
130,000 pages of declassified US Air Force files related to UFO sightings - ForFreedom
http://theblackvault.com/
======
nl
I saw a really good paper showing how myths about UFOs almost exactly mirror
the "old world" myths about "the little people" and the Faie.

The form of the myths mirrored each other almost exactly - strange night
visitations, kidnappings and often sexual violations.

From memory the paper argued that they represented "the unknown" in the human
psyche , and the rise of science had forced the myths to take a more
scientific form.

I wish I could find the paper.

(I guess some will argue that this is actually evidence that UFOs have been
visiting since prehistoric time. Enjoy, I guess:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F)
)

~~~
makmanalp
This would be very interesting to read about. Slight tangent: I also remember
seeing some stuff about how the brain is influenced by sociocultural things -
like how people from christian-majority nations see heaven / hell / god
imagery during psychosis but people from other, dissimilar cultures see
different things. Or: how come people ingesting hallucinogens consistently
report being one with god or being god? What's so special about the concept of
god that triggers that kind of hallucination? Why isn't it as common to think
that you're any other object, like a toaster?

~~~
sogen
There's an old 1900's illustration of UFOs, saw it in a Ripley's Magazine way
back in the late 90's - early 2000's.

 _They looked like stuff from that era:_

Cigars, Hats, Zeppelins, etc.

~~~
joshontheweb
It isn't uncommon to hear modern sighting described using these words as well.
That doesn't really mean much since these are still common objects today.

------
Swizec
Amazing! I've been working on a UFO sightings visualisation as an example for
a d3.js video course. This will be perfect :D

If anyone's interested:
[http://imgur.com/gallery/xTUxdi6](http://imgur.com/gallery/xTUxdi6)

The whole visualisation is an animation going from 1945 to 2014. But it's not
hosted anywhere yet (mostly because 14MB of data files make for a bad
website).

The green colors show sightings per capita in a state, darker is more. The
blue crosses are US air/navy bases. The yellow dots are the sightings
themselves. And the red circles are sightings clustered into 120 clusters,
then normalised by population.

The "result" is that most sightings happen near air/navy bases. And that there
are strangely many sightings per capita in the north-west.

~~~
Spooky23
Look at the corridors that had lots of sightings. In my area of upstate NY,
there were a ton of sightings later revealed to be due to testing the terrain
following radars in cruise missiles. I guess the topography looked like
whatever area of the former Soviet Union the missiles would target.

------
logician76
130,000 pages released, yet every commenter here is talking about their own
beliefs.. incredible since this is supposedly a science community.. I clicked
to see if anyone had looked at any of the pages yet and dug up some stuff to
save myself some time..

~~~
nzealand
Observations are typically lights seen by pilots or from the ground.

Conclusions range from meteors, astronomical bodies, other planes etc...

Honestly the thing that surprises me is how each report was completed in
detail. There is usually insufficient data for a definitive analysis, yet each
report must have days to complete.

------
wnevets
You would think UFO sightings would increase now that everyone carries a HD
video camera with them at all times.

~~~
api
Try filming a distant moving object with a commodity phone camera, especially
in lower light. Everyone has a camera, yes, but it's the wrong kind of camera
for capturing anything useful in this area.

If you wanted to get a good UFO photo or video what you'd really want is a
high-resolution infrared camera. Unless our UFOnauts (whatever/whoever they
are) are exempt from physics, anything using energy for any kind of powered
flight must emit infrared whether it wants to or not.

~~~
jacquesm
Anti gravity man! No self respecting UFOnaut would give terrestrial
degenerates the pleasure of leaving an IR signature.

~~~
api
Why would that matter? Energy use = energy conversions = IR.

------
maxerickson
The interesting question is how much of it was serious investigation of space
aliens and then how much of it was operational security for secret programs
and concern over soviet spy craft.

I looked at a couple of reports, one was explained as a meteor, another as a
missile, another as aircraft lights, pretty mundane stuff to be spending time
on. The investigators would know that the report came from near live ranges
and such.

~~~
furyg3
> he interesting question is how much of it was serious investigation of space
> aliens

0%

~~~
maxerickson
There had to be at least a few goofballs involved.

