The CIA's 'entire' collection of UFO records has been made available for you to sigh at
- Reference: 1610541010
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/13/ufo_records_declassified/
- Source link:
Though Greenewald is quick to point out there's no way of verifying that assertion, the collection is exhaustive with 2,780 hand-scanned pages of sighting reports, anecdotes, and musings from all over the world in wildly varying levels of detail and quality.
[1]
Introducing [2]the data dump , Greenewald said that the battle to get his mitts on the documents dates back to 1996.
"Originally, the CIA would only release about 1,000 pages that had been previously disclosed after a [Freedom of Information Act] court case in the 1980s. They never addressed the records that were dated in the years after the case," he wrote.
[3]
"The Black Vault spent years fighting for them, and many were released in the late 1990s. However, over time, the CIA made a CD-ROM collection of UFO documents, which encompassed the original records, along with the ones that took years to fight for."
300,000 edgy folk pledge themselves on Facebook to storming supposedly UFO-tastic Area 51 [4]READ MORE
It's the contents of this CD-ROM plus a box of more recently unsealed documents sent to Greenewald by the CIA that have been made available for enthusiasts' perusal.
Those hoping for some kind of Roswell-like revelation may be in for disappointment, however. The Register took potshots at the extensive list of searchable PDFs, which go back as far as 1957, and couldn't turn up anything more interesting than various US military outposts reporting unidentified craft flying at anomalous speeds and their radar supposedly being "jammed."
Many of the documents appear to be diplomatic cables or similar that merely mention in passing that civilians or military in this or that country reported seeing a UFO (among far more humdrum stuff).
Even word of citizens gathering at "crop circles" seems to have been enough for the document to be included in the dump, but hipster media empire Vice's tech limb, [5]Motherboard , pointed to " [6]a dispute with a Bosnian fugitive with alleged E.T. contact " [PDF] – though we're pretty sure it was a joke comment – and " [7]mysterious midnight explosions in a small Russian town " [PDF] as being of interest.
Thank goodness somebody has the time to wade through the mire even if the results are a little underwhelming. However, Greenewald himself highlighted on Twitter one document about an official being physically handed an object related to a UFO.
1/ In this CIA [8]#UFO document, the Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology (A/DDS&T) was shown SOMETHING related to a UFO that was hand carried to him. He decided he would personally look into it, and after, he gave advice on moving forward. That advice is classified. [9]pic.twitter.com/PyVEr3zCny — 🇺🇸 T̷h̷e̷ ̷B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷V̷a̷u̷l̷t̷ 🇺🇸 (@blackvaultcom) [10]January 8, 2021
Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon [11]READ MORE
Talking to Motherboard, Greenewald blasted the CIA for making it "INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner" due to the documents' "outdated" format (multipage .tif) and "text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a 'search' tool. In my opinion, this... makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose."
While no one would dispute that people have seen flying objects they were unable to identify – whether they be spy planes, weather balloons or top-secret technology – the notion that they were piloted by extraterrestrials remains farfetched. Indeed, if little green men were to pull up to Earth right now, we'd wager they'd utter their equivalent of "nope" and head off in search of more advanced lifeforms.
Even [12]footage obtained by former Blink-182 guitarist and current UFO nut Tom DeLonge last year can be explained away as aeroplanes or balloons.
[13]
Still, Special Agent Fox Mulder would be hyperventilating at the sheer volume of material to pick through, and The Reg admittedly had fun donning our tinfoil hats and taking a stab. Maybe you'll have fun too. Let us know what you find in the comments. ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x250&tile=2&c=2X-8nJCrD4V7AMdEWa41cOQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/#prettyPhoto
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x250%7C300x252%7C300x600&tile=3&c=33X-8nJCrD4V7AMdEWa41cOQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/11/aliens/
[5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdqjy/you-can-now-easily-download-all-cia-ufo-documents-to-date
[6] https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C05517842.pdf
[7] https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C05517791.pdf
[8] https://twitter.com/hashtag/UFO?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[9] https://t.co/PyVEr3zCny
[10] https://twitter.com/blackvaultcom/status/1347535280178302981?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/27/dod_ufo_video/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/27/dod_ufo_video/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251&tile=4&c=44X-8nJCrD4V7AMdEWa41cOQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: multipage .tiff files
Talking to Motherboard, Greenewald blasted the CIA for making it "INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner" due to the documents' "outdated" format (multipage .tif) and "text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a 'search' tool. In my opinion, this... makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose."
Oh FFS. You got what you wanted and now you're complaining they didn't format it the way you wanted?
Not to mention multipage .tiff sounds about right for original scans so surely better than some other format. It is not exactly rocket science to convert formats.
Re: multipage .tiff files
I think if they really wanted to piss him off they would have mailed him a box of photocopies.
