130,000 pages of USAF documents related to UFO investigations now online

Everyone loves a good UFO story and, for at least three decades, "everyone" included the U.S. government. From the 1940's through the 1960's, the U.S. Air Force investigated thousands of alleged sightings featuring strange aerial phenomena, and they cataloged their findings. Almost all of the alleged close encounters were debunked and, while a few presented genuine mysteries; Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969 due to its inability to produce anything deemed worthwhile.

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To this day, the Air Force summarizes its investigations by saying that there was never any indication that UFOs were a security threat, nor was there any evidence that they were extra-terrestrial or possessed of abilities which outpaced modern science. Now, a massive archive of de-classified Blue Book reports has been established online, and you can check it out for yourself. As CNN reports:

Nearly 130,000 pages of declassified Air Force files on UFO investigations and sightings are now available in one place online. Declassified government records about UFOs have long existed on microfilm in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Many of them also live on websites devoted to the topic, sometimes free, sometimes not. But UFO enthusiast John Greenewald says his database, Project Blue Book Collection, is the first to compile every single declassified document from the Blue Book project -- headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio from 1947 to 1969 -- in one place for anyone to search or download for free. The collection consists of files from Project Blue Book, Project Sign and Project Grudge, the names given to official investigations into unidentified flying objects by the United States military.

What this all boils down to is roughly 10,000 PDF files containing reports on virtually all of the famous post-Roswell "sightings" that conspiracy theorists have been discussing for decades. Alternately, if you think all the conspiracy theorists are a bunch of tinfoil hat wearing crackpots, it's a fascinating document dump that should interest anyone who's fascinated with aviation, the Air Force, or general U.S. history. If you're worried that this "openness" will ruin all the conspiracy theory fun, you can relax. The docs contain enough blacked-out text to keep the rumor mill churning forever, and who knows? Maybe there's yet another super-secret investigation going on right now. Unfortunately, we still have no idea why "the owls are not what they seem."