On Feb. 20, 2026, the day after President Trump ordered agencies to release their UFO files, John Greenewald Jr. found that the main document server behind The Black Vault had been emptied. Greenewald has spent decades filing Freedom of Information Act requests and posting what comes back. His archive of about 3.8 million files covers UFOs, CIA projects, military reports and more. Hundreds of gigabytes were gone, and some directories had their permissions changed, along with file ownership logs, with no explanation.

Greenewald said his hosting company told him the files appeared to have been deleted, not corrupted. Publicly, he called it very oddly timed server maintenance by the host that went awry. He said on X that he didn’t fully suspect foul play, but couldn’t rule it out either.

He didn’t lose anything. Everything was backed up in secure locations, and the site was back up shortly after. His advice to other archivists: keep backups in more than one place.

The timing did the rest. Within days, headlines around the world were calling it a vanishing of UFO files hours after a disclosure order, and the story became a fixture of cover-up threads. No evidence of deliberate deletion has surfaced, and the hosting company hasn’t explained publicly what happened.