130,000 pages of X-files released online as part of major FOI reveal

26 Jan 2015

UFO over forest illustration via Gerhard Uhlhorn/Flickr

Those who say ‘the truth is out there’ will now be able to live the lives of Fox Mulder or Dana Scully by searching through 130,000 pages relating to UFOs gathered under FOI requests.

The new documents were obtained by John Greenwald who runs Blackvault.com, where many documents that were once top secret under the US government were obtained as part of a series of freedom of information (FOI) requests that now total as many as 1.3m documents charting the weird and the wacky.

These new files however, document the US government’s actual official investigation into the unidentified flying object (UFO) phenomenon that has existed largely following the infamous Roswell crash in 1947 that sparked a fascination with alleged alien visitations to Earth.

The documents obtained by Greenwald chart every single reporting of a sighting, incident or photograph of alleged objects between 1945 and 1969 as sent in by the public as part of Project Blue Book, the name given for this official investigation.

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Image via Blaackvault.com

Of the 12,618 cases that were written up as part of the investigation, 700 of these remained ‘unidentified’ leaving what those people saw as a total mystery.

Given the complete lack of scientific evidence for the existence of spacecraft travelling to Earth from the furthest reaches of our galaxy, Project Blue Book was called off in 1970 after nearly two decades of painstakign research had been undertaken.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped believers in the 45 years that have followed with many online sleuths taking to the new files in the hope of emulating The X-Files and finding a gem among the reams of information collected.

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Image via Blaackvault.com

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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