You Can Now Search Through 12 Million Pages Of Declassified CIA Files Online

The mass of documents, news clippings, letters, and reports cover a whole host of bizarre and fascinating subjects spanning from the 1940s onwards. A cursory glance shows files on subjects ranging from UFO sightings, spies' recipes for invisible ink, investigations into celebrity "psychic" Uri Geller’s “paranormal perception”, and even documents about the infamous behavior control project MK-Ultra.

You can view the full 930,000+ documents here in the CIA Reading Room, complete with its own internal search bar.

Making all this data and information public holds a huge amount of potential for researchers, academics, scientists, journalists, nerds, the general public, and – no doubt – conspiracy theorists.

^{Excerpt from the Uri Geller files. CIA Library}

The documents have technically been publically available from 1995 onwards, however, they were previously only available on four computers in a back room of the National Archives in Maryland between the hours of 9am and 4.30pm. The CIA was pushed into making the documents available to the wider public following a lawsuit from the nonprofit news organization MuckRock in 2014. In 2015, the organization was told they could have the database delivered on 1,200 compact discs in six years time at a price of $108,000. 

It might have taken some time and effort, but all that information and knowledge is now just a few clicks away.