(Illustration courtesy of All Time Conspiracies)

Conspiracy theorists, UFO enthusiasts and amateur Internet sleuths, rejoice! Forty-six years after the conclusion of Project Blue Book, a secret U.S. Air Force investigation into reported UFO sightings, the project’s declassified files are now available online for free.



Project Blue Book launched in 1952, the third in a series of Air Force investigations aimed at scientifically studying UFOs and determining whether they were a threat to national security. Though the program was officially terminated in 1970, Project Blue Book files could previously be accessed in full only by visiting the National Archives in Washington, D.C. But now, thanks to a man named John Greenewald, who displays more than a million pages of government documents he’s obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests on his website The Black Vault, anyone can pour through all 130,000 Blue Book files without leaving home.



According to an interview with the UFO news website OpenMinds.tv, Greenewald started The Black Vault when he was 15 and, after nearly two decades of relentless FOIA-ing, now claims to host the largest online collection of declassified government data on everything for environmental issues to terrorism and mind control. But the most exciting part about Greenewald’s latest acquisition is that, according to the U.S. Air Force, 701, or 5.5 percent, of the 12,618 reported sightings included in the Blue Book files remain “unidentified”—a challenge UFO enthusiasts and researchers will surely be eager to accept.



“It is a project that lasted for over 20 years, and they investigated thousands of cases. Sure, many of them they claimed were all explanatory, but you still have a few gems that remain a mystery,” Greenewald told Open Minds. “But further, you can use this data to compare and contrast to what it is today and start drawing conclusions or, rather, maybe pose new questions that investigators haven’t thought of yet.”

















