Cracking Open "The Black Vault"

The recent advent of laws like the Patriot Act have threatened privacy and freedom of speech in America. A somewhat forgotten law to the contrary is the Freedom of Information Act. Under the FOIA, any citizen can request declassified government documents.

One example of the power of this civilian right can be found at the The Black Vault, the largest database of official UFO documents in the world. Twenty-six year-old John Greenwald has collected over half a million government documents pertaining to UFO’s through nearly two thousand FOIA document requests since he was fifteen years old. The documents have been collected and organized on his personal website.

From reading about Roswell to sightings in Iran that threw off airplane instrumentation systems, Greenwald has collected the documents and done his homework. Though Greenwald admitted in a recent interview that he doesn’t believe he’s “proved” anything, he does believe that the process of information gathering and sorting is a vital discipline.

We know that our government agencies have investigated phenomenon ranging from telepathy to psychedelics to telekinesis to extra terrestrial life. In light of these facts, it is interesting to think that what we don’t know might be available if we took better advantage of the FOIA.