Background The following document is found within the CIA archives of UFO files. For decades since its first release, portions of the memorandum was redacted. On January 24, 2019, The Black Vault filed a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request to have the record reviewed for possible further release. On August 7, 2019, the CIA released the letter and revealed that Dr. Leon Davidson was communicating with CIA agents about a “space message and its transmitter,” but was never told they were from the CIA. Dr. Leon Davidson was a chemical engineer and scientist, one of the team that developed the…
Author: John Greenewald
Background Cicada 3301 is a nickname given to an organization that on three occasions has posted a set of puzzles to recruit codebreakers from the public. The first internet puzzle started on January 4, 2012 on 4chan and ran for approximately one month. A second round began one year later on January 4, 2013, and a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The stated intent was to recruit “intelligent individuals” by presenting a series of puzzles which were to be solved. No new puzzles were published on January 4, 2015.…
Background The following document was just one of thousands of pages on UFOs released by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In July of 2018, I requested a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request on the record, since it had been many years since its last review, and it remained heavily redacted. For reference, the CIA claims the material that remains redacted (which is pretty much everything) is due to Section 3.3(b)(1). This is defined in the executive order as: Sec. 3.3 Automatic Declassification. (b) An agency head may exempt from automatic declassification under paragraph (a) of this section specific information, the release…
Background “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us”, commonly referred to as Raid Area 51 or Storm Area 51, was an American Facebook event that took place on September 20, 2019, at Area 51, a United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range, to raid the site in a search for extraterrestrial life. More than 2 million people responded “going” and 1.5 million “interested” on the event’s page, which subsequently attracted widespread media reaction and made the event become an Internet meme. USAF was fielding e-mails and phone calls from journalists (and others)…
By John Greenewald, Jr. – The Black Vault – Originally Published: October 18, 2019 To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), a public benefit corporation led by rock star Tom DeLonge, announced a collaborative agreement with the U.S. Army this week. The original press release sent out by TTSA was vague, and offered few details. However, the Army spoke with The Black Vault to discuss the agreement, and offer a copy of the entire document, nearly in full (understandably, a few phone numbers were removed for privacy reasons). The news broke on October 17, 2019, wherein TTSA stated…