KEY OBSERVATIONS
• An interstellar visitor deemed ordinary by science drew an extraordinary intelligence response.
• A “neither confirm nor deny” reply quietly contradicts public certainty.
• History shows why low-probability, high-impact risks are never ignored.
A classified silence now shadows an object science insists is fully understood.
[USA HERALD] – On December 31, 2025, a short, carefully worded letter from the Central Intelligence Agency entered the public record and quietly complicated the official story of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. Responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by researcher and transparency advocate John Greenewald Jr., the agency stated it could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records”related to the object. In intelligence parlance, that response is known as a Glomar denial, and it is rarely invoked casually. (Read the response here.)
The timing and context of that reply matter. Just weeks earlier, on November 19, 2025, officials from NASA publicly and decisively characterized 3I/ATLAS as a natural comet, closing the door on further institutional debate about its nature. The message from the scientific side of government was unambiguous: this object, though interstellar, fit comfortably within known cometary physics and posed no extraordinary questions. And yet, at the intelligence level, the possible existence of records about that same object was treated as classified.
