UAP Globe.)

Five governments sent representatives to a Pentagon meeting about unidentified anomalous phenomena. Two of them later told their own parliaments things that are difficult to square with the agenda for it.

What happened

On 24 May 2023 the Pentagon hosted the first meeting of what its own agenda called the FVEY Inaugural UAP Caucus Working Group. The document that proves it was released under freedom of information law more than a year later, and it is an ordinary internal email rather than a report of any sighting.

The email was sent on Tuesday 23 May 2023 at 5:44 PM to Sean M. Kirkpatrick, then Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, under the subject line "Updated FVEY Inaugural UAP Caucus Working Group Agenda, 24 May 2023". The sender's name is redacted under exemption (b)(6), which covers personal privacy, as are most of the other names on the document. The covering note reads: "Dr. K. Below is the updated agenda for the FVEY meeting tomorrow. Attached is the list of attendees from outside of our office."

The agenda then sets out the meeting in four labelled blocks. Under "Who" it lists "Representatives from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), FAA, NASA, and FVEY partners working UAP". Under "What" it states the purpose in full: "This inaugural FVEY UAP Caucus brings together key partners to cultivate shared awareness of allies' UAP issues; detection, identification, and mitigation activities and challenges; and opportunities for mission-specific collaboration. Planned presentations include our own office updates on operations and analyses and updates from FVEY partners. The intent is to develop a framework for future UAP collaboration."

Under "When" it gives 24 May 2023, 0830 to 1500, with a no-host lunch in the Pentagon Food Court from 1230 to 1330 and instructions for those without Pentagon access to meet at the Visitor's entrance by 0800. Under "Where" it gives "Pentagon, Room" followed by a redaction. A second email in the same release, sent 17 May 2023, states that the room "is a OUSD (I&S) room", meaning it belongs to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.

The running order is itemised. Check-in at the Pentagon Visitor's Center ran 0745 to 0815, administrative remarks and introductions 0830 to 0845, and from 0845 to 1000 "Dr. Kirkpatrick's Welcoming Address and U.S. Updates on UAP Efforts", broken into AARO Operations, AARO Analysis, AARO Strategic Communications, FAA, NASA, NIM-A and NIM-M. After a fifteen minute break, the block from 1015 to 1130 is headed "FVEY Partner UAP Updates" and lists four nations in order: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand. From 1130 to 1230 came a "Discussion on FVEY UAP Collaboration Way-Ahead Plan", resuming after lunch from 1330 to 1500 if needed.

The Way-Ahead block carries a list of "Topics to consider". They are: networks to share Five Eyes UAP reporting, with classification levels listed and partially struck through in the released scan; the "Need for shared data bases showing known objects using various sensors"; "FVEY UAP Collection Planning"; a future meeting schedule, asking how often and whether virtual or in person; and "Other FVEY forums to tie into? i.e. Emerging and Disruptive Technologies".

The fourth page of the release is almost entirely withheld, carrying only a note that the contents of the email are deliberative process privileged and withheld under exemption (b)(5). The document is published by AARO in its own freedom of information reading room among the 2023 case files. The Black Vault, which reported the release in June 2024, credits the request to Australian researcher Grant Lavac and describes the disclosure as a four page email.

Nothing in the agenda describes an object, reports an incident, or makes any claim about what unidentified anomalous phenomena are. Its evidential value is entirely in the fact of the meeting, the identity of the participants, and what four governments were asked to bring to it.

What is the official position?

There is no single official narrative here, because four of the five governments involved have said different amounts, and two of them have had to correct themselves.

The United States position is the document itself, which AARO released without contest. A Pentagon spokesperson, Susan Gough, confirmed in June 2024 that AARO "continues to discuss areas of mutual interest and concern related to UAP with its FVEY partners", which places the collaboration beyond the single 2023 meeting.

The British position is where the friction is. The standing public line was given by Baroness Goldie in the House of Lords on 30 June 2021: "we no longer investigate reports of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena. We have no plans to conduct our own report into UAP, because in over 50 years no such reporting has indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK." That line has been repeated for years.

On 22 July 2025 Clive Lewis, Labour member for Norwich South and a former shadow defence secretary, tabled two written questions to the Ministry of Defence. Both were answered on 4 September 2025 by Luke Pollard, Minister for the Armed Forces. To the first, numbered 69988, asking what information the Department holds on unidentified aerial phenomena, Pollard replied that "In over 50 years, no sighting reported to the Department has indicated the existence of any military threat to the UK and for this reason, the MOD ceased to investigate reports of UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in 2009", adding that material up to 2009 went to the National Archives.

