Thanks to The Black Vault, an online archive of declassified government documents, you can now dig through a massive trove of information the CIA has collected on UFOs over the years. The Black Vault's John Greenewald Jr. posted the contents of a CD full of 2,780 pages of documents last week, the result of Greenewald's many Freedom of Information Act requests. The CIA has occasionally declassified UFO-related documents over the years and even made a reading collection available online covering information from the 1940s through the early 1990s. Last year, the US Navy declassified documents and video connected to a 2004 UFO encounter. It seems public interest in UFOs hasn't waned. Greenewald tweeted on Wednesday that over 622,000 people generated more than 30.7 million hits on his servers and downloaded nearly 26 terabytes of data over the course of just 24 hours. This could be a fun year for UFO enthusiasts. The COVID-19 relief bill signed by President Trump in late December 2020 included a requirement for the director of national intelligence to submit a report on "unidentified aerial phenomena" within 180 days to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees. The request is for an unclassified report, but it may include a classified supplement. The search for definitive answers isn't over. "Although the CIA claims this is their 'entire' collection, there may be no way to entirely verify that," Greenewald wrote. "Research by The Black Vault will continue."
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.