------
senjutsuka
How is this still so crazy when we have 100s of interviews by military and
intelligence personnel talking about this stuff openly:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb/videos?shelf_index=0&v...](https://www.youtube.com/user/csetiweb/videos?shelf_index=0&view=0&sort=dd)

What exactly discredits all of them?

~~~
chez17
The fact that there are literally millions, if not billions, of people
walking, driving, riding in trains, and flying every single day with quality
cameras on them and not a single one of them has captured a single shred of
credible evidence. To quote Tim Minchin, every extraordinary claim that has
ever been presented by humans has turned out to be "not magic".

~~~
senjutsuka
Could you describe what constitutes credible evidence? Eye witness testimony
is often consider credible evidence of crimes with life/death sentences.

From a scientific standpoint Im not sure what you'd need for something like
this. After all up until recently the long standing testimony by pilots about
sprites, elfs, ball lightning (atmospheric electrical phenomenon) and the like
had no credible evidence except eye witness.

Further there is a ton, literally 1000s of hours of video and 1000s of images.
Most are fake but many (including in the op report) remain unexplained. Its
exceedingly unscientific in the face of unexplained evidence to simply say -
'nah nothing is happening there, lets just ignore it and the corroborating
evidence and not investigate any further'.

Im not saying I know the answer, Im saying ignoring all the exceedingly large
masses of information is ignorant. Exceedingly so when we literally have the
evidence you're claiming doesn't exist (video and pictures gallore).

~~~
teamhappy
I'm really no expert, but I think you'd need more than one eye witness to
begin with. Then there is the obvious difference between your two examples:
There aren't a lot of explanations for somebody seeing a person stabbing
another person, then again there are a lot of explanations for somebody seeing
light that moves in strange ways. The same is true for video footage and
photographs. Hardware fails all the time and a lot of these technologies have
quirks. Remember the old photographs with creepy looking kids in the
background and that kind of thing? There are very good and easy to understand
explanations for these events (images burning in, similar to plasma screens).
Remember what the word "UFO" means to begin with. I'd need at least some
evidence that proves the thing is actually an aircraft, let alone an
extraterrestrial one.

By the way. Pilots were crazy high back in the day, weren't they? Amphetamines
and that kind of thing? Just saying.

Also, you complain about people not investigating these events. That's
obviously not true. It's just that (so it seems, anyway) if nothing _ever_
comes out of it, people stop investigating.

------
donald_trumpet
UFOs still exist. Most are explainable as something mundane, aircraft,
weather, whatever. There are still a small percentage of strange experiences
out there.

But that does not mean they are "aliens" \- they are just unexplained. They
may be caused by anything - weather, ball-lightning, volcanic activity, marsh
gas, psychological oddities. They are deserving of study.

~~~
omegant
I´m airline pilot with 16 years of professional experience, I spent my first 3
to 4 years as a pilot looking outside to see if I could see a UFO. Of course I
didn't see anything strange. But I am routinely fouled by Venus. I've observed
Venus at dawn thousands of times, but now and then it seems that there is a
light following us. I look at it thinking it's another airplane, then when I
can't identify it as such, I remember that I´m looking at Venus. It's fun it
happens after so many years knowing the phenomenon.

When I was a kid I used to live in the country, not far from the airport (my
father was a commercial pilot too). It was common to see airliners doing a
visual landing traffic to land, passing just overhead. One afternoon, I was
coming out to feed the dogs when I saw a very bright green light, just the
same type of green that shines at the right wing of airplanes, but this
light's trajectory was 90º to the normal traffic one, and was heading away
from the airport. At first I thought It was a crashing airplane, but it was
completely silent. It was very weird, I stared at it for a minute or so, till
it disappeared to the East. I thought then that it was a hight (and heavy)
meteorite composed of Cu. Next day the local newspaper talked about it, how
everybody reported it to the police, and how it was in fact a meteorite that
brushed the higher atmosphere and rebounded again to the space.

