Categories: ScienceSpace

“Confirmation of Interstellar Object” Memorandum and Related Documents

On March 1, 2022, Lt. General John E. Shaw, Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command, wrote a memorandum for Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen at the NASA Science Mission Directorate. This was to confirm that a meteor detected on January 8, 2014, and written about in a scientific paper by Dr. Avi Loeb from Harvard University, and his colleague Amir Siraj, was an interstellar object.

This was posted on Twitter by the U.S. Space Command’s official Twitter account on April 6, 2022:

Continue scrolling for more...

That memorandum and Twitter post prompted an April 23, 2022, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Black Vault seeking out communication beyond the memorandum, from within the email box of Dr. Zurbuchen. The keyword search requested was “interstellar origin”.

The result came in on June 7, 2022. The publicly available material was omitted to help expedite the request, but those records are referenced with links in the FOIA response letter. The remaining records, not available publicly previous to this posting, totaled 28 pages, and were released with redactions.

Those records are all available below.

The redactions primarily consisted of referred material to Space Force; privacy information like emails and phone numbers; and what is tagged as (b)(5) FOIA exempted material.

The Black Vault was not going to publish the material until the Space Force responded, however, a lot of time has passed and that information has yet to be processed. Therefore, what has been released is being posted here, and the remaining information once it comes in, will be posted and this article will be updated.

The key document from the NASA release is Dr. Zurbuchen’s emailed response to Lt. General Shaw. Note the overuse of (b)(5) redactions.

A second record worth noting is the original correspondence from Dr. Loeb to Dr. Zurbuchen, asking about the meteor and the possible interstellar nature of it.

###

Document Archive

“Confirmation of Interstellar Object” Related Documents – NASA Release [43 Pages, 0.7MB]

 

Follow The Black Vault on Social Media:

This post was published on March 23, 2023 12:39 pm

John Greenewald

Recent Posts

FBI Files: Authors

The following is a list of FBI Files for many authors & their book that have…

July 17, 2024

Security Summaries and Security Summary Memoranda: FAA’s Northwest Mountain Region

Security Summaries and Security Summary Memoranda are critical documents published by the Federal Aviation Administration…

July 17, 2024

FBI File: Bacteriological Warfare

This FBI file relates to bacteriological warfare. It contains investigative information gathered over several decades.…

July 15, 2024

AARO Releases Findings on Suspected Extraterrestrial Alloy

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published two reports detailing the analysis of a magnesium…

July 11, 2024

FBI Files: American Politicians, Aides, and Appointees

It comes as no surprise, as celebrities and gangsters were being watched -- so were…

July 10, 2024

FBI Files: Civil Rights Era

Background Movements for civil rights were a worldwide series of political movements for equality before…

July 10, 2024