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This memorandum opinion by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dated March 27, 2007, rules in Leslie Kean's FOIA suit against NASA over records about the object said to have crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania on December 9, 1965. The court found NASA had not shown its searches were adequate and noted likely overlooked Cosmos 96 records. It upheld NASA's withholding of two emails under Exemption 5 and ordered the parties to propose new search procedures.
“Anderson”1 page
6 from FOIA officers in each of the Centers. Most of these letters simply assert that a “thorough” search was completed, and that “no records” responsive to plaintiff’s request were found. Only one of the ten letters, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, specified the particular databases that were searched, and the actual search terms used. In response to plaintiff’s opposition to these search descriptions, defendant submitted additional declarations from officials at several of the NASA Centers. See Def.’s Supp. Mem., Attach. 6 (Glenn Research Center); Attach. 7 (Marshall Space Flight Center); Attach. 8 (Goddard Space Flight Center); Attach. 10 (Johnson Space Center); Attach. 11 (Dryden Research Center); Attach. 13 (Kennedy Space Flight Center). These declarations provide addition information about which offices conducted searches, but most do not provide any detailed information about particular databases or records searched, or search terms used. Only the Marshall Space Flight Center provided a description of the actual databases searched and search terms used, though it lacks a description of what types of records the databases contain. See id. Attach. 7. Initially, plaintiff argued that defendant had provided no declarations describing the search efforts at NASA Headquarters during the third search. Defendant, in response, submitted a supplemental declaration by Stephen McConnell describing those Case 1:03-cv-02509-EGS Document 45 Filed 03/27/07 Page 6 of 21
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.