The Black Vault Released Thousands of CIA-Related UFO Documents This Year
Published Aug. 15 2021, 12:36 p.m. ET
After filing some 10,000 Freedom of Information Act requests, John Greenewald Jr., has amassed more than 3 million pages of government documents on his site, The Black Vault, including thousands of CIA-related UFO documents.
John says he’s been working to get the UFO files since 1996, when he submitted his first FOIA request at just 15 years old. “That one request has now turned into over 10,000,” he said in April on the Shifting the Paradigm podcast. “It never what I thought would be a lifelong journey and yet, it has, and I don’t really see myself stopping anytime soon.”
The Black Vault released 2,780 pages of CIA-related UFO records in January.
John Greenewald Jr.
The Black Vault’s UFO documents cover dozens of incidents and decades of records, including reports of light phenomena spotted in 1952 in Tashkent, a city in what is now Uzbekistan; a 1960 intelligence report about “rumored unidentified flying objects” in Sary Ozek, Kazakhstan, and a 1977 report about a bright light emitting “very fine rays” in Karelia, Russia.
“Although the CIA claims this is their ‘entire’ collection, there may be no way to entirely verify that,” John notes on the website. “Research by The Black Vault will continue to see if there are additional documents still uncovered within the CIA’s holdings.”
John Greenewald’s FOIA journey started when he was 15.
On the Shifting the Paradigm podcast, John said that he submitted his first FOIA request at age 15 to verify a four-page government document about a 1976 incident in Iran.
“So I sent off this thing called a FOIA request,” he recalled. “I had no idea what that was, and sure enough, that document came in the mail, and after [that], I was hooked. Back in 1996, government agencies didn’t have a way to submit electronically, so you had to literally lick stamps and put them on the letters and send them off. … The U.S. government really does operate very old-school. Even today, you know, you’d be amazed from a technical side how obsolete a lot of their stuff is.”
A former CIA director told John that a friend’s aircraft was stopped in midair at 40,000 feet.
In a video on his YouTube channel this April, John spoke with former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., who shared that he’s not as skeptical about unidentified aerial phenomena as he once was.
“There have been, over the years now, events of one kind of another, usually involving some kind of aircraft-like airframe,” the ex-CIA chief said. “I never thought there was anything to all this, it always seemed pretty far out to me … but there was one case in which a friend of mine was able to have his aircraft stop at 40,000 feet or so and not continue operating as a normal aircraft. What was going on? I don’t know. Does anybody know?”
He went on: “There have just been enough things like that that have occurred that I think there will be a lot of examination of what’s going on over the course of several months or maybe years. … I’m not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly, but something is going on that’s surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”
