In the summer of 1996, a fifteen-year-old in the San Fernando Valley found a declassified government document about the 1976 Tehran UFO incident on an early internet bulletin board. The document had been released by the US government but was difficult to access. When he wrote to the CIA requesting more, they quoted him fees he could not afford. He switched strategy: instead of asking for records that had already been released, he began requesting records that had not. His name was John Greenewald Jr. The archive he started building that year, The Black Vault, now holds 3,838,797 pages of declassified government documents and is the largest privately run repository of its kind in the world.
Greenewald has filed approximately 10,000 Freedom of Information Act requests across the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, NSA, DIA, Navy, Air Force, NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Executive Office of the President, and dozens of other agencies. The archive is free, searchable, and available for bulk download. It is a one-person operation, funded through advertising and donations, with no subscription paywall. He told Vice in 2021: “Plain and simple, the public has a right to know.”
The UAP Document Record
The Black Vault’s UAP holdings span the full institutional history of American government engagement with the subject. The archive holds records from the US Army (355 pages, released 1997), the Defense Intelligence Agency (246 pages across three tranches covering through 1990), the Department of Defense (270 pages), NASA (131 pages), Space Command (7 pages), and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (910 pages of Project Sign and Grudge records from 1948 to 1949). CIA, FBI, and NSA UFO collections are catalogued separately.
The signature release was the CIA’s complete UFO collection: 2,780 pages obtained under FOIA case F-2020-02272. The CIA had compiled the records on a CD-ROM in an outdated multi-page image format with no searchable text. Greenewald converted every file to searchable PDF and published the collection on 7 January 2021. In the days following, The Black Vault’s servers recorded 101 million hits from 1.7 million visitors, a record in the archive’s twenty-five year history. Smithsonian Magazine, Vice, and Science Alert covered the release. Greenewald noted at the time: “Although the CIA claims this is their ‘entire’ collection, there may be no way to entirely verify that.”
In May 2026, when the Department of Defense released the first tranche of UAP records, Greenewald processed the collection into a searchable archive. Many of the government’s original PDFs were password-protected, preventing standard text recognition. The Black Vault removed the restrictions, applied optical character recognition, generated searchable text, and published the full collection as a 2.0 gigabyte downloadable archive with agency categorisation and related-record linking.
The Method
Greenewald’s processing methodology has remained consistent across three decades: obtain the government’s raw output, remove the barriers to access, make it searchable, and publish it for free.
Government agencies routinely release documents in formats that are difficult to use. Photocopies are scanned at low resolution. Multi-page image files resist text search. Password protections prevent copying or processing. Greenewald applies optical character recognition to every release, converts proprietary formats to standard PDFs, and builds searchable databases around each collection. Earlier releases required him to scan thousands of pages by hand, one at a time. His custom-built search platform is designed, in his words, for “speed, organisation, and direct access to the underlying records.”
His editorial stance is consistent: provide the raw documents without editorialising, and let readers draw their own conclusions. He told Smithsonian Magazine: “I like to give people the raw information, the uneditorialized version, so they can make up their own mind.” This extends to his handling of contested claims within the UAP field. When the Pentagon refused to search for emails containing the term “Immaculate Constellation,” Greenewald filed a FOIA appeal not to validate the claim but to establish the government’s obligation to search. He won the appeal on 26 May 2026.
The FOIA Record
The archive’s operational history documents both what the government has released and what it continues to withhold.
In March 2026, the Navy confirmed that 78 photographs classified as unidentified aerial phenomena exist in its holdings. The photographs were withheld in full under the UAP Classification Guide and Executive Order 13526. Greenewald’s appeal was denied by the Office of the Judge Advocate General in February 2026. The case is documented under tracking number 2026-NavyAppeal-000123.
In May 2026, a FOIA request filed in June 2009 was finally closed after seventeen years, the longest case in The Black Vault’s history. The 80-page Cold War anti-satellite weapons policy document was withheld in full under national security, intelligence sources, and Atomic Energy Act exemptions. Greenewald has filed an appeal.
Other records obtained and published include the transcript of an invite-only AARO press briefing from March 2024 (which had excluded many journalists), Pentagon emails revealing internal messaging alignment on the AATIP programme and Luis Elizondo, the DoD Inspector General’s final UAP whistleblower reprisal report, and NASA internal planning documents on announcing a discovery of extraterrestrial life.
Greenewald has published two books through Rowman and Littlefield: “Inside The Black Vault: The Government’s UFO Secrets Revealed” (2019) and “Secrets from the Black Vault: The Army’s Plan for a Military Base on the Moon and Other Declassified Documents that Rewrote History” (2020). He has produced and appeared in programmes for the History Channel, National Geographic, and Discovery, and has been profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.
From the Archive
The Black Vault’s FOIA releases provide primary-source documentation for many subjects the archive covers:
- “After PURSUE: scientists, witnesses and Congress weigh in on the first UAP tranche” (11 May 2026): the archive’s coverage of the document release The Black Vault processed into a searchable collection
- “Avi Loeb Asks Washington for Raw UAP Data, Not Processed Videos” (23 April 2026): Loeb’s argument for raw sensor data connects to the document-access work The Black Vault has pursued for three decades
- The Galileo Project: the Galileo Project’s PURSUE analysis drew on the same government records The Black Vault made searchable
The archive’s Government Documents reading room draws on declassified records that The Black Vault has obtained and processed through FOIA.
