John Greenewald Jr.

John Greenewald Jr. began filing Freedom of Information Act requests with U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon, at age 15 in 1996, launching what would become The Black Vault, now one of the largest privately maintained archives of declassified U.S. government documents in the world, with nearly four million pages available to the public. Over three decades Greenewald has filed more than 10,000 FOIA requests, developing an unusually deep procedural expertise in FOIA law and agency response patterns that has made his methodology influential among other researchers and journalists seeking declassified UFO and UAP-related material. His archive has repeatedly surfaced documents of genuine historical significance, including Project Blue Book case files, Cold War-era radar and intelligence reports, and, in the modern era, records obtained from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and other bodies relevant to current UAP investigations. Greenewald authored Inside the Black Vault (2019), detailing both his personal FOIA methodology and specific case findings. Unlike figures who center testimony or witness interviews, Greenewald's contribution is fundamentally documentary and infrastructural: building durable, searchable, publicly accessible archives that other researchers, journalists, and skeptics alike rely on as a comparatively neutral evidentiary baseline, distinguishing his work from more narrative-driven corners of UAP media.