Documents / Official release

[02/20/1998 - 08/08/2000]: 24194021-20060474F-002-001-2023

· 28 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a White House email release covering February 1998 to August 2000. It is a set of Exchange mail records with attachments. One item is the President's February 19, 1998 remarks to a DNC dinner in West Orange, New Jersey, which includes a joke that young people think seeing a UFO is more likely than drawing Social Security. Other items are a joke 'Redneck Driver's License Application', an AP story about Chilca, Peru, where locals credit UFOs for the mud's powers, a Blair Witch Project article, and a Baltimore Sun article forwarded by the White House Situation Room about UFO FOIA requests to the NSA.

  • p. 21 …scam with 'The Blair Witch Projecf< By Terry Lawson Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) Asked to cite…
UFO Theorists Mining NSA Site For X-Files Page 2 of 2
Believers say what the documents don't say is most interesting.
http://classified/email/data_source/exchange/non-record/cd046/aug2000/ufo_theorists_mini... 1/5/2010
The agency hasn't added to the UFO page since its first posting two years ago, but it plans to soon,
Phillips said, especially for the most commonly requested items.
"Maybe it has nothing to do with aliens, that's a possibility," said Greenwald, of California. "But I've
never found so many documents this blacked out before, and that adds to the fascination."
The NSA apparently intercepted radio communications of an Iranian pilot who said he had temporarily
lost control of his airplane when he encountered something in the air that he couldn't identify.
To Greenwald and other enthusiasts, it comes as no surprise that so many people are perusing the
security agency's UFO documents. One batch of papers deals with an alleged "spotting" in Iran in the
1970s, which has captured the imaginations of many believers.
The documents on the Web - at http://nsa.gov/docs/efoia/released/ufo.html - shed no additional light on
this situation, which only adds to viewers' curiosity.
"The fact that they’re releasing this stuff and it's so blacked out, the theories just flurry," said John
Greenwald, who has collected UFO documents from NSA and other agencies for more than five years
and posts them on his Web site, "The Black Vault."
Agency officials said most of the UFO requests they receive ask for information about specific words
pulled from the online documents. Enthusiasts believe the agency categorizes documents under
keywords - and they just haven't hit on the right word yet.
"More people than ever are interested in this stuff," said Peter Gersten, an Arizona-based attorney and
director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. "Each year you get more and more people, especially young
people. With 'X-Files' and 'Star Wars,' it's exotic. It's entertaining. It's the greatest mystery of all time."
a letter. Now, people can use the agency's online request form to ask for documents, made even easier
with a ready-made letter template. Visitors can send in multiple requests in seconds.
Even with lists and a stack of frequently requested documents close by, agency officials say it's hard to
keep up with requests that are similar but change by a single word. Every request, no matter how similar
to a previous one must be queried again and given the same attention.
In pre-Internet times, most requests for documents with a keyword would center on popular tales such as
"Area 51," "Roswell," or "Philadelphia Experiment." Today, the keywords are more numerous,
prompting agency officials to compile lists of common ones - such as "snowbird" and "sigma" - and the
results of those searches, so they don't duplicate their efforts.

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 28 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.