With many of us still on lockdown, if you’re like me you’ve been burning through your backlog of books that you always meant to get around to reading. In case you’re running short, you may want to order a copy of the latest book from John Greenewald jr. titled “Secrets from the Black Vault.” You may remember John from an interview he did for us last year when he was talking about the Pentagon’s secret UFO program. He’s also the owner of the indispensable website The Black Vault, where John has been collecting literally millions of declassified government documents for well over a decade on a dizzying array of subjects.

In this latest offering, Greenewald takes readers down another series of government rabbit holes, exploring a wide range of programs you might have never heard of and, frankly, that the government would probably have preferred to not tell you about. But he also gives us a fascinating and occasionally dismaying look at the process involved in obtaining all of this information. There are some subjects where Greenewald had to wait literally over a decade, filing one FOIA request after another, requesting interviews and answers, before finally getting the information he was looking for. As consumers of news, many of us likely take for granted that someone will go out there, flush out the information, and deliver it in a digestible form. John Greenewald lets you peer behind the curtain and see all of the blood, sweat and tears involved in these efforts.

So what sort of intriguing United States Government secrets will John be revealing this time? I’m not going to spoil the whole book for you (which would take forever), but I’m happy to toss out a few teasers. If you’ve sat down for a bowl of cereal at breakfast recently, did you know it’s very possible that the company that made those sugary flakes was also involved for quite a while in the development of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction? And that the same cereal company has been blamed for the supposed UFO crash at Roswell in 1947?

You’ll also learn documented details about the CIA’s mind control program. (No, that wasn’t just a movie. It really happened and John has the documents to prove it.) There’s plenty more, ranging from how the United States and the Russians adopted a an entire crowd of Nazi scientists after the Second World War to our plans to build a military base on the moon. Yes… the moon. Oh, and of course, there’s an entire section on UFOs and what the government has been doing about them.

There’s plenty more beyond that, but I’ll leave it for you to explore for yourself. I really enjoyed this book and ended up tearing through it in a couple of sittings. It might change the way you think about the American government. Or, if nothing else, you’ll become the keeper of a ton of fascinating trivia to dazzle your friends. Secrets from the Black Vault gets a hearty two thumbs up.