The second question, numbered 69989, asked "whether the Government has participated in any international groupings focused on unidentified aerial phenomena since May 2023". The answer was a single sentence: "The Ministry of Defence has not participated in any international groupings specifically focused on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) since May 2023."

Separately, the Ministry of Defence had already disclosed under freedom of information, in August 2024, that two of its officials attended the Pentagon meeting. What happened when a requester asked what those two officials actually said is recorded in full in a decision notice of the Information Commissioner's Office, reference IC-348013-F2L6, dated 17 March 2025. The request, made on 21 August 2024, asked for "all details in all formats i.e. notes, presentation slides, videos etc from the United Kingdom UAP update section only".

The Ministry's handling of it moved in one direction. Its response of 17 September 2024 confirmed a search had been carried out and that the request fell within sections 24 (national security), 26 (defence) and 27 (international relations), while refusing to confirm or deny under section 23(5), which covers bodies dealing with security matters. On 4 October 2024 it explained the shift in its own words: "Prior to the release of information under US FOI legislation, the 'Neither Confirm Nor Deny' (NCND) position for requests on this topic applied for the majority of exemptions. That still remains the case for Section 23(5). However, since the US disclosure of information, the way in which we apply exemptions to similar FOI requests has changed in that, the NCND principle has not been engaged, and we can confirm some information is held, but this still remains exempt." At internal review on 24 January 2025, after 76 working days, the Ministry withdrew even that and returned to a full refusal to confirm or deny.

The Commissioner upheld the Ministry. His finding is the single most quotable line in the case: "The Commissioner is satisfied that given the subject matter of the information falling within the scope of the request, if any such information was held it is more likely than not that it would have been supplied by, or relate to, one of the bodies listed in section 23(3)." Section 23 is a class-based, absolute exclusion, and the notice is explicit that once it is engaged there is no public interest test and no relevance to whether the material is already public.

The Australian position was corrected on the record. In Senate estimates, answering a question on notice from Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, the Department of Defence denied that Australia had attended the briefing, and on 22 October 2023 the Canberra Times reported that Australia had ignored the meeting. Pressed again at the following November estimates, Defence reversed: "Yes [Australia was invited to the UAP briefing]. A Defence representative at the Australian Embassy in Washington attended." The Canberra Times reported the reversal on 11 February 2024 under the byline of Jamieson Murphy, noting that the Department declined to explain why it had given the earlier answer.

Canada answered through the Order Paper. An Inquiry of Ministry response numbered Q-2934 confirms that Canada sent two officials to the 24 May 2023 meeting, while withholding further detail under access to information provisions.

New Zealand, the fourth partner listed on the agenda, has said comparatively little on the record.

What the people involved say

The people in this case are officials and legislators rather than eyewitnesses, and the useful testimony is about what they were told.

Sean M. Kirkpatrick is the central American figure. A physicist who had been chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center, he was the first Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and the agenda has him giving the welcoming address and the American updates. His email signature in the released document carries the Latin motto "Universum mutatio est. Vita nostra est quod cogitationes nostra facere est." He left the office at the end of 2023 and has since been a prominent sceptic of claims that the United States holds recovered non-human craft, which is worth stating plainly: the man who convened the first Five Eyes UAP caucus is also among the loudest voices arguing there is no crash-retrieval programme to disclose.

Clive Lewis is the British witness, in the sense that he is the person who asked and was answered. Reporting by Christopher Sharp for Liberation Times, published on 29 August 2026, quotes Lewis saying he was "definitely misled" over the United Kingdom's Five Eyes UAP cooperation. His grievance is not that Pollard's sentence is literally false. It is that he asked the Ministry of Defence a direct question about international UAP cooperation, in the same window in which the Ministry had already admitted to a national newspaper's readers and to a freedom of information requester that two of its officials sat in that Pentagon room, and the answer he received disclosed none of it.

That distinction has to be stated carefully, because it cuts both ways and this archive will not overstate it. Lewis himself wrote the phrase "since May 2023" into his own question. The meeting fell on 24 May 2023. On the narrowest reading, a department answering about groupings "since May 2023" is answering about the period after that month, and the sentence is defensible. On any ordinary reading of what a member of parliament was trying to find out, it is an answer that leaves the questioner less informed than the public record already allowed.

