CIA FOIA Request Logs
Annual logs recording every FOIA request received by the CIA, from 2001 through 2023. Each page itemises the subject matter requested, the processing status, and the Agency's disposition.
Featured Records
The CIA FOIA request logs from 2001 to 2023 are a meta-archive: an archive of what the public asked the Agency for, and what the Agency told them was available. Two threads run through the 881 pages.
The Post-AATIP Surge
The 2017 log shows the inflection point. In December 2017 the New York Times published Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean's article revealing the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the Pentagon UFO study that had run under Senator Harry Reid's appropriation from 2007 to 2012. The article identified Luis Elizondo as a former Pentagon AATIP director and released the FLIR-1, GIMBAL, and GOFAST videos. The CIA FOIA office's request volumes for UFO-related material climbed sharply across the December 2017 quarter and stayed elevated through 2018.
The 2017 log line items show the institutional response. Requests for "AATIP," "Tic Tac," "Nimitz UAP," "Pentagon UFO program," and "Elizondo" appear in the request descriptions across the second half of the year. The Agency's standard processing response, "no records responsive to your request," appears as the disposition for the majority of these requests, although several were processed and released in subsequent years.
The pattern is institutionally telling. The CIA FOIA office had received baseline volumes of UFO-related FOIA requests across every year of the prior decade. The 2017 spike is not the appearance of public interest in the topic, which had been continuous for sixty years. It is the appearance of public interest in the official US government framework for handling the topic, prompted by the Times article's revelation that an official framework had existed.
The Department of Defense has previously acknowledged the existence of this program. Senior Pentagon officials told the New York Times that AATIP studied physiological effects of UAP encounters on the witnesses and recovered metamaterials from advanced aerospace vehicles.
The New York Times, "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money'", 16 December 2017
The Black Vault Litigation
The 2015 and 2016 logs document the early phase of John Greenewald Jr.'s Black Vault FOIA litigation against the Central Intelligence Agency for UFO-related records held by the Agency. Greenewald's litigation, which culminated in the 2020 release of approximately 2,780 pages of Agency UFO records to the Black Vault and through the Agency's electronic reading room, was one of the most significant private FOIA actions on the topic in the modern era.
The litigation trail in these logs shows the procedural texture. Greenewald filed an initial request, received a partial response and a denial, filed an appeal, received a further partial response, and ultimately pursued litigation that produced the 2020 bulk release. The line items in the 2015 to 2019 logs reference the litigation by case number and by the Black Vault site name.
The institutional significance is partly that the litigation produced a release that would not otherwise have happened. The CIA's standard policy on Cold War UFO records had been that they were available for in-person review at the National Archives but not for bulk electronic release. The Black Vault litigation forced the Agency to digitise and publish records that had been technically available but practically inaccessible for decades.
