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made public for the first time. Since 2004, the governments of Brazil, Chile, France, Mexico, Russia, Uruguay, Peru, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have released once-secret files, and in 2009 even Denmark and Sweden joined the trend by releasing over 15,000 files each. However, none of these new records have changed our overall understanding of the phenomenon, beyond confirming that the same events occur around the world and that the behavior of the objects, and often of the governments responding to them, has been repeated over and over. Unfortunately, there has been little forward motion in terms of actually solving the mystery, and the acquisition of even more documents is not the have overall none new our answer. In fact, government investigators have by and large been limited by the fact that all they've been able to do so far is learn as much as possible after a single event is over. Without greater resources, not much can be done except for the filing of reports, year after year. Letters from civilians about isolated, often questionable sightings are also added to the aggregate, making up a large proportion of the released pages. Although often fascinating, government documents no longer reveal anything new, and the thousands and thousands of pages have not led to a major breakthrough in understanding. The most sensitive files—the intelligence reports that are concerned with more serious national security implications and likely deeper investigations and analysis—will not be declassified and released. No long-awaited "smoking gun" document has surfaced. I believe that a demand for the release of yet more files —even in the United States—is no longer a useful focus. It's an interesting sidetrack, but it does not speak to the heart of the problem. Undue emphasis on seeking further release of documents could even prolong the international stalemate 6 1 1 1 aoa we now face, and give governments a way out through claims that they have done their part by declassifying files or will be doing so in the near co. future. Yet the public continues to get very excited about seeing new batches of government documents about UFOs. Most recently, the release of large archives by France in 2007 and the UK in 2008, 2009, and 2010 generated a frenzy of international media coverage in America. So many people logged on to the French website its first day that it crashed. Most interesting was the announcement that about 28 percent of the French cases remain unexplained—approximately the same percentage found by Project Blue Book and the Condon report in 1968. [4] A featured 2008 piece in the New York Times by a staff reporter stationed in the UK selectively focused on a few of the silliest new documents released by the British MoD (letters written to the agency by wacky everyday people), and provided readers with the standard ridicule and blatantly biased approach traditionally employed by that noted paper. [5] Ironically, this led to the media breakthrough I had been waiting for: The New York Times published the first serious op-ed piece about UFOs in