I first found the Black Vault when I was aboard my second ship, in 1998. At that time I was engrossed in everything related to conspiracies, secrets, and cover-ups, and accidentally stumbled upon the Black Vault. The internet was in a weird stage at this time, running almost completely unrestricted and unregulated. Computer memory averaged 128MB, dial-up was the only way to access the internet (remember Prodigy and AOL??), floppy disks were still used often, hard drives were averaged at 1GB or less, and Bill Clinton was still faithful to his wife.

The Black Vault was in its infancy stage back then, but reported to be the largest archive of information in the world. It retained this title for a very long time, but I cannot find whether this is still true today. Now it boasts over 1/2  MILLION pages of declassified government documents, acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), over 50,000 forums posts, and thousands of hours of documented footage of various strange things.

What does his site cover? *Deep Breath* Conspiracies, Government aviation projects, UFOs, Ancient civilizations, Paranormal, JFK assassination, secret technology, Area 51, Cryptozoology, Extraterrestrials, Weapons testing, and much more.

Not only was the Black Vault big, it was invented by a 17 year old kid named John Greenewald. That was well over ten years ago, and he has now expanded into a Radio Show, a Facebook style Video Source (over 2,000 hours of footage), a huge Forums, and now creating a wiki style encyclopedia.

John is now an international UFO and conspiracy icon and hero to many people. He is featured in so many blogs and websites that I stopped counting. John is an honored speaker at many functions, and is the author of several books.

I remember when the site first came out, it was so “hush hush” and controversial that many places banned his site from their browsers. Even the military had put his site on an “off limits” status for a time. I’m not sure if this is still true or not. Ironically, these types of websites are common place now, and fill every corner of the internet.  Now we are overwhelmed by paranormal “real” TV, ghost hunters, people talking to the dead, end of the world movies, aliens, and everything in between.

Even though I do not follow conspiracy theories any longer, I believe that the Black Vault deserves a place of Honor in my Blog Review because of it’s achievements, influence, and mission… to reveal those things that are kept hidden from the majority of mankind.

Thank You John Greenewald, for all the years of late night reading,

-bryan j bailey