About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been published online for the public view. The full records, consisting nearly 800,000 files, include peculiar experiments from the Stargate program, which has been a longtime interest of conspiracy theorists.
The archive that had previously been accessible only at the National Archives in Maryland, was released online after a continuous push from the freedom of information advocates. An advocate from the non-profit group, MuckRock, filed a lawsuit against the CIA to upload the collection online more than two years ago.
Journalist Mike Best also applied pressure to the CIA by crowd-funding more than $15,000 to visit the archives. He forced the CIA to print out the records and then publicly upload each one them.
One of the records contains documents of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state under presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as information confided to the government, such as intelligence analyses and scientific research and development papers.
Some of the unusual records from the archive are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. The documents had memos detailed on celebrity psychic performer, Uri Geller in 1973, and how he was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with accuracy, which the researchers described as a "demonstration of paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner". Other unusual records include a collection of reports on UFO sightings and the recipes for invisible ink.
Although much of the information has been publicly available since the mid-90s, it has been tremendously difficult to access. The published declassified CREST archive is now available on the CIA Library website.
