Cosmology, Energy, Environment, Everything, History of Science, Life, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Space, Time, Universe

CIA Releases “X-Files”

A photograph of two very young buddhist monks, showing one of them sitting in an alley while the other is seemingly levitating in front of him. The image is stamped by the Central Intelligence Agency.The Real X-Files

As the X-Files series enjoy a revival on TV, the American spy agency has decided to place thousands of declassified documents detailing government research into UFOs on its website.  The CIA documents also confirm the reality of humans with ‘Special Abilities’ able to do seemingly impossible things. 

Following media pressure from a 2014 lawsuit by MuckRock – a non-profit freedom of information group – over access to the CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) database, as well as a variety of metadata regarding how that database is used, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) announced it would publish the material in November 2016.

 

CREST

The entire declassified CREST archive is now available from the CIA Library website.

The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files.

While much of this information has been publicly available since the mid-1990s, it was previously very difficult to access.  The records were only available on four physical computers located at the back of a library in the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day.

The CIA was subsequently forced to upload its document archive in a process which took over two years.

The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

 

Real UFOs

A collage of three grainy black and white photographs: 1) A police officer and another witness examining at an indistinct patch of ground in a desert landscape. 2) A shot of five UFOs flying in close formation. 3) A single bright large UFO hovering over some trees.
The real X-Files? The CIA uploaded photos of UFO sightings to its publicly-accessible online database.

Amongst many documents, the CIA declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 detailing the Agency’s investigations into reported Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).

 

Unfortunately, those documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s, leaving much of recent history either unexplored or not yet declassified.

The official stance of the CIA remains that the air force investigations were brought to a close after it concluded that:

“No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security (and) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorised as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles” and that there was no evidence that the sightings “represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge.”

 

Ten Documents the CIA Wants You to See

A picture of the Office Memorandum from the United States Government.
One of the official U.S. Government Memorandum on the subject of “Flying Saucers”.

To help navigate the vast amount of data contained in their FOIA UFO collection, the agency decided to highlight a few documents that both skeptics and believers will find interesting.  It is not known whether the CIA chose to do so in order to take away from John Greenwald’s effort, or provide greater exposure to this information for its own esoteric purposes.

 

Here you can take a peek at a selection of CIA-held documents that the fictional X-Files TV series character Agent Fox Mulder would have loved to use in an attempt to persuade others of the existence of extraterrestrial activity.

  1. Flying Saucers Reported Over East Germany, 1952
  2. Minutes of Branch Chief’s Meeting on UFOs, 11 August 1952
  3. Flying Saucers Reported Over Spain and North Africa, 1952
  4. Survey of Flying Saucer Reports, 1 August 1952
  5. Flying Saucers Reported Over Belgian Congo Uranium Mines, 1952

 

A meme showing actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson starring as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from cult TV series "The X-Files". The scene is set in a small office. Both characters are staring at a computer screen. He thinks: "At last, proof! And from the CIA, for crying out loud!" She thinks: "He's going to go nuts with all this! Lord help us!"The following five documents could have been used by Mulder’s skeptical counterpart, Dana Scully, to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings.

  1. Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, 14-17 January 1953
  2. Office Memorandum on Flying Saucers, 15 March 1949
  3. Memorandum to the CIA Director on Flying Saucers, 2 October 1952 
  4. Meeting of the OSI Advisory Group on UFOs, 21 January 1953
  5. Memorandum for the Record on Flying Saucers, 3 December 1952

 

Air Technical Intelligence Center

Number 4 details how the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio examined between a thousand and two thousand UFO reports.

While most were easily explained away as the wrongful identification of clouds, meteorites or aircraft, around one hundred reports could not be explained.

The conclusion was that surveillance has to be continued to ascertain the true nature of these reports, but done under the radar so that the public were left unaware of the investigations.

 

Ultra-Humans

A collage showing the following: 1) A photograph of Uri Geller with a bent spoon. 2) The alleged results from Uri Geller' s psychic test.
Details from psychic Uri Geller’s test results from 1973 were also uploaded to the CIA website.

Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists.

Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer.

Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying – but sometimes precise – accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner”.

Whatever you believe, whatever you think…

The partial “truth” is now officially out there.