John Greenewald – Eyes Only Archive

John Greenewald, born on April 17, 1981, is an American researcher who built The Black Vault, a public archive of declassified U.S. government documents obtained primarily through Freedom of Information Act requests. He filed his first FOIA request at the age of fifteen, and over the following three decades assembled a collection of more than 3,000,000 declassified records. Every document on the site is made available to the public at no cost, including records that took more than a decade to obtain from federal agencies.

Key facts

Born: 17 April 1981
Country: United States
Occupation: ufologist
Awards: FBI vexsome filer list

Origins and Family Background

Greenewald grew up in a household with direct connections to U.S. military and aerospace history. His father, a former United States Marine, worked as a welder on both the space shuttle and Mars landers. His grandfather served in the United States Navy. Those connections placed the family close to some of the most technically demanding programs in American history well before Greenewald turned his own attention to the records those programs generated.

The Black Vault: Founding and Early Constraints

Greenewald launched what would become The Black Vault in 1996, when he was fifteen years old. His first FOIA request, mailed on August 11, 1996, was for a four-page document about a 1976 UFO incident over Iran. He received the document from the Defense Intelligence Agency approximately two weeks later.

The site’s earliest infrastructure imposed severe limits. The original hosting provider, Primenet, offered free hosting but capped storage at five megabytes, a space roughly equivalent to one or two contemporary smartphone photographs. Because scanning and posting files directly was not technically possible under those conditions, Greenewald hand-typed hundreds of pages of retrieved government documents directly onto his web pages.

Publishing and Major Releases

In September 2002, at 21 years old, Greenewald published his first book, Beyond UFO Secrecy: The Story of the Black Vault’s Pursuit of the Truth, through The Black Vault imprint.

In January 2015, he uploaded 129,491 pages of Project Blue Book documentation to The Black Vault. The material covered more than 10,000 cases drawn from three Air Force UFO studies: Project Sign, which ran from 1947 to 1948; Project Grudge, which ran from 1949 to 1951; and Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969.

In January 2021, Greenewald published what the CIA described as its entire collection of UFO-related documents. The collection comprised approximately 2,780 pages of material declassified since the 1980s. He had obtained it via a CIA CD-ROM purchased in mid-2020.

Navy UAP Videos and FOIA Refusals

Following a FOIA request filed in April 2020, the U.S. Navy confirmed in September 2022 that it possessed additional unseen UAP videos. The Navy declined to release them, citing national security concerns. The confirmation itself, however, established on the record that the videos exist and remain classified.

The FBI Designation and MKUltra Episode

The FBI placed Greenewald on its internal list of so-called “vexsome” filers. He subsequently obtained the FBI’s own records describing how that designation program operates through a separate FOIA request. Those same records had been withheld from other requesters, with the FBI telling them that no such records existed.

A separate episode involving CIA records on MKUltra illustrated the friction that can attend large-scale FOIA work. When the CIA stated it could not locate certain MKUltra documents, Greenewald sent the agency a 97-page fax demonstrating that the records did exist. The CIA acknowledged the error but still charged him $425.80 for producing the remaining pages. He raised that amount through a GoFundMe campaign.

The Black Vault Radio

Greenewald hosts The Black Vault Radio, a podcast that uses the archive’s collection of more than 3,000,000 declassified government documents as a starting point for conversations with experts about government and military history.

Did you know

When Greenewald launched what would become The Black Vault in 1996, he had only five megabytes of storage space and hand-typed hundreds of pages of government documents onto web pages, because scanning and posting files directly was not technically possible for him at the time. (cjr.org)
Greenewald’s very first FOIA request, mailed on August 11, 1996, was for a four-page document about a 1976 UFO incident over Iran. He received the exact same document from the Defense Intelligence Agency about two weeks later, which ignited his decades-long archival career. (cjr.org)
Greenewald’s father, a former Marine, worked as a welder on both the space shuttle and Mars landers, giving the family a direct personal connection to America’s most celebrated aerospace programs before John turned his attention to government secrecy. (cjr.org)
When Greenewald sent a 97-page fax to the CIA proving the existence of MKUltra documents the agency claimed it could not find, the CIA admitted its mistake but still charged him $425.80 for the remaining pages. He raised the money through a GoFundMe campaign. (cjr.org)
The Black Vault’s original hosting provider in 1996 was Primenet, a service that offered free hosting but capped users at five megabytes of storage, a constraint so tight it equals roughly one or two contemporary smartphone photographs. (cjr.org)

Data sources

Data updated: 2026-10-27