The unnamed complainant behind the Information Commissioner's decision is the third figure, and the reasoning recorded in the notice is unusually sharp. He argued that the Ministry's position was internally inconsistent, having confirmed information was held in September and October 2024 before refusing to confirm or deny in January 2025. He also argued from the government's own policy, noting that if the United Kingdom genuinely regards unidentified anomalous phenomena as carrying no military threat, then "he could not see circumstances where a security body would be proactively seeking such information, this would contradict with published UK government policy". The Commissioner did not engage with that argument on its merits, and did not need to, because section 23(5) is absolute.

Senator Peter Whish-Wilson is the Australian equivalent: the legislator whose repeated questioning turned a denial into an admission across two rounds of Senate estimates.

Is the Five Eyes UAP Caucus Working Group: The Pentagon Meeting of 24 May 2023, and the Answers London and Canberra Gave About It real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one, the mundane reading, and it covers a great deal of this.

Allied staff comparing notes is the ordinary business of an intelligence partnership, not an anomaly in itself. Five governments that already share signals intelligence discussing an airspace-awareness problem is close to the least surprising thing the Five Eyes arrangement could do. The agenda reads like exactly what it is: an administrative email with a visitor badge desk, a food court lunch, and a list of speaking slots. It reports no object, describes no incident, and asserts nothing about origins. The Way-Ahead topics are data-management questions, about reporting networks, shared databases of known objects, and how often to meet.

The classification line deserves care rather than excitement. It appears in a list of topics to consider, and it is a question about what level a future sharing network would need to operate at, not a statement that anything is currently held at that level. It is also partially struck through in the released scan, so its final form is not established by this document.

The British exemption has a deflationary reading too, and it is a strong one. Section 23 is class-based and absolute. It is engaged by whether the information was supplied by or relates to a body on the statutory list, not by whether the content is remarkable. Anything briefed by British officials in an allied intelligence forum is very likely to have passed through, or to relate to, one of those bodies as a matter of routine handling. On that reading the Commissioner's finding says something about British information-handling plumbing and nothing whatever about unidentified anomalous phenomena.

The Australian reversal likewise has a dull explanation available. The attendee was a Defence representative from the embassy in Washington rather than a delegation flown out from Canberra, and a question on notice about whether Australia attended a briefing could plausibly be answered wrongly by a department that looked in the wrong place. Defence declining to explain the error is consistent with embarrassment as much as with anything else.

Pass two, taking the significant reading seriously.

The tension is real and it is on the record, not inferred. The United Kingdom's stated position is that unidentified anomalous phenomena have shown no military threat in over fifty years and that it stopped investigating them in 2009. Yet two of its officials were given a slot in a Pentagon caucus to deliver a national UAP update, in a room belonging to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and when a member of the public asked what they said, the settled answer became that even confirming whether a record exists would touch a body on the security services list. A subject with no defence interest does not usually require the security-bodies exclusion to discuss.

The complainant's argument, which the Commissioner declined to reach, is the sharpest form of this. Either the published policy is complete, in which case it is hard to see why a security body would hold the material, or the material genuinely relates to a security body, in which case the published policy is not the whole picture. The decision notice resolves the legal question without resolving that one, and the notice's own reliance on confidential submissions in a related case, IC-292124-F1N2, means the reasoning that satisfied the Commissioner is not public.

The composition of the meeting is the other thing worth weighing. AARO did not convene defence intelligence alone. The agenda puts the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA in the room alongside two National Intelligence Managers, which frames the problem as simultaneously a civil aviation matter, a civil space matter and an intelligence matter. Whatever the phenomena are, the American position in May 2023 was that they needed all three communities and four allied governments in one place, with the explicit aim of building "a framework for future UAP collaboration".

Finally, the pattern across two parliaments is its own datum. In Australia a denial became an admission only under repeated questioning, and the department would not say why. In Britain a question about international UAP cooperation drew an answer that was, at best, narrowly true and unhelpful. Neither is evidence about the phenomena. Both are evidence about how much friction sits between what these governments do on this subject and what they tell their legislatures about it.

Tier: Unknown. This case makes no claim about what was seen, because the documents make none. What is established is the meeting, its participants, its stated purpose, and a documented record of two allied governments giving their own parliaments accounts that the paperwork does not comfortably support.