On the morning of May 17, 2023, Sean Kirkpatrick sent a short email to a staff member whose name has been redacted from the public record. The subject line read simply: "FVEYS meeting." Kirkpatrick, then director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, asked that an invitation and logistics be extended to a redacted set of recipients for a meeting the following week. Then he asked what turned out to be a telling question: "We are holding it here and not the Pentagon, correct?"
He was wrong. By noon that same day, a reply landed in his inbox confirming that the May 24 meeting would in fact be held at the Pentagon — specifically in a TS/SCI-cleared room operated by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
The exchange, preserved in two FOIA releases from AARO's reading room — documents 23-F-1486_2.pdf and 23-F-0949_2.pdf — offers the most detailed picture yet of an event that has received almost no public attention: the inaugural Five Eyes UAP Caucus, a classified, full-day intelligence-sharing summit that brought together UAP officials from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The story that emerges from the documents is not just about what happened in that Pentagon room. It's about how seriously the U.S. government — and its closest intelligence partners — had already begun treating the UAP problem before most of the public hearings that would later dominate the news.
What the Agenda Actually Showed
The meeting ran from 8:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. An updated agenda, emailed to Kirkpatrick at 5:44 p.m. the day before the gathering by a staffer identified only as Kim, laid out the day in precise half-hour blocks.
Kirkpatrick was scheduled to open with a welcoming address and U.S. updates on UAP efforts, covering AARO Operations, AARO Analysis, and AARO Strategic Communications, followed by presentations from the FAA and NASA. Two agenda slots — labeled NIM-A and NIM-M — remain redacted, their topics withheld.
The afternoon was given over to the allied nations. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand each presented their own UAP updates. Then came what the agenda described as a discussion on a collaboration way-ahead plan — a structured working session with an explicit list of topics: how to share UAP reporting across different classification levels (including unclassified, Secret REL FVEY, and the more restricted TS//SI/TK REL FVEY channels), whether to build shared databases of known objects detected by various sensors, how to coordinate future UAP collection planning, and whether to tie the effort into existing forums focused on emerging and disruptive technologies.
That last item is worth pausing on. Linking UAP collaboration to an "Emerging and Disruptive Technologies" forum suggests the participants were at least contemplating that some UAP might represent technological capabilities — adversarial, allied, or otherwise — that don't fit neatly into existing intelligence categories. The agenda doesn't say that explicitly. But the framing is deliberate, and framing in classified planning documents is rarely accidental.
Kim's cover email noted that the briefing was "essentially the same as the GISRC" — a reference that is not further explained in the released documents and whose meaning remains unclear. The attendee list from outside AARO's own office was attached but has not been released.
Both FOIA releases carry a standard notation on the final page: the contents of the emails are deliberative process privileged and fall under FOIA exemption (b)(5). That exemption covers predecisional government deliberations — in other words, the working conversations through which policy is shaped before decisions are finalized. The fact that the government invoked it here tells you something about how officials viewed this meeting: not as a ceremonial exchange, but as a policy-forming event.
The Gap Between the Mission Statement and the Meeting
The same FOIA tranche that yielded the caucus documents also includes an AARO briefing slide deck — document 22-F-1364_2.pdf — that bears Kirkpatrick's name and title and sets out the office's formal mission language.
Two versions of AARO's core description appear in the available documents, and they don't quite match. The slide deck describes AARO as "a uniquely-capable, Defense Department & Intelligence Community organization that integrates operational, scientific, and intelligence capabilities to resolve UAP." The agenda email, by contrast, draws on language that describes AARO as leading "integration of the Department's UAP operations, research, analyses, and strategic-communications" — a formulation that positions the office as a coordinator across the enterprise, not simply a participant in it.
"integration of the Department's UAP operations, research, analyses, and strategic-communications"
The distinction may seem semantic. It isn't. One framing describes an office that analyzes UAP. The other describes an office that runs the government's entire UAP apparatus. Whether AARO had the authority, the resources, and the interagency cooperation to actually play that second role — particularly at a moment when the office was also trying to coordinate with four foreign intelligence services — remains an open question that the documents surface but don't resolve.
The AARO briefing slides also articulate the three geographic domains in which the UAP problem presents differently. In U.S. territory and operating areas, DoD observations cluster near military facilities and the immediate safety of U.S. citizens is the priority. Near strategic capabilities — nuclear infrastructure, deterrence assets — the reporting is described as primarily historical, and the slides acknowledge that analysis is limited by information currency and source reliability. In foreign territories, the concern shifts: the consequence of misattribution is described as moderate-to-high, "potentially leading to adversarial misattribution of UAP to the United States."
That third category is precisely the one the Five Eyes caucus was designed to address. If allied nations are also observing UAP near their own strategic assets — and the caucus structure strongly implies they are — then the risk of misattribution runs in multiple directions simultaneously.
What a Federal Agent Saw in the Western United States
Separate from the Five Eyes documents, a June 2026 memorandum released by the Office of the Under Secretary of War — document DoW-UAP-D080 Narrative 2, part of the war.gov UFO release series — records the testimony of a federal law enforcement agent identified only as Witness 2.
In October 2023, the witness and a partner were tasked with surveying an area in the western United States for individuals launching drones. What they reported observing bore no resemblance to drones.
At approximately 7:00 p.m., the witness observed a bright, circular orb-like light roughly 35 to 45 degrees above the northern horizon. The light grew larger and contained a smaller red orb within it. Then, in the witness's account as recorded by AARO, the bright orb expelled three or four red lights that accelerated instantly and maneuvered in a coordinated horizontal formation. The process repeated approximately five times over the course of 30 minutes, across the northern, northeastern, and eastern horizon. Multiple team members confirmed the same observations.
The witness struggled to characterize it. The movement appeared too smooth to be mechanical, the witness wrote, but too structured to be biological. The account then offered a comparison that the witness was careful to frame as an analogy rather than a conclusion: the bright orb-like light, the witness wrote, was "not dissimilar to the opening and closing of a portal through which objects travel and deploy forward." The witness added immediately: "I am not saying or suggesting that was what we observed but rather offering that as a similar/applicable description."
A second incident that same month involved the same witnesses pursuing a separate object across rural terrain at speeds reaching 70 miles per hour, with headlights off and night-vision equipment deployed. The object accelerated away instantly when they came within approximately 50 yards. Later, it transformed — in the witness's telling — into a box-shaped configuration of orange and purple lights that glided smoothly across rugged ground as if hovering.
These accounts are unverified testimony, recorded by AARO and released through official channels. They don't confirm anything about what the objects were. What they do confirm is that federal law enforcement agents reported genuinely anomalous observations to the government's UAP office, that the office took those reports seriously enough to formally document them, and that the events remain unexplained.
The thread connecting all of this is the same office, the same period, and the same unresolved question that Kirkpatrick's Five Eyes summit was trying to build a framework to answer: what are these things, who else is seeing them, and what do we actually know?
The specific document that would most change the picture is the attendee list that Kim attached to her May 23 email — the one that has never been released. If it shows which allied intelligence officials were in that Pentagon room, and at what seniority level, the scope of what the U.S. government was sharing, and with whom, becomes considerably clearer.