Design, Science and Technology

More than three decades' worth of government UFO records are now available for download, thanks to the efforts of some intrepid truth-seekers. The massive data dump includes more than 2,700 pages of UFO-related documents declassified by the CIA since the 1980s. The U.S. government also calls them "unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. According to The Black Vault — an online repository of UFO-related documents operated by author John Greenwald Jr. — the documents were obtained through a long string of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed over the last quarter century .

 

Over time, so many requests piled up that the CIA created a CD-ROM full of declassified documents, known as "The UFO collection." In mid-2020, Greenwald purchased the CD-ROM, and he recently finished uploading its contents as a series of searchable PDF files on his website. You can find them all at The Black Vault website. The documents cover dozens of incidents, including the 1976 account of the government’s then-Assistant Deputy Director for Science & Technology being hand-delivered a mysterious piece of intelligence on a UFO, to the description of a mysterious midnight explosion in a small Russian town.

 

"Although the CIA claims this is their 'entire' [declassified] collection, there may be no way to entirely verify that," Greenwald wrote in a statement on The Black Vault website. "Research by The Black Vault will continue to see if there are additional documents still uncovered within the CIA's holdings."

 

The data dump arrives months before officials from the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies are due to appear before Congress and spill their guts on everything they know about UFOs, the New York Post reported. A provision attached to the nearly 5,600-page COVID-29 relief bill passed in late December 2020 requires the agencies, "to submit a report within 180 days … to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena."

 

The provision follows a banner year for UFOs, when startling footage of an unidentified object darting around several U.S. Navy planes in 2004 and 2015 was finally declassified. While the new data dump is significant, it's also just a drop in the bucket of The Black Vault's enormous archive. The website reportedly contains more than 2.2 million pages of UFO-related material in its archive, which Greenwald obtained through more than 10,000 FOIA requests. According to the Vault website, Greenwald filed his first FOIA request in 1996, when he was just 15 years old.

 

Read the full article at: www.theblackvault.com

Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87. In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes’ event horizons, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light can’t escape. After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April, 2019. 

 

Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite space probes ever, takes amazing high-res pictures of the lunar surface. But more than that, it can map the elevations of lunar features using shadows as a guide. Knowing the angles of the Sun, the Moon, and its viewing position, it can accurately gauge the elevations of the Moon’s surface as it takes image after image, orbit after orbit.

Via Sakis Koukouvis, ABroaderView

To the naked eye, our Galaxy appears as the Milky Way: an irregular, unevenly luminous band of dim light. Invisible from urban habitats and barely visible from many suburban locations, the Milky Way is actually bright enough, when located at the zenith of a dark sky site on a moonless night, to cast shadows on the ground. It will be useful to summarize briefly how our understanding has progressed from this naked eye view to the Galaxy model of modern astronomy.

Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald

Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald