Activité-Paranormale

On February 20, just one day after Donald Trump issued an order to accelerate the declassification of documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrial phenomena, the main server of The Black Vault was completely wiped. The massive data loss — nearly 3.8 million files — was first reported by the Daily Mail and subsequently confirmed by several English-speaking media outlets.

The incident immediately sparked intense speculation within the UFO research community and beyond. Founded and run by John Greenewald, The Black Vault is one of the world’s largest independent repositories of declassified government documents, many obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. For more than two decades, the platform has collected, archived, and published thousands of official records concerning unidentified aerial phenomena.

In a public statement, John Greenewald said he could not entirely rule out the possibility of sabotage, but he currently favors a more mundane explanation: a failed maintenance operation carried out by the site’s hosting provider. According to the host, the deletion resulted from a “voluntary removal” caused by human error, rather than data corruption or a targeted cyberattack.

Fortunately, no permanent loss has been reported. All files were backed up on secondary servers, allowing for a rapid restoration of the site and its vast archive.

Nevertheless, the timing has raised eyebrows. The server wipe occurred less than 24 hours after the presidential announcement calling for increased transparency and faster release of classified UFO-related documents — a decision that has reignited debates surrounding secrecy and government disclosure.

While no concrete evidence currently links the two events, their close succession has fueled suspicion and revived long-standing theories of suppression. Greenewald urges caution: “The timing is certainly strange, but without solid proof, it is more responsible to treat this as a serious technical failure rather than deliberate interference.”

The episode serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of digital infrastructures, even for major independent archives — and of the intense political and media sensitivity surrounding the subject of unidentified phenomena and possible extraterrestrial life.