Those UFO Files

You may have already heard the news, however, in case you haven't, a massive amount of US Government UFO filesâ€"from Projects Blue Book, Sign, and Grudgeâ€"has recently gone live on the web.Fox Newshas reportedon the information, citing an article at MilitaryTimes.com.

The files can be found at The Black Vault. According to the Military Times article, the searchable database is the result of nearly 20years of work by UFO enthusiast John Greenewald.

Mr. Greenewald diligently used the Freedom of Information Act to request UFO documents from the US government, which form the basis of his database. This recent update is massive, adding over 130,000 pages of digitized information. As I write this, the site is very slow, no doubt due to high traffic as a result of the news reports.

Project Blue Book, one of the primary sources for these files, is infamous in the UFO community. According to the Wikipedia entry, Blue Book was the third study commissioned to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data. The project ran from 1952 until it was terminated in 1969, finally ending in January 1970.The US Government's Archive sitetells us that there were a total of 12,618 sightings reported to the project, of which 701 remain unidentified.

The project, and related projects, have featured heavilyin UFO literature and with conspiracy theorists. I've seen accusations that Blue Book was intended to be a distraction, to convince the public that the government was "doing something" about UFOs and attracting attention away from the "real" UFO investigations. I'm not here to say one way or the other on Blue Book.

I do, however, look forward to paging through the archives. It should be fascinating reading. Given that the majority of the reports were explained, I hope to learn more about how UFO investigations were done at the time.

I encourage you to take a look, as it will be sure to have fascinating documents of interest to many people. Let us know what you find.

Be well.

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