Executive Order 12958 created new standards for the process of identifying and protecting classified information, and led to an unprecedented effort to declassify millions of pages from the U.S. diplomatic and national security history. In 1995, United States President William J. Clinton signed this Executive Order. As of 2002, this policy has resulted in the declassification of what were 800 million pages of historically valuable records, with the potential of hundreds of millions more being declassified in the near future. Clinton's White House Chief of Staff, John Podesta, was an important influence in this process.
One outcome of this change in policy is the government's 1995 admission of its two-decade-plus involvement in funding highly-classified, special access programs in remote viewing (RV).
This effort also involved the late Laurance Rockefeller and also focused on the classified UFO records that Clinton wanted declassified. Clinton's interest in UFOs is explored in a book by Webster Hubbell titled Friends In High Places. Hubbell was Janet Reno's Assistant Attorney General and reveals that he was asked by Clinton, the newly-elected President at the time, to learn everything he could about who killed John F. Kennedy and about UFOs. Later, on November 30, 1995, while visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland, Clinton made a comment in a humorous tone, about the controversial Roswell UFO incident:
I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know. —Bill Clinton,EO 12958 was amended and effectively replaced by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, in Executive Order 13292 (text). EO 13292 has itself since revoked and replaced. The current EO in effect for classified information is Executive Order 13526 (text).
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