Greenwald operates a website called the "Black Vault," where he has made the files available in searchable PDF format

The release comes less than six months before the government's official UFO report which was inserted into the COVID-19 omnibus bill, and includes reports that date back to the 1980s, according to Greenwald - who scanned everything by hand in order to create searchable PDFs.

"Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA," he told Motherboard in an email. "It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time."

According to a blog announcing the archive, the CIA created a CD-ROM containing previously released records as well as those the Black Vault was attempting to unseal. To ensure the Black Vault has as complete a record of CIA documents as possible available, it purchased this CD-ROM in mid-2020. 

The Black Vault blog notes that the CIA claims that this represents all its documents on the file, but there may be no way to verify that and other documents may be out there. -Vice

"Researchers and curious minds alike prefer simplicity and accessibility when they look at data dumps such as these," said Greenwald, adding: "The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner. They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a "search" tool.  In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose."