CIA UFO Documents Now Available For Download

The CIA's declassified files on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been made available for download online, months before the deadline given to U.S. intelligence agencies to submit a report on it.

The Black Vault, said to be the largest privately run archive of declassified documents in the world, announced via Twitter that it has released a downloadable document archive of what the CIA claims is its complete archive of documentation on UFOs – now termed by the government as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The intelligence website said the records go back "more than a half-century."

Founder John Greenewald Jr. stated on the Black Vault website that they have been fighting for the release of the files since 1996. The records began to emerge in the '80s after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) court case.

Greenewald added that many files were released in the late 1990s, but the supposedly complete archive of the CIA's UFO records is now available after The Black Vault acquired a CD-ROM collection of all the UFO documentation CIA has gathered over time. They shared a photo of the CD from the CIA on Twitter.

“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.”

Greenewald also said that The Black Vault “filed 10,000 FOIA requests in total to amass the 2.2 million pages in this entire archive.”

The CIA's documentation on UFOs is 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, but they have been converted to searchable .pdf documents.

Back in April 2020, the Department of Defense also released three declassified videos that featured Navy pilots encountering a mysterious UFO. Following the leaked videos, the Navy released seven other incident reports on different encounters between Navy pilots and UAP.

Meanwhile, the director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have six months to submit a report to Congress on what they know about UFOs, CNN reported. The countdown started in December after President Donald Trump signed into law the coronavirus relief and spending package bill.

According to the Senate intelligence committee's directive, the report to be submitted to congressional intelligence and armed services committees must contain "detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI."