The CIA has released around 13 million pages of declassified documents online in a much more easily accessible form, following a lawsuit and other pressure:
Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner".
[...] While much of the information has been technically publicly available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access. The records were only available on four physical computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day. A non-profit freedom of information group, MuckRock, sued the CIA to force it to upload the collection, in a process which took more than two years.
At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. "By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online," Best wrote in a blog post. In November, the CIA announced it would publish the material, and the entire declassified CREST archive is now available on the CIA Library website.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @12:00PM
So, the archives contain no new material. These archives were already available and are, therefore, quite useless. The CIA will not release inconvenient material, and will "accidentally" lose documents and videos they don't want you to see.
The real bits will never be released, like the entry point into the earth's core at the south pole. Or the aliens they are currently in contact with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @12:30PM
Yeah, it was an ingenious move to call "Stargate Project" a project completely unrelated to the Stargate. Fortunately the investigative Hollywood studios found out anyway and filmed documentaries. ;-)
(Score: 4, Funny) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday January 20 2017, @01:36PM
I'm hoping this means a new season of Wormhole X-Treme!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:30PM
Since a couple of years ago when the navy was caught red-handed financing Hollywood productions, a lot of people started considering the following pattern at least as far as Stargate was concerned:
1. The government routinely financed production companies that will scan through circulated scripts in search for keywords and nationalistic, pro-military patriotic themes.
2. Concurrently, popular sites frequented by script writers and conspiracy theory nut-jobs would get flooded with all manner of nonsense and half-truths as part of the already publicized misinformation campaigns.
3. At some point, some guy wrote a script gluing up a few of the popular conspiracy theories using leaked & released program names and the likes.
4. The script was read by the production company, some improvements were suggested and an extremely well funded film called Stargate ended up being shot. A series was to follow...
Of course, this is all just another conspiracy theory. Still, worth mentioning considering even the Stargate script writers ended up parodying the notion...
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday January 20 2017, @12:45PM
You should invest in the tinfoil production business, with a side-investment in hat-folding.
OTOH, all that is inconvenient for too many will get destroyed, of course, unless they were too stupid to make copies of copies. Please do not underestimate the left-hand does not know right-hand effect in large organizations. It may take ages, but some things still come out when the stakeholders are dead and the followup'ers have no clue.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday January 20 2017, @01:03PM
> [...] when the stakeholders are dead and the followup'ers have no clue.
George Bush, formerly of the CIA, has fallen ill. Maybe a few more documents about the JFK assassination will come out soon.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bush_Sr,_JFK_-_J_Edgar_Hoover_memo_2.jpg [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:38PM
Not new, but previously to read anything in the archive one had to drive to [Maryland?] and hang out with a bunch of armed spooks while they let you fire up the microfiche viewer in the sub basement, and find the film located in the bottom of a locked file cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @01:54PM
Oh, yeah, I forgot about the Archives "armed spooks"! The secret security force of the National Archives; don't let that librarian-like visage fool you, they are really an elite ninja-trained force that will slit their grandma's throat without a second thought, out defending or covering up information (blah blah blah, I didn't read that Brown book nor see the Nicholas Cage movie, whatever the hell that was about - though I did see various spoofs on it, like in American Dad or Family Guy).
The CIA paranormal research has been widely written about since the 70s when the US and the Soviets were looking into it to get any edge on the other they could. For starters, read the many works by James Randi that talk about it and go from there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:15PM
You sounded like you were only a moderate idiot until you invoked James Randi... now I'm guessing you're probably as much a charlatan as he.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @04:17PM
Randi admitted he was a charlatan. And magician. He explicitly told you up front where he was coming from. Not so much with Geller and Putoff and Targ and all the REAL charlatans who stole (or are still stealing).
Ain't it funny how Geller nor anyone else could ever bend Randi's spoon? Even when offered a million dollars as incentive?
I'd love to be the kind of charlatan as Randi, but alas I don't have the charisma and quick eye as he did. The best I can do is just call out the bullshit on the interwebs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday January 20 2017, @06:28PM
Randi is a charlatan? You mean, the guy that goes around proving every other psychic he can get his hands on is a fake?
Go and read his Wikipedia page for 5 whole seconds.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @04:33PM
Uri Geller is a practiced con artist. If he pulled off an interesting ESP feat in front of CIA observers, there was probably undetected trickery involved.