The U.S. Navy is refusing to release videos of UFOs and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) due to concerns that the videos will “harm national security.”
On Friday, U.S. Navy rejected the FOIA request, which was submitted by document archive The Black Vault in July 2022, according to a report on The Black Vault’s website. “The UAP Task Force has responded … and have stated that the requested videos contain sensitive information pertaining to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and are classified and are exempt from disclosure in their entirety under exemption 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(1) in accordance with Executive Order 13526 and the UAP Security Classification Guide,” Gary Cason, the deputy director of the Navy’s FOIA office, said in the response letter.
“The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release,” Cason continued, according to The Black Vault.
Researchers Discover 279-Year-Old UFO Mystery Over London, Englandhttps://t.co/vGCpL3mnne
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 12, 2022
One of the only upsides to the rejection is that the Navy made zero attempt to hide the existence of the videos, Business Times noted. The outlet also suggested that the Navy’s response makes it “obvious that the U.S. military takes the possibility of a UAP threat very seriously” in the months following the Department of Defense hearing on the phenomena in May, the first public hearing on the topic since the 1960s. (RELATED: China Claims It Might Have Detected Signals From Aliens, Then Deletes The Report)
After the hearings concluded, the Pentagon announced the creation of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to analyze reports of UAPs. The creation of the AARO was mandated by the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.