The Barack Obama Presidential Library claims it has “3,440 pages and 26,271 electronic files” possibly related to the existence of UFOs and related phenomenon.
We know this thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by John Greenewald Jr., of The Black Vault, a clearinghouse of declassified government documents. Greenewald asked the Presidential Library for “documents and communications about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and photos and videos of Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena/Phenomenon and the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program.”
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In response to the FOIA request, the library said it had thousands of documents that might be possibly related to this request and that it would take some time to sort through it all. Interest in UFOs has risen in recent years following the release of U.S. Navy videos detailing encounters with unexampled aerial phenomenon. Last year, the Pentagon released a report claiming that not everything seen in the sky could be explained away with current science.
Obama himself is on record saying that UFOs are real. “When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” he told Reggie Watts during a 2021 appearance on The Late Show with James Corden. “But what is true is that there is footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. How they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take that seriously and try to figure out what that is.”
With thousands of documents to go through and, presumably, redact, it might be some time before Greenewald Jr. sees a proper response to his request. As is often the case with this kind of material, it’s also possible that the documents are mostly procedural and contain either nothing interesting or information we already know.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pursued the truth of UFOs relentlessly in and out of office. A former staffer of Reid’s told Politico the quest didn’t pan out. “After a while, the consensus was we really couldn’t find anything of substance. They produced reams of paperwork. After all of that, there was really nothing there that we could find.
