Rob Mercer and the Black Vault

I learned this morning (February 19) that many of the documents from the Project Blue Book days located by Rob Mercer through some very nice detective work, can now be accessed at the Black Vault, hosted by John Greenewald. As most of you know, the Black Vault is a huge site of documents recovered through FOIA

John Greenewald
(Photo copyright by Kevin Randle)

requests filed by John, and other documents provided by those who had recovered them in the past… which is to say, I suppose, that it is a huge sharing site that provides an important feature for those of us interested in UFOs including information on the people involved and what the government has learned and stored.

Rob Mercer had discovered that a box of Blue Book material was for sale on Craig’s List and bought it. Turned out it was a treasure trove of important information that had originally belonged to Carmon Marano, one of the last officers who worked at Blue Book. You can learn more about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/10/boxes-of-blue-book-material-on-craigs.html

And you can listen to my interview with Rob Mercer here:

https://youtu.be/FItr36JIf48

And you can listen to Carmon Marano talk about his time at Project Blue Book and how he obtained what turned out to be boxes of the UFO related material here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyz0ZAvhv7g

Or read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/11/x-zone-broadcast-network-former-blue.html

I did ask Rob how the material had ended up at the Black Vault and he told me (well, answered an email):

I joined up with John last November to help with his UFO investigations team.  He knew about my Blue Book find and told me I could share some on his site if I wanted.  I had been sharing a few of them on my site for a few years, but never really got them on there the way I wanted because of the volume.  I had been wanting to put a collection together called "From the Desk of Project Blue Book" 

for some time, because that’s pretty much what it is.  I still have the case files to scan and put on, along with slides correspondences and some other miscellaneous papers. 

      For the last several weeks I have been going through them again and have found a few items that did not make it into Blue Books archives as far as reports. One item that comes to mind is a three page hand written letter from a gentleman in 1969, that witnessed an event in the 1920s in Phoenix Arizona. It is on the Black Vault.

http://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/desks-project-blue-book-sighting-report-phoenix-arizona-late-1920s/

As you can see, there is more to be scanned and digitized. As anyone who has scanned almost anything knows, it can be a long and involved process, but Rob has been working toward that end. Now, some of it can be found and viewed by those interested in it.

As a side note, I found that the information Rob had on the Socorro UFO sighting to be useful in my research and in the writing of my book, Encounter in the Desert which was published last October. For those interested, it can be found in your local bookstore and online at Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Encounter-Desert-Randle-Kevin-ebook/dp/B072MQGD9K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1519084216&sr=1-1&keywords=Kevin+Randle