Documents / FOIA release

Final Product (FOIA 23-F-0010)

Office of the Secretary of Defense · 2023 · 28 pages · text from the file's own layer

This 2023 Office of the Secretary of Defense FOIA release (case 23-F-0010) contains 2022 email exchanges between Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The emails arrange a meeting at Loeb's home on October 3, 2022. They also include Loeb's Medium essays on interstellar meteors IM1 and IM2 and on the Ukrainian UAP report. In that essay Loeb argues the "Phantom" objects were probably artillery shells and the luminous object a satellite.

"Down To Earth" Lilllits on Unidentified
Aerial Phenolllena in Ukraine
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I □ IAn image of"pha11tom'' objects above Ukraine (C,·edit: Zhilyaev, Petukhov & Reshetnyk 2022)
Over the past two weeks I was bombarded by a dozen requests to read a new report by astronomers on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in Ukraine. My response
to all of these messages was the same: "I am not sure what to make of the report. Ukraine is in a
military conflict with a lot of human-made activity in the sky. This must introduce a lot of noise for
any search for objects that are not human-made. In science we aim to maximize the signal-to-noise
ratio, and so Ukraine would be the last place on Earth where I would initiate UAP studies."
But last evening I received a special request from a high-level official in the US government to
summarize my thoughts on observable signatures of UAP and so this morning I checked the UAP
report from Ukraine and wrote a paper about it a few hours later.
The Ukranian paper reports about two types of
objects: luminous and dark. The dark objects with no visible emission were labeled as ' 'Phantoms".
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FOIA release, from the osd collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 28 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.