Between 1947 and 1969, there was a huge surge of UFO sightings in North America. Following the Roswell incident, the public’s imagination ran wild with the suddenly plausible possibility of intelligent life, and thousands of reported sightings were logged above airforce bases, city outskirts, backcountry fields – even the White House. Over those years, the US Air Force gathered information on 12,618 UFO sightings across the country, in a program labelled Project Blue Book. This project was the only official program ever set up by the American government and military to attempt to understand the UFO phenomenon.
In 1996, at the age of fifteen, John Greenewald, Jr. launched a website called Black Vault – his way of giving the public access to government secrets. In the years since, Greenewald has made over 5,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and shared over 1.4 million pages of declassified documents to the site. Last week, he uploaded a whopping 130,000 pages of Project Blue Book documentation onto a massive online database. It’s a crazy list, and if you’ve got a bit of spare time, worth pondering the unknown with this extensive list of ‘open-and-shut’ cases.
