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How False UFO Stories Were Created - Sometimes Deliberately - by the US Military

Slashdot
3 months 1 week ago
Last year's Pentagon report reviewing UFO reports "left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation." The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the colonel was on a mission — of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda. That's not the only example. The Journal spoke to Robert Salas, now 84, who in 1967 was a 26-year-old Air Force captain "sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana." Suddenly all 10 missiles were disabled after reports of "a glowing reddish-orange oval was hovering over the front gate... The next morning a helicopter was waiting to take Salas back to base. Once there he was ordered: Never discuss the incident." 58 years later, the Journal reports.... 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... But any public leak of the tests at the time would have allowed Russia to know that America's nuclear arsenal could be disabled in a first strike. The witnesses were kept in the dark. To this day Salas believes he was party to an intergalactic intervention to stop nuclear war which the government has tried to hide. "We were never briefed on the activities that were going on, the Air Force shut us out of any information," Salas tells the Journal. But it's not just secrecy. Some military men were told directly that they were working on alien technology, according to Pentagon investigator Sean Kirkpatrick: A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick's investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses. It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual. 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... Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates, whether as some type of loyalty test, a more deliberate attempt to deceive or something else. After that 2023 discovery, Kirkpatrick's deputy briefed President Joe Biden's director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, who was stunned... "We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real." The article also notes that rep9rts of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon "skyrocketed" after May of 2023 — but that "Many pilot accounts of floating orbs were actually reflections of the sun from Starlink satellites, investigators found."

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