Pentagon Has Been Pushing Americans to Believe in UFOs for Decades, New Report Finds

Gizmodo

11-06-2025

UFOs have been back in the news a lot lately, and it may be the case that the government wants it that way. Last week, the Wall Street Journal published the first of a two-part series that probes the ways in which the Defense Department has been responsible for creating and fostering the UFO mythology in America.
'The article shows that the government has, at various points over the years, purposefully sown disinformation about UFOs, in an effort to make Americans believe in little green men. This news comes as the result of an internal investigation by Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was specifically set up within the Pentagon to investigate UFO sightings. Kirkpatrick, who spoke with the Journal, says he's found evidence that the government 'fabricated evidence of alien technology' in an effort to distract from real weapons programs being carried out by the government in secret.
The Journal frames its findings as a 'stunning new twist in the story of America's cultural obsession with UFOs' but, while the story's specific anecdotes are certainly new and quite interesting, its broader findings are not, nor are they particularly stunning. Instead, they parrot what many critics of the UFO narrative have long said: that the UFO mythos grew out of a disinformation campaign created by shadowy defense officials to obscure more terrestrial secrets about America's national security community.
Last year, we wrote a story with very much the same takeaway, having interviewed one prominent UFO critic, Mark Pilkington, who released a documentary in 2014 arguing that the government used disinformation specialists to lie to Americans and thus hide its covert activities.
Still, the Journal's investigation offers fresh details about a number of bizarre incidents that will surely tantalize the most avid UFO researchers. In particular, one episode revealed by Kirkpatrick's investigation involves a UFO sighting at a nuclear bunker that took place in 1967, and seems to show that the government's disinformation efforts were not merely aimed at members of the public but also its own staff. Robert Salas, a now 84-year-old former Air Force captain, says that his former job was to man the bunker, which would have launched a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in the event of a nuclear war. One night, Salas says that a 'glowing reddish-orange oval' was seen hovering over the front gate of the facility by the building's guard. Not long afterwards, Salas discovered that the missiles at the facility had mysteriously been disabled.
What had happened? Had aliens managed to disable the base's nuclear capabilities? The Journal notes that a less supernatural—if still quite crazy—explanation for the episode may exist:
Kirkpatrick's team dug into the story and discovered a terrestrial explanation. The barriers of concrete and steel surrounding America's nuclear missiles were thick enough to give them a chance if hit first by a Soviet strike. But scientists at the time feared the intense storm of electromagnetic waves generated by a nuclear detonation might render the hardware needed to launch a counterstrike unusable.
To test this vulnerability, the Air Force developed an exotic electromagnetic generator that simulated this pulse of disruptive energy without the need to detonate a nuclear weapon. When activated, this device, placed on a portable platform 60 feet above the facility, would gather power until it glowed, sometimes with a blinding orange light. It would then fire a burst of energy that could resemble lightning.
Another intriguing anecdote that is shared in the report involves a bizarre custom that was inflicted upon newly inducted members of highly secretive government programs. Those inductees would be handed a picture of a UFO, Kirkpatrick found:
For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force's most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle. The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary's office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.
Officials who spoke with the newspaper dubbed this practice a 'hazing ritual' that spun out of control, but, like most things associated with the UFO phenomenon, it's easy to find a different interpretation of events. Was this really a 'hazing ritual'? Or was it part of an internal disinformation campaign designed to sow confusion and maintain cover for those secret programs, even within the programs themselves? Frankly, there's just no way to tell.
Similarly, there's no way to tell whether the Journal's story hasn't been futzed with in some similar way. The simple truth is that, when it comes to UFOs, it's impossible to trust anything that comes out of the mouth of a government or ex-government official. You're better off just giving up on trying to find the truth of the matter, which is, of course, exactly what the government wants.