With a honorable citizen’s effort the Black Vault’s John Greenwald had painstakingly placed in PDF format for the general public to read and to easily research previously USAF declassified Project Blue Book files held at the National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/foia/ufos.html  (I’m correcting my previous erroneous statement that what had just been released to the public were recently declassified files). It was a major effort and this was newsworthy as it would help anyone interested at how research had been conduceted take a good look at these files produced by an iconic UFO research project.

Unfortunately, in a letter by John Greenwald director of The Black Vault dated January 29, 2015 he announced that, due to a copyright claim (!!), he’s decided to take these files off the internet for now. Here’s the link: http://www.openminds.tv/usaf-ufo-blue-book-files-forced-taken/31946

“It is with great frustration to announce, that Ancestry.com, and their subsidiary Fold3, has laid down a claim to copyright on the Project Blue Book material – which has long been labeled as “public domain” by the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA).   Ancestry.com is claiming ownership to the digital version of this material – despite me having records that Fold3 doesn’t even have in their archive and I received under the FOIA starting back in 1996.  They simply claimed it was 100% theirs and I was forced to remove it.”

Still, the availability of these files at the National Archives should be a step in the right direction of transparency on an issue that cannot (and should not!) be hidden for ever. Other countries have already been open about much of their files as very few of them may be of direct security interest.  I would say in some Latin American countries an average of 2-3 out of 1000-1500 files may be of conventional security interest. In the U.S. part of the reason given for the debunking and  classification was fear of disruption of emergency channels that the Soviet Union could take advantage of.

Even reviewing these old Project Blue Book files related with what may be “average” types of sightings – as normally reported worldwide – would be of scientific interest today as conventional explanations could not be found to explain away a remarkable % of them. That in itself should make them of scientific interest. That percentage varied according to how much freedom the Blue Book researchers had or how much they were expected to debunk. A fair review of the UFO cases reported could still be helpful today when we have no access to any other investigations that might be secretely accruing somewhere else.

Optimistically, in spite of this hopefully temporary setback, more events pointing towards the reality of an intelligent extraterrestrial presence will keep coming en force to change the psychological discomfort, scorn, fear and shame felt by so many of our political and cultural leaders  who prefer to remain in their comfort zones without taking a serious look at an ever-increasing pile of “anomalies” that indicate that our classical concepts about “reality” are way our of phase with that reality.