Aresearcher dedicated to uncovering official secrets believes he may have struck the “jackpot” on classified information held by the US government about UFO encounters.

John Greenewald says he has learned that former President Barack Obama’s official archive holds more than 3,000 pages and 26,000 electronic files on UFOs and related unidentified aerial phenomena.

“If true, I am absolutely floored the Obama Presidential Library has that.”

Mr Greenewald, who runs The Black Vault website focused on declassifying government documents, requested records from the former president’s library under the the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

While the size of the tranche of data held by the library has caused excitement among UFO watchers, the records themselves won’t be released any time soon.

Mr Greenewald said in a follow-up tweet that he won’t be allowed to view any of the files, and that he’d been told it would take at least 1 years to fulfill his FOIA request.

“It took the wind right out of my sails,” he said in a tweet, and called for help from lawmakers to expedite the process.

Last year, the Pentagon released a long-awaited unclassified report into everything the Government knows about UFOs.

The intelligence report was inconclusive about the existence of UFOs.

Investigators did not find extraterrestrial links in reviewing 144 sightings of aircraft or other devices apparently flying at mysterious speeds or trajectories.

But they drew few other conclusions and instead highlighted the need for better data collection about what’s increasingly seen by Democrats and Republicans as a national security concern. 

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