The U.S. government hasn’t been covering up alien visitation of Earth. It has been covering up its own use of UFO lore to keep military secrets hidden.
The U.S. government hasn’t been covering up alien visitation of Earth. It has been covering up its own use of UFO lore to keep military secrets hidden.
A Pentagon team tasked with investigating various conspiracy theories about a secret military program to study UFOs found that the real source of the rumors wasn’t out of this world, but considerably closer to home. The U.S. military intentionally fabricated evidence of extraterrestrial encounters to provide cover for real secret weapons programs. The government targeted its own citizens with disinformation.
A bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal highlights one example. An Air Force colonel gave photos of what seemed to be alien craft to the owner of a bar near the (in)famous Area 51. There was just one problem: The photos were doctored, as the Journal relates he confessed to Pentagon investigators in 2023. His actual intention: to hide the development of top secret, strategically essential, otherworldly seeming but in fact quite earthly aircraft being developed there. To keep these craft secret from the prying eyes of locals, it was better to make them think that they “came from Andromeda,” as the Journal put it.
The Journal based its report on interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. government officials and on thousands of pages of documents. It found that military officers and intelligence officials routinely used extraterrestrials as a smokescreen for real secret weapons — and, occasionally, as a joke. The Pentagon allegedly omitted key facts about this from a 2024 public report to Congress to avoid embarrassment.
Government agents even used UFO lore as a tool to weed out leakers and obscure classified aviation developments. This information bears out the case I made two years ago while criticizing conservative media figures and politicians for embracing UFO claims.
Back then, noted “whistleblower” and decorated combat veteran David Grusch testified to Congress and media outlets about a highly bizarre, decades-long conspiracy by the U.S. government to cover up crashed UFOs. He told tales ranging from Benito Mussolini orchestrating an alien cover-up to a secret Pentagon effort against Russia and China to recover extraterrestrial technology. It seemed right out of a video game.
It turns out that the U.S. government fabricated alien-technology claims and deliberately allowed “rumors to fester” to conceal actual classified programs, and as a hazing ritual to test the loyalty of new agents. Grusch did not personally leak information but instead followed proper channels under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 2021. He then saw his claims and identity promptly leaked.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico were all offered Grusch’s story but declined to publish it, citing the need for more time to verify the claims. Most of the confirmation comes from sources who wished to remain anonymous or spoke under a pseudonym.
For once, the mainstream media were right. There’s a “long history of U.S. government agencies explicitly manufacturing vast amounts of evidence to abuse individuals’ interest in UFOs to uncover potential leakers and moles,” as I wrote two years ago.
The Journal offered one particularly egregious example. A combination of running joke and hazing ritual among U.S. Air Force officers centered around a fake program dubbed Yankee Blue, allegedly aimed at reverse-engineering alien antigravity technology. New officers were told they’d be joining the program and shown doctored evidence, then threatened with jail or execution if they revealed anything.
Many simply never learned that the program was fake. It’s likely that Grusch has simply fallen for similar subterfuge. He served as an Air Force intelligence officer during the hazing ritual’s heyday. The practice reportedly ceased only in spring 2023. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that this mix of loyalty test and office hazing makes a lot more sense as an explanation than the supposed visitation of Earth by alien craft. This ritual apparently lasted for decades and resulted in hundreds of people signing nondisclosure agreements who sincerely believed that the UFO info was real.
The Journal also reported that UFOs were used as a distraction from a vulnerability in American nuclear capabilities to electromagnetic pulses. UFO rumors were intended to prevent the Soviet Union from discovering this very real vulnerability in America’s strategic deterrent.
It’s more evidence for my long-running thesis in these pages that everyone should calm down and accept that UFOs aren’t aliens.
As I wrote two years ago:
If you were the U.S. government, it’d be very low-cost and high-reward to probe for moles by distributing fictional evidence of how advanced alien technology was obtained. If the recipient didn’t disclose the information, that person could logically be trusted. If he illegally leaked it, he could be incarcerated. If they leaked it in the very explicitly legal manner Grusch has, adversaries of America may credibly believe that the DoD has access to alien technology orders of magnitude more powerful than the best your country can muster. It’s a win-win-win.
Something like this clearly happened. Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a devout UFO believer, helped appoint others with similar beliefs to powerful positions in the Pentagon and Intelligence community. As I’ve noted, it’s easy for such people to interpret new evidence to fit their preconceptions. Many of them are currently approaching retirement.
When people who already believe in aliens hear secretive reports about the Air Force “recovering crashed craft fragments,” their first thought isn’t likely to be that it’s a Russian aircraft shot down by Ukraine.
Stoking this sort of belief, moreover, wouldn’t be out of character for the U.S. government. One of the most tragic and well-documented cases, one that bears an eerie similarity to Grusch’s, is that of veteran, government contractor, and physicist Paul Bennewitz.
Bennewitz, who lived near Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, noticed colored lights in the sky and intercepted unusual radio signals. He assumed he had stumbled onto an experimental aircraft and took his evidence to the military.
Rather than correct him, the military encouraged him to believe he’d discovered an alien UFO. It even funded his “research.” Over time, Bennewitz became convinced that aliens were preparing an invasion via underground bases on Earth.
By the government’s own admission, Bennewitz was literally driven to insanity after U.S. agents made him the “object of a program of psychological destabilization” to convince him of an imminent alien invasion to distract him from evidence of real secret programs he’d obtained.
Bennewitz ended up committed to a psychiatric facility and spent the last quarter century as a paranoid wreck. The signals he intercepted had been deliberately sent by the NSA to mislead him. His computer was even swapped out to ensure that he “properly” decoded the messages.
Rather than tell Bennewitz the truth that his recordings showed experimental aircraft, the Air Force actively fed him disinformation.
One thing is true: The government has been concealing the truth. But it’s not covering up alien visitation of Earth. It’s covering up its own use of UFOs as a convenient cover story for real national security interests.