We’re only two weeks into 2021, and this is my second article about the CIA. Following its minimal techno rebrand, the government has now released hundreds of documents about UFOs, which are now available for the public to download for free.

Dating back to the 1980s, the reports supposedly contain all of the information the CIA has about Unidentified Flying Objects – or, as the agency likes to call them, Unidentified Ariel Phenomena (UAP).

The PDF documents have been released by The Black Vault, self-described as “the largest archive of declassified documents in the world”. As reported by VICE, the site’s founder John Greenewald Jr. says he obtained the PDFs after spending years submitting Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Previously-released reports were uploaded onto a CD-ROM by the CIA, which Greenewald purchased last year and has since updated with the records he’s acquired via FOIs.

“Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,” Greenewald told VICE. “It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.”

The release of the documents comes just weeks after news broke that the US COVID-19 relief bill includes legislation that gives the Pentagon six months to release all its information about UFOs.

In July last year, the US Department of Defense announced that it would be disclosing new discoveries about UFOs every six months, following April 2020’s official declassification of three notorious UFO sightings – first leaked in 2007 and 2017.

Although the CIA asserts that the documents released make up its “entire” collection, Greenewald is skeptical, declaring in a post on The Black Vault that there’s “no way to entirely verify” the claim.

“The CIA has made it incredibly difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner,” Greenewald told VICE. “They offer a format that is very outdated and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a ‘search’ tool. This outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them for any research purpose.”

You can download all of the reports here.