On the morning of May 17, 2023, Sean Kirkpatrick typed a quick note to a subordinate whose name has since been redacted. "Morning," he wrote, from his Pentagon email address. "Please extend an invitation and supporting logistics for our FVEYS meeting next week." Then, almost as an afterthought: "We are holding it here and not the Pentagon, correct?"
The answer that came back later that day was no — it would be at the Pentagon after all, in a TS/SCI room belonging to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. The date was set: May 24, 2023, 0830 to 1500. Lunch in the Pentagon Food Court.
That exchange, preserved in two FOIA releases from AARO's electronic reading room — documents 23-F-1486_2.pdf and 23-F-0949_2.pdf — is the clearest documentary evidence yet that the United States was, at that moment, building something new: a formal intelligence-sharing architecture around UAP with its closest allies. The Five Eyes partnership — Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand — was being folded into America's UAP bureaucracy in an organized, agenda-driven way, more than a year before most public reporting caught up with the fact.
The emails are routine in tone, which is part of what makes them significant. Whoever "Kim" is — her last name is redacted — she signed off with "V/r" and attached an attendee list. The briefing, she noted, was "essentially the same as the GISRC," a reference whose full meaning remains obscured by redactions. Kirkpatrick's email signature closed with a line of Latin: Universum mutatio est. Vita nostra est quod cogitationes nostra facere est. Marcus Aurelius. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
" is — her last name is redacted — she signed off with "
What the Agenda Reveals
The caucus agenda, which runs to two pages and was sent to Kirkpatrick on May 23 — the day before the meeting — is more substantive than typical bureaucratic scheduling documents. It identifies the participants by organization: AARO, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FAA, NASA, and unnamed representatives from each of the four FVEY nations. It schedules Kirkpatrick himself for a 75-minute block: a welcoming address followed by U.S. updates broken into AARO Operations, AARO Analysis, and AARO Strategic Communications — plus separate presentations from the FAA, NASA, and two units identified only as NIM-A and NIM-M, neither of which is explained anywhere in the released material.
The FVEY partner updates were allotted from 1015 to 1130 — slightly over an hour for Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand to collectively brief their UAP observations and activities. That ratio — 75 minutes for the U.S., 75 minutes for four allied nations combined — says something about who was convening and who was attending.
The afternoon session was devoted to a "Discussion on FVEY UAP Collaboration Way-Ahead Plan," and the agenda's list of topics is the section that most rewards careful reading. Organizers wanted to discuss networks for sharing FVEY UAP reporting at three classification levels: unclassified, Secret REL FVEY, and TS//SI/TK REL FVEY. They wanted to establish shared databases of known objects catalogued across multiple sensors. They wanted to formalize FVEY UAP collection planning. They discussed tying the effort into existing forums for Emerging and Disruptive Technologies. The agenda states, plainly, that "the intent is to develop a framework for future UAP collaboration."
This was not a one-time briefing. The agenda explicitly asks: "Future Meeting Schedule (How often, virtual or in-person?)"
What was agreed to in that afternoon session — whether any of those three-tiered reporting networks were actually established, whether shared sensor databases were built, whether subsequent meetings occurred — is entirely unknown. The contents of the email thread were designated deliberative process privileged and withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(5) before release. What reached the public is the frame, not the painting.
There is also a small but telling discrepancy between the two FOIA releases of what appears to be the same document. In 23-F-1486_2.pdf, the May 17 response to Kirkpatrick describes the meeting room as "a TS/SCI OUSD (I &S) room." In 23-F-0949_2.pdf, the same line appears with the "TS/SCI" classification designation struck through, leaving only "OUSD (I &S) room." Whether that reflects a redaction choice, a formatting artifact, or something more deliberate is unclear. It is the kind of small variance that rarely matters — until it does.
An Office Still Defining Itself
The internal tension in how AARO has described its own mission is worth noting, because it shows up across documents that were presumably coordinated. The official slide deck released under FOIA as 22-F-1364_2.pdf — bearing Kirkpatrick's name and the AARO seal — describes the office in one passage as "a uniquely-capable, Defense Department & Intelligence Community organization that integrates operational, scientific, and intelligence capabilities to resolve UAP." A few slides later, the language shifts: "AARO leads integration of the Department's UAP operations, research, analyses, and strategic-communications to deliver exquisite data, advanced sensors, sound analytics, and shared mission awareness and ownership."
