CIA RELEASES ITS UFO FILES, BUT MAKES IT HARD FOR EXPERTS TO READ

Thousands of documents from the CIA on unidentified flying objects were released this week in a document dump that the agency says includes all their records on UFOs, Lauren Aratani reported for The Guardian.

The documents are currently available on the Black Vault, an online archive of declassified government documents, after the site’s founder John Greenewald Jr, purchased a CD-Rom the CIA had made with its UFO documents.

About 2,700 pages were included in the collection, what the agency says are all the files it has on UFOs, but Greenewald notes on his website that “there may be no way to entirely verify that.”

Some of the reports, including one about mysterious explosions in a Russian town and another with a first-hand account of a strange sighting of a flying object near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, are the sort of reads that you might expect to find in a science fiction novel rather than official government documents.

But some of the documents are difficult to read, and what exactly they were used for is unclear. Greenewald told Vice’s Motherboard that the intelligence agency put the documents together in an “outdated” format that makes it hard to parse the collection.

“The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner,” he wrote to Motherboard.

“This outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose.”

The document dump comes just as UFOs – or, as the US government calls them, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – seem to have caught the attention of lawmakers in Congress.

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