NASA says it holds no UAP records, yet a new FOIA release shows its UAP Director spent 2023 asking librarians for research on the subject. Researcher Grant Lavac laid out the paper trail in a September 30 post on his Substack, and it is a better read than the usual “gotcha” because the real story is smaller and stranger than a cover-up.
What NASA Said
In FOIA case 26-00029-F-HQ, Dr. Daniel Evans, the Designated Federal Officer for NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team, wrote that the agency does not hold or manage records classified specifically as UAP documents. That matched NASA’s public tone. At the September 14, 2023 briefing that announced the team’s final report, Administrator Bill Nelson and Evans stressed openness and the scientific method. If you follow UFO disclosure, you have heard that pitch before.
What 3,668 Pages Show
A separate request, 26-00789-F-HQ, was filed on May 4, 2026 and answered on September 28. It asked for emails between Mark McInerney, NASA’s Director of UAP Research, and research librarians at Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA sent back 3,668 pages, with 2,778 released in full and 890 in part.
The emails describe a methodical reading project in the second half of 2023. In September, McInerney asked for literature on spherical and triangular drones. Librarians pulled papers on spherical UAVs and Coanda-effect drones, and noted that true triangular designs were scarce in public literature and often overlapped with conventional aircraft like the B-2 stealth bomber. He then moved on to ion and electromagnetic propulsion, and the library supplied technical papers on plasma flow control, dielectric barrier discharge actuators, and sonic boom reduction.
He also asked about parallax and apparent position shift, to help explain pilot reports of an object below them that seems to move faster than reality. The requests stretched far enough that librarian John Grunwell said the search might have to expand into journals on vision, perception, and consciousness studies. I love that line. It is a government librarian realizing the UFO question is not just an aerospace question.
One more detail made me smile. On October 2, 2023, Grunwell suggested using AI to hunt for the drone literature, but warned his colleague to do it without revealing anything they should not. Months earlier, in July 2023, McInerney had started an environmental signatures database to help scientists tell known natural events, like atmospheric sprites or marine life tracked by synthetic aperture radar, from real anomalies. That project was paused by September 2023 because of limited resources.
The Records Question
When NASA records officer Patti Stockman learned the agency claimed zero UAP records, she reportedly expressed surprise given the recent public studies. She forwarded National Archives guidance on metadata requirements for digitized UAP records and asked how the two fit together. Evans held his position. He said earlier incidents near NASA centers were identified or tracked by Defense Department assets, and that he had routinely deleted unsolicited emails from the public, so nothing was retained.
NASA also referred 26 pages to the Department of Defense and 15 pages to the Government Accountability Office. Because the GAO is exempt from FOIA timelines under 4 CFR Part 81, records routed there are handled outside the usual rules. Meanwhile, McInerney’s detail to the Pentagon’s AARO ended in fall 2024, the Director of UAP Research role was never permanently refilled, and he retired in July 2025. The Goddard library itself was permanently closed on January 2, 2026 as part of a campus consolidation, with thousands of physical volumes reportedly slated for disposal or transfer.
Cover-Up or Paperwork?
My read is about 70 percent curious and 30 percent cautious. The open-minded view is that NASA’s public line was too neat. An agency that names a UAP Director and runs a public study should expect to have paper on the subject, and its own records officer seemed to think so too.
The cautious view is just as fair. Library requests for journal articles are reference material, not sighting data, and Evans’s statement was narrowly about records classified specifically as UAP. Nothing in the release, as Lavac describes it, shows NASA sitting on UFO evidence. What it shows is an agency whose messaging, filing habits, and closed library make it hard to know what was kept and what was lost. That is a lot of pages for one researcher to sort, so I would like to see more eyes on the full release.
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