These are not identical claims. The first frames AARO as an integrator of existing capabilities across DoD and the IC. The second frames AARO as the entity that leads integration — a subtly but meaningfully different posture. One describes a collaborative node; the other describes a command function. Neither description has been officially reconciled with the other. This matters because the same slide deck is what Kirkpatrick or his staff would have used to brief congressional oversight, allied partners, and the public — and the office's precise authorities remain, in practice, contested.
The AARO mission deck is also notable for what it lays out candidly about the three geographic domains of UAP concern. Reporting near U.S. military facilities is "most often" where DoD observations occur, and threats to U.S. citizens and government facilities are listed as the priority. Reporting near strategic capabilities and critical infrastructure is described as "primarily historical" — meaning the analysis is limited by the age and reliability of the underlying intelligence. And in foreign territory, the document acknowledges that reporting is constrained by source reliability, and that "adversarial misattribution of UAP to the United States" is a live concern. Allies and strategic competitors, it notes, are applying their own resources to observe and attribute UAP from open sources.
That last point is not a throwaway line. It is a direct argument for why the FVEY caucus existed: if allied nations are already watching the same phenomena from their own territory and operational areas, the United States has a strong incentive to get ahead of the information-sharing before allied governments draw their own conclusions independently — or worse, before adversaries exploit the ambiguity.
The Western U.S. Event
Separate from the May 2023 diplomatic architecture, a more recent document adds a different kind of data. Released by the Office of the Under Secretary of War and posted to war.gov, the document designated DoW UAP D080 Narrative 2 is a memorandum dated June 2, 2026, presenting the first-hand account of a witness identified only as Witness 2 — described as one of several U.S. federal law enforcement special agents who observed UAP over two days in October 2023 in the western United States.
The account is detailed, grounded in specific times and terrain, and written with the careful hedging of someone who understands how the report will be read. Witness 2 describes observing, at approximately 1900 hours on the first night, "a bright circular orb-like light approximately 35-45 degrees above the northern/northeastern horizon" that "grew slowly brighter." Inside the bright orb was a smaller red orb. Then: "As the bright orb-like light grew larger, it expelled three or four red lights from it. The red lights accelerated instantly and maneuvered with perfect, smooth coordination into a horizontal formation."
The sequence repeated approximately five times over the next thirty minutes across different points on the horizon. Multiple team members confirmed they saw the same objects. From roughly 1930 to 2300 hours, a row of three equally-spaced red lights hovered above the southern horizon, occasionally dipping below it before rising again.
Witness 2 is precise about what the movement did not resemble. "It looked like a mix of mechanical deployment and biological division," the account reads, "it appeared too smooth and agile to be mechanical, but too structured/coordinated to be a biological division." Then, with evident care, Witness 2 offers a comparison: "The bright orb-like light was small, grew larger, appeared to project objects out of it, and then it dimmed until it was no longer visible; not dissimilar to the opening and closing of a portal through which objects travel and deploy forward." The witness is explicit that this is a descriptive analogy, not a claim.
The second incident the same week involved what appeared to be vehicle headlights hovering in a valley, lights that pulsed in coordinated patterns between two positions, and then a chase at 70 miles per hour on a rural highway with headlights off, using night-vision equipment. The object that drew the agents north accelerated instantly to the south when they closed to approximately 50 yards — covering at least a mile across rugged terrain in under a minute — before eventually transforming into "a group of orange and purple lights in the shape of a box," which then glided northwest toward a mountain range.
AARP's questions about the origin and purpose of the UAP observed in this incident remain publicly unanswered. The document itself asks them explicitly, as open items: what was the origin of what was observed, and what was its purpose? No answers are provided.
The EarthSky summary of the Pentagon's third UAP file batch, published in June 2026, notes that the release includes orbs — consistent with Witness 2's account. A separate witness account in the broader file release describes a large red orb releasing two smaller red orbs. Whether these describe the same event, the same class of phenomena, or entirely unrelated incidents is not established by any document currently available.
What the May 2023 emails and the October 2023 witness account share is a structure: the U.S. government was, on one track, building a classified international framework to systematize how Five Eyes partners collect, share, and analyze UAP data; and on another track, accumulating first-person accounts from federal agents describing objects that no one in the chain of reporting can explain. The distance between those two tracks — between the alliance-building architecture and the raw, unresolved field accounts — is where the real question lives.
The specific document that would begin to close that gap is the FVEY UAP Collaboration Way-Ahead Plan itself — whatever was produced from the afternoon session of May 24, 2023. If it exists in releasable form, it would show whether the framework Kirkpatrick was building that day ever produced the shared databases, the tiered reporting networks, and the collection coordination that the agenda proposed. No such document has surfaced.