The Project BlueBook Archive
Searchable Project Blue Book archive (BlueBookFiles.org)
“The UFO phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history.” — Dr. J. Allen Hynek

If you’ve ever tried to dig into Project Blue Book case files, you know the pain: thousands of scans, inconsistent filenames, and lots of “where do I even start?” energy.
So I built a thing to make it easier to explore:
It’s still very much a work in progress (and yes, there are bugs), but it’s already the easiest way I’ve found to actually research Blue Book cases without getting lost in a maze of PDFs.

What was Project Blue Book?
Project Blue Book was the U.S. Air Force’s official UFO investigation program, active from 1952 to 1969.
In simple terms: reports would come in from the public, pilots, police, radar operators, military personnel, etc., and Blue Book investigators would try to determine what happened. A lot of cases ended up as mundane explanations (aircraft, balloons, Venus, temperature inversions… the usual suspects). Some were chalked up to “insufficient information.” And a small number remained “unidentified.”
Blue Book is often remembered as a debunking effort, and honestly, that’s not wrong. It was largely designed to reduce public anxiety and close out cases with conventional explanations whenever possible.
But one of the most interesting parts of the story is the investigator who became synonymous with the entire program: Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
Hynek started out as a skeptic—brought in as a scientific consultant in part to help explain sightings away. Over time, after years of reviewing cases (including ones that didn’t fit neatly into simple explanations), his position evolved. By the end of his involvement with the subject, he became one of the strongest voices arguing that the UFO phenomenon deserved serious, scientific attention.
Why this site exists
The Blue Book records are already public and available online via the National Archives (and mirrored on sites like Fold3, Archive.org, etc.). But the problem I kept running into is that browsing and searching those sites feels slow and clunky—especially if you’re trying to search across the whole collection, follow patterns, or jump between related reports.

I wanted one place where I could search across the documents like a normal person.
So I built an archive that includes most of the Project 10073 Record Cards (the one-page “summary sheets” investigators filled out for each report), plus some other related Blue Book / UFO documents.
If you’ve never seen the cards: they usually include the date, location, witness info, what was reported, and the official explanation or conclusion. The usual stuff shows up a lot: Venus, aircraft, balloons… and of course, swamp gas 😅
What you can do on BlueBookFiles.org
Full-text search across ~6,000 documents

I ran roughly 6,000 reports through OCR so you can search the actual content (locations, dates, descriptions, weird phrases, whatever). Some scans are rough, so OCR quality varies—and the worst ones will be imperfect.
“Forgiving” search (not strict keyword-only)
Search is designed to be flexible: typo tolerance, partial matching, relevance ranking. For example, searching disk will also pull disc, and a bunch of misspellings still get picked up.
You can also search exact phrases using quotes, like:
"swamp gas"
Selectable / copyable document text
Where OCR succeeds, the text is selectable so you can copy snippets, cite something quickly, or just download the full OCR’d PDF.
Interactive map view (my favorite part)

There’s a geocoded map view for each report here:


























