CIA unexpectedly releases all of its documents on UFOs

The CIA claims this is every document it has collected, but such a claim is impossible to verify

(Artem Kovalev )

All of the CIA’s publicly available documents on unidentified flying objects is now available to be downloaded.

The website The Black Vault, ran by  John Greenewald Jr., has published a downloadable archive of every instance of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the government classification for UFOs. All the files are available online at The Black Vault's website.

Greenewald scanned thousands of pages by hand following approximately 10,000 Freedom Of Information Acts (FOIA) levied at multiple agencies, including the CIA, which have resulted in the 2.2 million pages uploaded to The Black Vault

“Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,” Greenewald told Motherboard via email.  

“It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.”

The Black Vault purchased a CD-ROM containing both previously released records from the CIA, as well as those it was providing from FOIA  requests, it said in a blog post.

The CIA claims that this is all the documents the agency has on file, but The Black Vault says there is no way to verify that.  

“Researchers and curious minds alike prefer simplicity and accessibility when they look at data dumps such as these,” Greenewald said.  

“The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner. They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a “search” tool.  In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose.”

Many interesting documents have come out of the Black Archive, including one related to a CIA Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology who “exhibited interest” in a redacted object “which was handcarried to his office”.

“He decided he would personally look into it, and after, he gave advice on moving forward. That advice is classified”, the Black Vault Twitter account tweeted.

Greenewald has been investigating UFOs since he was 15 years old, and since then the Black Vault has over two million pages from FOIA requests. While the coronavirus pandemic has let government officials take longer on FOIA requests, Greenewald remains dedicated. Some requests have taken 14 years to be delivered, but the Vault founder is not deterred.

“You can take something that took more than a decade to come to my mailbox and give it to the public for free in an instant—that’s why I do it,” he told the Columbia Journalism Review. “I’m fairly hooked on the whole FOIA thing.”  

The news comes as the US government’s coronavirus relief bill includes a Pentagon briefing on everything it has collected about unidentified flying objects.

The briefing will cover “observed airborne objects that have not been identified" and feature "detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data collected by: a. geospatial intelligence; b. signals intelligence; c. human intelligence; and d. measurement and signals intelligence," according to the request.

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.