The documentation by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has been made available for download, months before the deadline given to the US intelligence agencies to submit a report on it. The Black Vault, privately run archive of declassified documents, has published a downloadable archive of a collection of CIA related UFO records.
John Greenewald Jr., who runs The Black Vault, said in a blog post that the CIA made a CD-ROM collection of UFO documents over a period of time. In mid-2020, Greenewald purchased this CD-ROM to ensure the Black Vault has as complete a record of CIA documents on “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), a term preferred by the US government, as possible available.
“The Black Vault spent years fighting for them, and many were released in the late 1990s. However, over time, the CIA made a CD-ROM collection of UFO documents, which encompassed the original records, along with the ones that took years to fight for,” he stated.
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The Black Vault has, so far, filed around 10,000 Freedom Of Information Acts (FOIA) requests to amass approximately 2.2 million pages in its entire archive. Greenewald told Motherboard, via email, that he had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA and it was like “pulling teeth”. He reportedly said that he had to scan a “couple thousand pages” one at a time. All the files are available online at The Black Vault's website.
{{/usCountry}}The Black Vault has, so far, filed around 10,000 Freedom Of Information Acts (FOIA) requests to amass approximately 2.2 million pages in its entire archive. Greenewald told Motherboard, via email, that he had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA and it was like “pulling teeth”. He reportedly said that he had to scan a “couple thousand pages” one at a time. All the files are available online at The Black Vault's website.
{{/usCountry}}The CIA’s CD-ROM contents on UFOs are available to download in two formats - original and searchable .pdf conversions. The original form of CD-ROM content is the entire collection, zipped up, with zero processing. The searchable .pdf conversions also contain all files, however, they have been converted to searchable .pdf documents.
In April 2020, the department of defense released three declassified videos that showed US Navy pilots encountering what appeared to be UFOs. Following the declassification of videos, the US Navy released seven incident reports on the series of encounters between Navy pilots and UAP.
The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, part of a massive $2.3 trillion Covid-19 relief and government spending bill signed into law by President Donald Trump last month, has directed the intelligence agencies to submit a report on UAP within 180 days. According to the Senate intelligence committee's directive, the report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data as well as intel inputs from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.