The truth is out there: the X-files is real. Project Blue Book was a government project that sought to document sightings of UFOs by military personnel and civilians alike. Records were kept beginning in 1947 until the project officially ended on Dec. 16, 1969.
Although the documents relating to the project were already declassified years ago, they were difficult for the public to read because they were only available to view at the National Archives in Washington on 94 spools of microfilm. In the past, the files were made available on truth-seeking websites such as Project Blue Book Archive and Fold3.
Now, the archives of Project Blue Book are now more easily accessible and searchable by year and keyword on the Black Vault website where the PDF documents have been uploaded.
According to the records kept for Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force recorded almost 130,000 pages of sightings. There are 12,618 sightings mentioned by those working for the Air Force in the documents and among those, 701 of those "phenomena" are still unidentified.
Fox Mulder himself would be jumping for joy at the availability of the previously classified documents about UFOs, all thanks to the efforts of John Greenwald, who fought for two decades for access to the government files under the Freedom of Information Act.
His requests were finally granted. On Jan. 12, he uploaded the documents onto his online database, in addition to files from Project Sign and Project Grudge, predecessors of the extensive records kept in Project Blue Book.
What kinds of strange sightings were recorded in Project Blue Book, you may wonder?
Well, one random entry from Feb. 7, 1950, for example, describes a conical object flying at 5,000 feet over Alameda, Calif. It was estimated to be 30 feet long, had a gray vapor tail, and "changed [the] position of its axis during flight."
One of the final entries for Project Blue Book before it was terminated details the observations of a 13-year-old witness, including handwritten notes and diagrams from a sighting in Round Lake, Ill.
If you think one of the thousands of recorded sightings includes the infamous Roswell crash of New Mexico in 1949, you're out of luck. No documents about that particular event are kept with the declassified Project Blue Book files.
