UFOs, Laser Weapons, "Screwballs" in CIA Document Dump

Okay, it ain't the "family jewels" -- the CIA's documents, detailing Cold War assassination plots, kidnappings, and "behavior modification experiments." But, "very quietly, the Agency has put literally thousands of documents online on their website," *Entropic Memes *points out. Many of them are formerly classified. And they cover everything from spy satellites to "screwballs" to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There's no index or anything, so "finding stuff on their website can be really hit and miss," adds Entropic Memes. "But it’s an entertaining way to spend a few hours, and you never know what you might stumble across." Like this 1990 note, about a "UFO over Murmansk," for instance. Or this report, of an agent code-named "YOGA."

Even within these declassified documents, mysteries remain. In many papers -- like this one from 1987, on "Soviet Tactical Laser Weapons" -- paragraph after paragraph is blacked out. Others are even more tantalizing. A 1976 cable is cut down to a lone sentence: "23 Sept XXXXXXXXX with personal request to investigate UFO sighted Morocco." A two-page document is redacted to a single paragraph:

One one occasion XXXX asked if the U.S. forecast has even bothered with U.F.O. sightings. He explained that one time the XXXXXXXXX and the XXX in particular, has been plagued with calls and questions about the U.F.O. sightings. He said that some of their scientific balloon flights had prompted some of them. Now, he said, he never gets these calls anymore and half joking surmised that someone must have made a political decision that they were not to be sighted anymore.