The CIA’s had a rough couple of months. While the release of The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, first as a grainy pdf and soon after as a book (published by this very house) garnered headlines, one other major story has flown under the radar.

You could be forgiven for missing one of the most significant breaks of the year, and the young century: John Greenewald’s online publication of the CIA’s Project Blue Book in a fully searchable digital format.

From the late 40s, when it was known as Project Sign, till 1967, Blue Book kept detailed records on reports of strange flying cigars, dancing lights and claims of abduction. All of these documents, culled from local newspapers and military reports, were collected and classified by the agency, in an attempt to determine their veracity and evaluate any potential threat to national security that they might present. Ultimately, the Agency’s extraterrestrial obsession ran its course, and the program was shut down, having, somehow, determined once an for all that it wasn’t really a national security issue.

This is old hat to anyone who watched too many seasons of the X-Files. Or Galactica1980. Or Twin Peaks. It’s also old hat to anyone who was cool enough to be wading through the National Archive’s microfilm collection after 2008, when the files were originally declassified. But now anyone with access to the world wide web and a PDF reader can freely explore the cornucopia of weirdness available on Greenewald’s Black Vault website.

While much of the content is wrapped in obscure technical jargon (Air Force Weather Reports which have a strange and hypnotic allure), there are bizarre moments of beauty, like this excerpt from a Chattanooga newspaper article, which reads like something out of DeLillo:

“Mrs. [REDACTED] Drive, said she looked up from a car parked near the intersection of Brainerd and Airport roads and saw the sunlight of yesterday afternoon reflected on a dozen round-shaped silvery things like parachutes. She said they were flying in three V’s. She said she later inquired at the airport and was told no flight of that kind and communicated with the field.”

Or, these basically incomprehensible photographs of (presumably) a flying saucer in Newfoundland.

Or this report from Leibnitz, Austria:

THE VIENNA NEWSPAPER WIENER MONTAG TODAY PUBLISHED A FULL FRONT-PAGE PICTURE OF A WHITE-GLOWING OBJECT AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND AND IDENTIFIED IT AS A REAL FLYING SAUCER—THE MOST SENSATIONAL PHOTOGRAPH OF OUR CENTURY.

THE NEWSPAPER SAID [REDADCTED], 36, ITS PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE STYRIA PROVINCE, TOOK THE PICTURE LAST WEDNE DAY [sic]. IT QUOTED [REDADCTED] AS SAYING THE OBJECT HOVERED FOR ABOUT 10 SECONDS OVER A WOODED AREA ABOUT 45 FEET IN THE AIR. HE SAID HE COULD FEEL HEAT FROM IT.

‘IT LOOKED LIKE A WHITE-GLOWING SPIDER,’ [REDADCTED] SAID.

Of course the question hangs like a white-glowing spider over the whole mess: Why? Why bother? Why spend millions of dollars and man-hours, tracking what are from our vantage point obviously absurd claims of extraterrestrial encounters?

With the CIA’s recent admission that secret spy plane flights were in large part responsible for many “UFO” sightings of the 50’s and 60’s, it is tempting to assume that the whole apparatus was a red herring, a theatrical distraction befitting the Cold War-era. Perhaps it was a hysterical symptom of the paranoia that had wormed its way into the heart of Red Scare America. Or perhaps this is just the way that our intelligence community works. Maybe this is exactly the sort of document that the whole apparatus is designed to produce: distracting, inciting, infinite.

Grayson Clary puts it clearly in his article “A Guide to Federal Surrealism,” which appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books last week: “Deep state literature never records the secret itself. Not really. The works are all Janus-faced ritual texts, spells that by turns summon and banish the classified from the corner of your eye.” The piece is worth reading in its entirety, and the Blue Book makes a fitting, comic addition to Clary’s bibliography, which includes The Warren Report, Style Manual & Writer’s Guide for Intelligence Publications, The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, and, of course, The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.

The truth is out there, folks. Get diggin’.