Inside the UAP Kitchen: 1300 Pages of Scott Bray's Emails

At the end of September 2026, the U.S. Navy released a large batch of documents on unidentified aerial phenomena. After four years of waiting, The Black Vault received 1321 pages of emails from Scott Bray, a former deputy director of naval intelligence. Of these, 302 pages were withheld in full, and the rest were released with redactions. The request had been filed back in May 2022 and concerned all of Bray's correspondence mentioning UAP, UFO, UAPTF, AATIP and related terms.

These emails span the years when the Navy was creating its task force on unidentified phenomena — the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Bray stood at the center of that work. One document states plainly: Jay Stratton headed the Navy's UAP Task Force and reported directly to Bray. The correspondence shows how, within the department, briefings for Congress were prepared, public wording was discussed, and the growing interest of lawmakers was handled.

The most concrete thing that stands out is the leadership's attitude toward the briefings themselves. In February 2021, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Trussler explained the change of leadership this way: Stratton was not fired, they simply put in place a person who would manage the team rather than "an analyst who likes to give presentations." The goal was to avoid "unusual statements" and move the work into calmer waters. A year earlier, Rear Admiral Kelly Aeschbach wrote plainly that she wanted "to get Jay and the Navy out of the driver's seat." These phrases capture an internal assessment: UAP presentations raised questions among senior officers.

The documents also touch on the famous 2021 assessment, in which 143 cases remained unexplained. In the correspondence, officials clarify something important: those reports did not fall into the "other" category. They simply remained without a category. Some of them contained only verbal descriptions from pilots, with no technical data that could be verified. Leadership noted that the briefings often provided a set of stories but did little to turn them into analysis — there was a lack of assessment of scale, possible conventional explanations and consequences.

The emails include discussions of April 2020, when the Navy made public three well-known videos of UAP. There is also correspondence with Pentagon officials, admirals and intelligence officers about how to formulate public statements, how to respond to media inquiries and how to structure the work of the task force. It is clear that the UAP topic was taken seriously within the system: structures were created, classified reports were prepared, and there were disputes over whether the cases were being studied deeply enough.

This release does not provide sensational footage or definitive answers. It provides something else — a direct look at how naval intelligence worked with unidentified phenomena in real time. The documents show both the interest in the topic and the internal constraints and management decisions that had previously remained behind closed doors. Now these 1300 pages are available for study.