Air Force Colonel Gave Out Photos of Flying Saucers Near Area 51

Yahoo

08-06-2025

The Pentagon's real-life "X-Files" office has uncovered an inconvenient truth about military officials spreading UFO disinformation to unsuspecting Americans and coworkers alike.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Defense Department's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) uncovered an anecdote from an Air Force colonel who trolled people near Area 51 with doctored photos of flying saucers.
Back in 2023, the colonel in question admitted to AARO investigators that he had, some 43 years prior, given the photos to a bartender at a local pub near the classified military base. The photos went up and the incident was added to the lengthy lore surrounding the base, but as the ranking officer revealed, the whole gambit was meant to distract from a secret weapons program being developed at the massively-classified Air Force base.
In interviews with dozens of former and current officials, as well as contractors and scientists who have worked with the AARO, the WSJ learned that the Pentagon repeatedly played into conspiracy theories surrounding what the government refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — and those campaigns weren't limited to the unsuspecting public.
Perhaps the most jarring of the AARO discoveries shared with the newspaper is the suggestion that higher-ups in the Air Force would haze new commanders by telling them that they were being inducted into a secretive program called "Yankee Blue."
The phony project, according to since-retired AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick, involved the reverse-engineering of alien crafts — a key tenet of some of the more outlandish claims from UFO whistleblowers in recent years. After being told about their "induction," the officers were warned to never speak of the program again, lest they be jailed or even executed.
Multiple officers told Kirkpatrick they had never revealed what they'd been told, even to their spouses, out of fear of the retribution with which they'd been threatened. Others still didn't learn that they'd been subjected to a cruel joke until 2023, when the the DOD — which acknowledged the program's existence to the WSJ — banned the hazing ritual that had apparently been going on for decades.
Unfortunately, these shocking revelations aren't all that surprising. As much as we want to believe the truth is out there, it's far more believable that military officials would lie to the public — and to their subordinates — about alien tech than it would be for the Pentagon to actually have such artifacts in its possession.
More on UAPs: A Military Whistleblower Showed a Photo of an Allegedly Huge "Disc-Shaped" Object, But There's an Incredibly Obvious Explanation