Documents / Official release
This Clinton Library release of Clinton Presidential Records covers the National Security Council email folder labeled Area 51, dated September 15, 1997 to November 3, 2000. It lists withdrawn emails, most held back for national security or privacy reasons. Some emails were released. They include November 1997 talking points on the President renewing a classified information exemption for the Air Force site near Groom Lake, Nevada, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Other released items are news clippings about Lake Havasu grass circles and UFO requests to the NSA.
“Díaz”2 pages
Page 2 of 2 n h Believers say what the documents don't say is most interesting. 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. 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. "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 NS A 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. "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." 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. 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." In pre-Intemet 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. UFO Theorists Mining NSA Site For X-Files * 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. A *
Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 37 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.