CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

Location: Entirely online at the CIA website (cia.gov/readingroom). FOIA correspondence and inquiries are directed to the Information and Privacy Coordinator, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505. (CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia; the Reading Room itself is a digital public portal, not a physical research facility.)

Conditions of access to archival material:
Free and open public online access to documents previously released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Mandatory Declassification Review, and other CIA release programs. Materials are searchable via the site’s search tools and organized into collections. Documents are typically provided as PDFs and may contain redactions under applicable FOIA exemptions. No registration is required to view or download released records.

New FOIA requests can be submitted online or by mail/fax to the address above. The Electronic Reading Room is provided as a public service by the Directorate of Digital Innovation’s Information Management Services. Not every CIA record is in the Reading Room; researchers may also submit new requests for additional material.

Description of the CIA:
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the United States’ principal foreign intelligence service, responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating foreign intelligence and conducting covert action as directed. The FOIA Electronic Reading Room is an official public-access portal maintained by the Agency to make available documents released under FOIA and related declassification programs. It supports transparency by providing online access to previously classified or withheld records once they have been reviewed and cleared for release.

Description of the CIA archive generally:
The CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room is an online repository of declassified and FOIA-released CIA documents, including topical historical collections, the large CREST (CIA Records Search Tool) archive of 25-year-program records, and materials on a wide range of intelligence subjects. It serves as the primary public portal for reviewing Agency records that have been released to the public.

Description of UAP specific material:
The principal UAP/UFO resource is the “UFOs: Fact or Fiction?” collection. According to the CIA’s own description, this collection catalogues Agency information on the subject from the 1940s through the early 1990s. Most of the documents consist of CIA cables reporting unsubstantiated UFO sightings appearing in the foreign press and intra-Agency memoranda about how the Agency handled public inquiries about UFO sightings.

The collection page directs readers to the 1997 Studies in Intelligence article “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990” by Gerald K. Haines (Center for the Study of Intelligence) for the most comprehensive official historical overview available at the time of the collection’s presentation. That study, based on an Agency-wide file review ordered in late 1993 by DCI R. James Woolsey, concludes that while CIA concern over UFOs was substantial until the early 1950s (including monitoring of Air Force investigations and participation in the 1953 Robertson Panel), the Agency thereafter paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena. The review found no evidence of a direct national-security threat from the reported objects and no evidence of extraterrestrial visits. A significant portion of 1950s–1960s sightings were later assessed as related to classified high-altitude reconnaissance flights (U-2 and OXCART/A-12 programs).