Did the Pentagon spread false UFO stories? We're skeptical.
The report also alleges that an Air Force colonel intentionally stoked UFO speculation at a Nevada bar in the 1980s as cover for the development of the first stealth fighter. Similarly, their sources claim that there is a 'terrestrial explanation' for a prominent incident involving UFOs and nuclear weapons.
While each of these points merits close attention, the Journal's reporting must also be scrutinized for what it omits.
Schectman and Viswanatha suggest that 'MAGA skepticism about the 'deep state'' is motivating Republican members of Congress to investigate government involvement with UFOs. Yet they make no mention of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds's (R-S.D.) bipartisan 64-page UAP Disclosure Act, which alleges that a secret government 'legacy program' has recovered UFOs and 'biological evidence of non-human intelligence.'
In a recent interview on NewsNation, Rounds confirmed that he and Schumer will reintroduce the legislation in the coming weeks. Schumer alleged on the Senate floor in December 2023 that the federal government has 'gathered a great deal of information about [UFOs] over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people' — and, per 'multiple credible sources,' with Congress as well.
Moreover, the authors omit eyebrow-raising comments from lawmakers and officials describing individuals alleging 'firsthand' knowledge of unreported UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. This includes comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), current director of the Pentagon UFO analysis office Jon Kosloski, veteran congressional staffer Kirk McConnell and former intelligence official David Grusch.
The fact that multiple high-ranking officials have claimed firsthand knowledge of secret UFO programs does not square easily with a 'bizarre hazing ritual' involving bogus 'alien projects.'
According to the Journal, Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon's UFO analysis office, uncovered broad hazing practices in which 'thousands' of Air Force officers were briefed on secret 'alien' activities over several decades. The prank apparently included requiring personnel to sign non-disclosure agreements that carried the threat of jail or execution, leaving officers 'scared to death' if they revealed the nonexistent program.
But no evidence of such systemic, widespread hazing about extraterrestrials has yet emerged. Nor can Kirkpatrick and his former office keep their stories straight. A year after supposedly discovering such extensive hazing activity, Kirkpatrick and the Pentagon claimed that longstanding allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs are the product of 'circular reporting' from a 'small group' of alien believers. Yet now, supposedly, 'thousands' of personnel were led to believe that such programs exist. Which one is it?
Kirk McConnell recently retired after serving 37 years on the congressional Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, where he held the highest, most compartmented security clearances. He was also one of the Senate's lead staffers on UFOs.
McConnell told us that he is 'confident' that he 'was never told by Kirkpatrick or anyone else from [the Pentagon's UFO office] or the Department of Defense that the Department had uncovered and documented a significant number of instances where Department of Defense officials actively and knowingly spread misinformation about UAP in order to provide cover for special access programs or to play jokes on their colleagues.'
Similarly, we know Air Force personnel who have observed UFOs, but none who have received any briefings on bogus 'alien' programs. The Pentagon's UFO analysis program, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, must clarify the scope and scale of any such hazing rituals immediately.
At the same time, an Air Force colonel disseminating UFO pictures at a Nevada bar in the 1980s, ostensibly as a cover for the then-nascent Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter program, appears to violate prohibitions on domestic influence operations by the military.
Finally, Schectman and Viswanatha report that investigators discovered a 'terrestrial explanation' for one of the better-known incidents involving UFOs and nuclear weapons. In March 1967, according to former Air Force missile and targeting officers, 10 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles shut down from alert status as security guards observed a UFO hovering above the front gate of a missile facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. The Journal's sources claim that an unannounced electromagnetic pulse test caused the 'UFO' and subsequent shutdown of the missiles.
But the government documents Schectman and Viswanatha cite in support of this supposed explanation in fact debunk it. The documents state that the 'proposal for the design, development, fabrication, and testing' of the system supposedly responsible for the Malmstrom UFO incident was not submitted until 1971, four years after the event. How could this system, which was not developed and tested until 1973, cause an incident that had occurred six years earlier?
Moreover, Schectman and Viswanatha suggest that this electromagnetic generator created the object observed hovering over the missile facility's main gate. 'When activated,' they write, 'this device, placed on a portable platform 60 feet above the facility, would gather power until it glowed, sometimes with a blinding orange light.'
Let's set aside that the system apparently had not been tested, let alone proposed, when the Malmstrom incident occurred. The notion is preposterous that such a large electrical generator, requiring 10 3,250-pound concrete braces, could be constructed just outside the front gate of a Malmstrom Air Force Base's Missile Alert Facility undetected by the armed guards that patrol the area.
Similarly, it strains credulity to suggest that an electromagnetic pulse, which disables and destroys sensitive electronic equipment, would be tested against an active nuclear missile facility at the height of the Cold War. Additional documentation cited by Schectman describes testing such destructive electrical pulses only under meticulously controlled conditions and environments — and certainly not against nuclear weapons and unsuspecting Air Force officers.
Intentionally or not, Schectman and Viswanatha's reduction of the well-documented UFO-nuclear nexus to a single 1967 incident — with a questionable 'explanation,' no less — does their readers a disservice. So does their failure to mention that the Pentagon now admits openly that it is stumped by 'several dozen' 'true anomalies' and 'really peculiar' UFO incidents.
