You Can Now Easily Download All CIA UFO Documents to Date

In anticipation of the government’s official UFO report coming in less than six months thanks to the COVID-19 omnibus bill, you can now download all of the publicly available CIA documentation on UFOs. 

The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified documents, has released a downloadable document archive filled with PDFs containing CIA files on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the government’s preferred term. . Some of the reports date all the way back to the 1980s, and according to the site’s founder, John Greenewald Jr., the spy agency claims this is all of its documents on UAPs. 

According to Greenewald,  around 10,000 Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) reports were required to obtain the PDFs and the process was an excruciatingly long one. He scanned the documents by hand. 

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

According to a blog announcing the archive, the CIA created a CD-ROM containing previously released records as well as those the Black Vault was attempting to unseal. To ensure the Black Vault has as complete a record of CIA documents as possible available, it purchased this CD-ROM in mid-2020. 

The Black Vault blog notes that the CIA claims that this represents all its documents on the file, but there may be no way to verify that and other documents may be out there. 

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 They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a “search” tool.  In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose.”

According to Greenewald, there have been thousands of downloads within the first 24 hours of the release. From a dispute with a Bosnian fugitive with alleged E.T. contact to mysterious midnight explosions in a small Russian town, the reports definitely take readers for a wild ride. Some of the documents are crisp and clear while others are nearly indecipherable. 

One of the most interesting documents in the drop, Greenewald said, involved the Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology being hand-delivered some piece of information on a UFO in the 1970s. 

The first UFO information to be declassified under FOIA laws came in the 1970s and early 1980s. After this, Greenewald said it was exceptionally difficult to obtain information from the government regarding extraterrestrial phenomena. 

“Plain and simple, the public has a right to know!” Greenewald said. “When I began researching nearly 25 years ago at the age of 15, I knew there was something to this topic.  Not because of viral internet hoaxes. Not because of back door meetings wherein I can’t tell you who, but I promise it was mind-blowing information. No, none of that. It was simply because of the evidence that I got straight from the CIA. And the NSA. And the Air Force. And the DIA. I feel I am achieving what I set out to do. Easy access, to important material, for people to make up their own minds on what is going on.”

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Vice.