If you are expecting or believing in alien UFOs, it´s easy to mistake
something like this for a real UFO. I read some time ago this report
[http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-
Inst...](http://www.amazon.com/Conclusions-Controlled-UFO-Hoaxes-
Institute/dp/090467438X) It's about a couple of guys that join a UFO sighting
group, and start doing fake UFOs with helium balloons and a flash to see how
they responded to it (spoiler: not very accurately or sceptical). Highly
recommended.

------
api
I've always had a passing interest in UFOs and similar mysteries. The sense I
get from reading a bit into the subject is that when you subtract the obvious
cranks and cultural mythology there does exist a hard core of very hard to
explain UFO cases with hard evidence associated with them. It's a minority of
cases overall but they do exist.

The evidence isn't strong enough to confirm any of the leading hypotheses
(ETs, classified tech, etc.), so they still remain in the mystery category.

A common misconception about a basically scientific worldview is that you
can't have mysteries, that everything has to be settled. This is absolutely
wrong. Of _course_ there are mysteries. If there weren't, science would stop.
I'm perfectly comfortable with mysteries and with answering "I don't know" to
certain things.

------
mratzloff
If you are genuinely curious about officially documented reports about UFOs
(not aliens), then I highly recommend reading "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and
Government Officials Go on the Record" by Leslie Kean.

[http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-
Offici...](http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-
Officials/dp/0307717089)

In a field where many of the books are written by either true believers or
debunkers, this is a fresh take on the phenomena, carefully researched and
conservatively written by an investigative journalist.

------
acd
Doing a word frequency analysis from the site of the reports 1940-1960. What
happened in Dayton Ohio and in Ohio in general?

City and state 20 Miami Florida 21 N W PACIFIC 21 Duluth Minnesota 21 LasVegas
Nevada 22 KansasCity Missouri 22 Philadelphia Pennsylvania 23 Houston Texas 23
Seattle Washington 25 Fairborn Ohio 26 N E Pacific 26 LosAngeles California 26
Washington D C 27 Albuquerque NewMexico 27 Dallas Texas 27 Denver Colorado 28
ColoradoSprings Colorado 30 SanAntonio Texas 31 Baltimore Maryland 31
Cleveland Ohio 32 Brooklyn NewYork 32 Columbus Ohio 32 Kettering Ohio 36
Chicago Illinois 41 N W 41 Cincinnati Ohio 42 BLANK 69 N W Pacific 71
ILLEGIBLE 140 Dayton Ohio

By state 57 Japan 59 Oklahoma 59 Tennessee 62 Nebraska 66 Alabama 67
NorthCarolina 72 Kansas 73 E 73 Mass 76 Louisiana 78 Nevada 81 Maine 90
Kentucky 92 Alaska 98 Arizona 111 Georgia 113 Minnesota 117 Iowa 117
Massachusetts 131 Calif 137 Virginia 139 Maryland 140 Missouri 141 Oregon 141
Wisconsin 149 NewJersey 155 Indiana 156 Washington 160 Colorado 165 NewMexico
191 Illinois 197 Michigan 199 Pennsylvania 216 N 237 Florida 244 W 427 Texas
461 NewYork 565 California 731 919 Ohio

~~~
WillNotDownvote
Project Blue Book itself was based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
which is outside Dayton, Ohio.

~~~
acd
Thanks for pointing that out, possibly false positive then.

------
wahsd
What I find interesting is that these documents were classified at all if
there was nothing to them.

I'm sure some of the documents can be tied to secret test flights, but why
classify and keep secret the rest of the documents. I wish someone would ask
that question, what if any justification was there for classifying them in the
first place.

Edit: Looking at some of the documents, it seems that many of the reports of
sightings are essentially people reporting celestial bodies, aircraft, or
weather phenomenon. I am rather certain that there is really absolutely
nothing in here to be found. This strikes me as the equivalent to clearing out
filing cabinets of useless documents. It's probably a matter of finding the
needle that may or may not have slipped through in a huge haystack.

