Deliberate deceptions, propagated myths and buried secrets: how the Pentagon fabricated UFO mythology in the U.S.

For decades, the mythology surrounding UFOs awakened passion both inside and outside the United States. Many testimonies from retired military personnel, citizen videos of peculiar and strange flying objects; movies, TV shows and, especially, the secrecy of the U.S. government fueled theories about alien technology, the famous Area 51 or the belief that humanity is not alone.

Last year, during the massive "sightings" of UFOs that spread on social networks, many Republican politicians denounced the little transparency demonstrated by the federal government, further fueling the belief that the institutions are disingenuous, opaque and are, in fact, hiding what it knows about these unidentified flying objects. According to The Wall Street Journal investigation, many of these Republicans were right, the hoax did exist, though perhaps not as many thought.

This is how pop culture about UFOs was fabricated.

According to the WSJ, the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon, not only covered up information about unidentified aerial phenomena, but deliberately fabricated the myths about extraterrestrial life that began to spread widely in the 1980s. The goal? To protect top-secret strategic weapons development programs, especially top-tier spacecraft, during the Cold War and the most tense stage against the Soviet Union.

The report, written by journalists Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha, exposes an unprecedented disinformation network that dates back to the 1950s and reached unprecedented and unsuspected levels in the 1980s. According to the WSJ, one of the most emblematic cases occurred in Nevada, near Area 51, where an Air Force colonel delivered supposedly authentic photographs of flying saucers to a local bar.

The images, hung on the bar's walls, fueled UFO myths for several generations. Of course, what the locals, the sporadic customers and not even the owner of the bar did not know was that those photos had been digitally manipulated by the federal government and that that disinformation operation had a simple under-the-table objective: to distract the public's attention from the testing of stealth aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk, a plane that at the time looked, without exaggeration, like a machine from another world.

That episode, confirmed by the officer himself to the Pentagon in 2023, was just one among many, as a small team of Defense Department investigators was able to find: the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

This office, created by Congress and headed by scientist Sean Kirkpatrick, discovered that for years some military units conducted initiation rituals where new officers were "briefed" on the existence of some top-secret alien technology reverse-engineering projects. These officers, very gullible and prone to be impressed, were given images of supposed ships with anti-gravity systems and ordered not to talk, not even to their families, about the subject, due to the high confidentiality of the matter. Many not only believed the story, but some still do.

Kirkpatrick, a physicist specializing in laser vibrations and former chief scientist at the Space and Missile Intelligence Center, was recruited by call in 2022 to lead AARO. His office, which had unprecedented access to classified programs, found that many instances of disinformation were deliberate and fabricated by the Pentagon: forged documents, ambiguous reporting and, especially, a huge bureaucratic structure that hid secret programs within other secret programs.

One of AARO's most important findings was the case of Captain Robert Salas, who in 1967 was in charge of a nuclear missile silo in Montana. According to the captain, in those years, a bright flying object landed on the base he was guarding and, minutes later, all the missiles were deactivated. While this case was interpreted in reports for years as an alleged alien intervention, AARO's investigation found that it was a secret government test using electromagnetic pulse generators designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear attack without detonating a real bomb.

The electromagnetic pulses disabled guidance and control systems, exposing security flaws in the U.S. nuclear system, but personnel were never informed of the matter due to the sensitivity of the findings. However, this secret upended the life of Salas, who to this day continues to believe that he witnessed an extraterrestrial intervention.

In part, the captain is not wrong: everything he experienced that day and in the years that followed was the product of a cover-up.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in addition to hiding these details for decades, the Pentagon also intentionally omitted these findings from its 2024 public report, after the Air Force requested not to include this information that could compromise active programs, provoke internal scandals or even upend the institutions' image.

Kirkpatrick withdrew before that report was finalized.

However, consulted by the WSJ, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough confirmed that a second volume of the landmark report is planned that will include many discoveries, including evidence of falsified materials, cover-ups and the revelation of these alleged institutionalized hoaxes that got out of control.

As the report, with more details, continues to be drafted, skepticism regarding the institutions grows. This is a battle of confidence that seems lost for the federal government, which must now admit that, for years, it conducted a massive disinformation campaign against citizens of its own country to hide secret programs from them. Getting back from that looks very difficult.