Re: multipage .tiff files
I'll say this, if he did NOT receive even a single piece of Microfiche, the whole thing is a joke. Furthermore, it could just be me but I'd much prefer film negatives to .tiff files as a .tiff file increases the probability of Photoshoping.
The problem with UFOs isn't the unidentified bit. It's attempts at identification by those who've never heard of Occam.
#USE "course.lib"
PROC hello.world(CHAN OF BYTE screen!)
out.string("Hello World!*n", 0, screen!)
:
pic?
A nice man giving the aliens flowers?
Lego
Or it didn't happen
A matter of interpretation
I remember a neighbour once telling me she'd seen "a genuine UFO". I'm still not sure whether she meant she genuinely couldn't tell it was a flying object or that she knew it was a flying object but couldn't identify what kind it was, but I couldn't help feeling that "genuine" and "unidentified" were somewhat contradictory.
Re: A matter of interpretation
> she'd seen "a genuine UFO"
That's "genuine" as opposed to all those fake UFOs you see all the time.
Re: A matter of interpretation
Being a little pedantic she was right, she did see a genuine UFO.
It was a flying object she genuinely couldn't identify, doesn't necessarily mean it was an object from another world not of our own.
I know most people would think of a UFO as coming from somewhere else but it's fun to argue semantics
If there is nothing there ...
why did the CIA just not hand all of what they had over when first asked ?
Is it part of some CIA mindset ?
Re: If there is nothing there ...
There's nothing there NOW!
Re: If there is nothing there ...
I don't think Elvis had finished reading it.
Re: If there is nothing there ...
Just speculating, but maybe they were worried they'd accidentally recorded secret military test flights.
Another possible reason is that they didn't want to go to the expense and hassle of digitising something so useless.
But well all know the real reason...
UFOs are not the problem
It's all the Identified ones the aliens are fliiting around in that I want to know about.
Yesterday's Conspiracy
Clearly we've moved on from little green men and crop circles to more demented brain viruses.
It's all real I tell ya...
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”
“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
With every person and their dog / cat now having a smart phone with a camera, why isn't the internet awash with new UFO videos?
They've improved their cloaking devices, obviously.
Since the ‘50s we have developed radar stealthed aircraft and at least the idea of adaptive camouflage. Aliens would have FTL travel, life support, radiation screening, all kinds of very hi tech but not cloaking.
So they must have nicked it from us.
Either that or alien tech increases in line with our scifi which means they’re fictional.
To be fair, there is the sci-fi trope of UFO's causing electronics to lose power ( eg: causing a car to roll to a stop ).
Old fashioned analogue cameras might be better for such a task
Perhaps because mobile footage comes tagged with metadata and there are now tools which can tell if the footage has been ‘worked’ on.
This has stymied the fraudsters. The toss the UFO model in the air and film with handheld 8mm brigade have given up.
I recall two UFO incidents from my time in NZ. One was a of a light which kept ‘following’ experienced airforce pilots. Turned out to be the planet Venus.
Another was a scam by former residents of my uni Halls who being from all over the country worked out timings and slightly varying descriptions (to make them real) of an object travelling very fast all along the length of the country. It was regarded as the best attested UFO sighting in NZ.
At a college reunion in my time the plotters came clean including to the media. The UFO nuts refused to believe a ‘bunch of students’ could have cooked it up and carried it out. Some got their parents to call the report in to add verisimilitude. UFO nuttery appears to be a combination of wish fulfilment and faith.
Stupid people will be stupid and try to refuse evidence when shown they're stupid. No surprise there then
I have yet to see ANY even remotely convincing evidence of anything ACTUALLY exhibiting impossible speeds or accelerations or movement. Not to mention the people usually claiming to have been abducted by aliens are the sort of people who would have been less interesting to said aliens than the average non-human primate. (Though I could see why they'd want to kidnap a human over a chimp or gorilla. Those things are murder machines if provoked)
Some years back, having missed my flight ( in a conventional airliner) I ended up with about twelve hours to sit around before the next connection, so I had a look for something to read. I ended up buying a book of tales from alleged abductees, not one of whom could produce a reasonable account of what happened to them that made any sense at all.
I am fairly certain the vast majority of them were attention seekers and one or two of them were genuinely ill and in need of therapy of some description.
I wish I could remember the title but is was a dozen years ago and I left the book on the seat when my flight was called.
I think life of some kind is highly likely somewhere out there but any life form that is advanced enough to have a practical form of interstellar transport will almost certainly not need to creep around the skies of Earth flashing lights and pissing off jet pilots.
As for the 'We are not ready for them' meme, a good percentage of humanity is still unprepared for walking upright.
Reminds me of that beautiful Calvin & Hobbes cartoon:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/11/08
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us"
From the book "Scientific Progress Goes Boink" I think.
See also Carl Sagan - The Demon-haunted World.
multipage .tiff files
My format of choice for OCR image files... you can do a whole book in one go that way.
natch. --->