Mildly amusing statement from one of the more interesting reports I cam across
(Last Report, last page): "...leads me to believe, or at least to suspicion,
that the accusations of NEGLIGENCE heaped upon you (as individual officers in
Bluebook and collectively by some independent investigators in recent years
may not be entirely unfounded."
[http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com/documents/1960s/196...](http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com/documents/1960s/1967-06-7365317-Austin-
Texas/1967-06-7365317-Austin-Texas.pdf)

~~~
jdietrich
Information is classified by default, and only ever declassified when there is
a high degree of confidence that the information is no longer sensitive.

The concern almost certainly has nothing to do with the possibility that
someone might have seen an alien spacecraft, but the risk of revealing
information about military aircraft movements.

------
joshuaheard
If you consider the Drake Equation
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation)),
there are probably millions of alien civilizations in our galaxy alone that
could send craft to our planet. If that is true, they would certainly observe
and study us, much like we observe and study lesser animals. And to avoid harm
to their subjects, the aliens would likely avoid detection. So, even though I
think 90% of UFO evidence is terrestrial phenomena, the odds are in favor of
alien race(s) visiting us, so it's possible some UFO evidence is of alien
craft.

~~~
delecti
While the Drake Equation indicates that there are probably loads of other
intelligent species in our galaxy, there's no reason to think that it's
practical for them to visit.

~~~
ArtDev
Especially that a craft will have to travel for millions of years to get here!

Heck, we only evolved very recently on this planet. If humans don't go extinct
in the next 2-5 million years, then maybe its possible to get a visitor (but I
wouldn't bet on it).

------
rglover
I mean, come
on...[http://cl.ly/ZNIU/Image%202015-01-20%20at%201.13.21%20PM.png](http://cl.ly/ZNIU/Image%202015-01-20%20at%201.13.21%20PM.png)

------
thedangler
This one really gets me.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6WobAoTaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6WobAoTaI)

------
emcrazyone
I'm not a conspiracy theory type but I wonder how much was declassified vs.
how much was not. Do you wonder if this is the mundane stuff the US Air Force
releases to be able to give them an argument against UFO phenomenon?

I loosely follow this subject. I get excited when guys like Stanton Friedman
speak. I got real interested in this subject when the whole Rendlesham Forest
thing exploded.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident)

And even Niel Armstrong believes. Wasn't there an unencrypted radio
communication that was recorded between NASA and one of the space shuttle
missions where the astronautes describe a UFO being observed of some sort?

All this just makes me wonder how much is not declassified or if it is
declassified that it's probably down played as something other than a UFO???

~~~
nl
I'm not sure about Neil Armstrong - although I can't find any evidence
supporting the view that he believed in UFOs.

Buzz Aldrin doesn't though:

 _On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that
appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that
could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world
- it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved
away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose
with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels.
And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off
of one of these panels. Which one? I don 't know. So technically, the
definition could be "unidentified."

We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed
and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been
distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it
wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose
these observations, on another country's television network._[1]

I'm not sure it can be much clearer than that.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2a5vg8/i_am_buzz_aldri...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2a5vg8/i_am_buzz_aldrin_engineer_american_astronaut_and/cirtrhe?context=3)

~~~
joshontheweb
Interesting. He certainly takes on a different tone about the experience in
this interview
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlkV1ybBnHI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlkV1ybBnHI)

~~~
nl
That is _entirely consistent_ with what he says on Reddit.

Notice that the _editing_ makes it seem like he thinks it was some suspicious
object, but if you just take what he says it is basically "we saw something,
it wasn't clear what it was." Even in the edited interview it is clear they
thought it was part of the rocket, because they asked where it was.

Clearly it didn't seem very important to them then: they kept an eye on it but
weren't concerned.

Turns out it wasn't the rocket, just some panels from it.

That makes a lot of sense physically, and is consistent with what he says
there and later on Reddit.