The same unexplained phenomena perplexing the government today have been reported since at least the 1940s.
Rear Admiral (ret.) Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., is a former acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce and a Navy oceanographer. He is on the advisory boards for the Sol Foundation and the UAP Disclosure Fund. Christopher Mellon was the minority staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for intelligence. He is the chairman of the board of the UAP Disclosure Fund. Marik von Rennenkampff was an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and an appointee at the Department of Defense. He is a contributor to the Sol Foundation.
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Boston Globe
14 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
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Boston Globe
25 minutes ago
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New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Douglas Murray: Will NYC fall for the selfie-entitled Zohran Mamdani?
What do you do if something doesn't work? Why, surely you should double down even harder on the things that make it not work. Right? That seems to be the attitude of voters who decided that Zohran Mamdani was the candidate for them in the New York City mayoral race. There are plenty of excuses that can be made for how New York ever had this woeful candidate put before us. A self-professed 'democratic socialist.' You could point to the failure of the Democratic Party to put up viable and talented candidates. You might wonder at how Andrew Cuomo honestly thought that there was a way back for him in city politics. And you might blame the vanity of a man who even now seems unwilling to drop out of the race. Or you might wonder why the Democratic Party has decided to make the same mistake on the city level that it has made on the national level in putting forward tested but failed candidates instead of successful and talented ones. An American tale But in the end we have to face the fact that the present front-runner for mayor is the most woefully inadequate candidate possible. Promising the most woefully impossible agenda. On Mamdani's qualifications the facts speak for themselves. Mamdani may be presenting himself as the representative of struggling New Yorkers, but he himself is anything but. Privately schooled at the Bank Street school, he went on to study at Bowdoin College in Maine. From there he loafed around for a bit, trying to make it as a rapper before deciding to become a political activist. Truly a story of American struggle. He had the cushion of his parents, of course. Because while Mamdani would like to present himself as the voice of the voiceless, he is in fact the perfect megaphone for a type of entitled coastal elite. His father is a professor at Columbia University — of course. And it seems that his father's interest in colonialism, post-colonialism and decolonization has formed his son's political worldview. The political base that Mamdani junior has decided to appeal to is exactly the sort of person who thinks 'decolonization' is one of the big issues of our time. A couple of centuries after it had even the slightest impact on the lives of people in this country. But if you have been educated by people like Mamdani Sr. then you might well think that decolonization is the great issue of our time. Because there are empires and colonies everywhere these days, aren't there? Ugly racial politics Yet that is just the mood music. The real crux of Mamdani's campaign comes down to just two things. The first is the playing of overtly racial politics, bringing the most divisive approach to the forefront of his campaign. This comes not just in Mamdani's promise to tax white New Yorkers, or to pretend that it is white New Yorkers who somehow have the power these days (doubtless because they're all still running those darn colonies). It is also there in his appeal to communities based on his own ethnic and religious background. Not just the Muslim card, but the Ugandan immigrant card, the Asian card. He used this not just to appeal to New Yorkers from South and East Asia but to young, white, college-educated New Yorkers who like to fetishize and glamorize anyone who they think of as 'other.' It doesn't matter how little Mamdani has achieved in his life to date, or how impossible his promises like rent control are. Mamdani need only release a video of himself eating without a knife and fork for these grads to coo with appreciation. You might put this down to the TikTokization of our politics, where a relatively fresh-faced candidate can make a sound bite seem long-winded. This is politics for a post-sound bite generation, where someone's 'vibe' matters more than their actual platform. Still we can glimpse where Mamdani might still unravel. In recent days we had confirmation that Mamdani lacks basic accounting skills. His promise that as mayor he will use $140 million to fund socialist grocery stores is something he claimed was already accounted for. It turns out that the money he thought was available for his free-food scheme is private spending which he mistook for government spending. Still, who cares what is private and what is government when you're promising a socialist utopia? Anti-white tax scheme As for his claim that white people need to be taxed more, again this is pure 'decolonization' bunkum. All recent studies show other racial groups exceeding the earnings of white Americans in this country. In fact the two groups which nationwide exceed the earnings of white Americans are Asian Americans and, er, Indian Americans. I wouldn't put it past Mamdani to attack these groups as well in due course. After all, the only sectarian politicking which Mamdani is keener on than antisemitism is his anti-Indian sentiment. Mamdani is one of those sectarian politicians who is never happier than when accusing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being a 'war criminal.' Modi is one of the international leaders who Mamdani has said he would like to ban from coming to New York. But it isn't his grandstanding on the world stage that is his biggest drawback. Rather it is his incompetence and wishful thinking on the home front. After all, this city has been run by left-wing politicians for a long time. If you think the city is unequal, unfair and just begging for more left-wing policies, then why have these policies to date provided such terrible results? A sensible voter might conclude that it is because left-wing policies don't work. A naïve voter might be persuaded that it's because they haven't been tried enough, and conclude that what New York needs to thrive is for the rich to be chased out and everyone else to be given free stuff. There are 5 million voters in this city. The only way that Mamdani can win is if the only people who come out to vote are the minority of New Yorkers who are as delusional as he is.
