How False UFO Stories Were Created - Sometimes Deliberately - by the US Military (msn.com) 57
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 reports 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."
"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 reports 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."
You can't fool me... (Score:5, Informative)
I know what really happened: Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket, and refracted light from Venus. It wasn't an alien ship, it was just an all natural flashy thing.
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I know what really happened: Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket, and refracted light from Venus. It wasn't an alien ship, it was just an all natural flashy thing.
Even the former leader of your United States of America, James Earl Carter Jr., thought he saw a UFO once. But it's been proven he only saw the planet Venus.
But Jimmy Carter was at the Battle of the Rabbit ! (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The true believrs won't believe this (Score:3)
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We know they lie, and justify it to themselves in various ways.
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They're lying about lying! Now some people will say, what if they're lying about lying about lying, but I know that's not the case. If anything they're lying about lying about lying about lying!
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You're lying.
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Is it really a good thing to make the concept of over-the-top paranoia succinct?
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Indeed, it is absolutely true that our government lies to us. A lot.
Of course, that still doesn't mean that intelligent space-aliens exist, let alone have ever visited our planet. We still need compelling evidence in favor of the claim, which we don't have, before the claim becomes believable.
Re: The true believrs won't believe this (Score:3)
And you have to ask yourself, "which is more plausible? That the Air Force made up stories to cover for a program we know they were running? Or that aliens traveled an unimaginable distance using unimaginable technology, only to let themselves be captured?"
Re: The true believrs won't believe this (Score:2)
On a serious note (Score:2)
If government had actual radar contacts with foo fighters that moved in arbitrary directions at high rates of speed, they might want people to stop asking questions until the research divisions could come up with some way of countering the perceived threat.
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Or until they fixed the artifact filters in their new radars.
Bob Lazar comes to mind (Score:2)
The U.S. protected top national security secrets a bit differently back in the day. I suspect they initially fooled Mr. Lazar, but he wised-up somewhere along the way and has been milking this thing for all its worth.
You'll never know for sure (Score:2)
You've got toilet paper hanging out the back of your pants.
Creating doubt thru misinformation keeps smart people from figuring things out and from being believed.
These are standard techniques of people that want to stay hidden.
Peering behind certain curtains means suspending disbelief... you can't do that.
You can't. It's easy to mislead logical people with a bit of misinformation that "makes sense".
Exactly what people trying to hide ufos would say (Score:2)
Mors Est Scientia (Score:2)
Beware Project Majestic! Beware the Program!
THE GOVERNMENT! (Score:2)
People who say the government this and the government that are hilarious. As if the people who work in the military and so on are monolithic. You have millions of people with their orders, jobs, politics, policies interpretations, biases, mistakes, and more.
Stargate SG1 and plausible deniability (Score:3)
If you take an even wider perspective... (Score:2, Insightful)
So what's that have to do with the government? Well it turns out it costs a lot of money to be an
Bigelow [Re:If you take an even wider perspect...] (Score:3)
Before the UFO grifter bullshit, Robert Bigelow was the owner of a "private aerospace company". Every single penny that this guy ever made, came from government contracts.
Nope. Bigelow's fortune came from the fact that he owned the hotel chain "Budget Suites of America."
Taxpayers created Robert Bigelow via NASA and Pentagon contracts.
Nope. He did found an aerospace company, "Bigelow Aerospace," with the stated objective to develop technologies for a hotel in space, but it had only a trivial amount of NASA funding ( a $17.8 million contract to fly a module to the International Space Station), and and no Pentagon contracts. The company shut down years ago.
Basically, he's a slightly-nutty rich guy who played in UFOs and aerospace with no pa
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Silly rabbit! Facts won’t get you voted up!
To get points, blame THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT and RON FUCKING DESANTIS.
Or mention PUTIN SUPER SPY TRUMP, INCOMPETENT MUSK, and SNEAKY VANCE.
Understood?
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Honestly, whatever Bigelow the person is like, I always did think they were onto something with the expandable modules. It at least partly addressed the fundamental problem with the ISS, which was that it was assembled from rigid modules that had to fit into the cargo bay of the space shuttle (or rockets in general) which basically meant long and thin. Consider that Skylab was 71 tons and had an internal volume of 361 cubic meters and the ISS is 420 tons and has an internal volume of 1000 cubic meters. So t
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I'm still disappointed that inflatable space tech got forgotten, it had a lot of potential.
It's been staring at us all along (Score:4, Informative)
It's all so confusing (Score:2)
A friend and I had a very terrifying experience with "something" very close hovering above us in 1980 when we were 12 years old. It scared the living hell out of us. No one believed us until the local news papers started reporting similar reports around the surrounding counties a few weeks later. This was in 1980, no drones, very few bright satellites. What was it? No idea. This new wave of UFO and UAP reporting has me very, very skeptical. But what in the hell did we see back in 1980? It's one of those mom
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Which seems likely to happen. If you read the comments here, it seems that a lot of people have firm convictions about things they often don't know much about.
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I'm not religious, so I don't believe in a god(s). I'm not a UFO believer either. Proof, hard solid proof, is needed for me to believe in something. What we saw that night defies everything I can possibly think of, and I have thought about it a lot over the years. The incident didn't convince me of UFOs or aliens though because I have no proof to provide, just my word that something unexplainable was witnessed. It's so easy today to fake UFO and UAP footage and the irony is everyone is carrying around a cam
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I gave a long post on this above, probably overdoing it a bit. I short, you probably did witness something and probably something very interesting. Probably not a UFO though. Experiences like that tend to be brief and also very hard to describe because people tend to have no idea what they are looking at while it happens which makes it hard to remember or describe detail. So descriptions tend to be very vague among some people. Among others, details are very specific, but basically made up. When I say made
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Next to my friend's house is an open field, approximately 200ftx200ft. Beyond the north and east sides of the field is a gully that goes down approximately 100ft. The north and east sides of the field are also ringed with very large old trees. It was around 6:30pm to 7:00pm on a November night and dark as the sun had already set (northern Ohio). We were dressed in our winter coats as it was cold too. We were standing on the south edge of the field by his house. A sudden intense bright white light began to s
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Sorry, Slashdot has not been notifying me of reply posts again. So, it doesn't sound like you saw a natural phenomenon. It certainly sounds like some sort of flying vehicle and some sort of spotlight (possibly with a UV component by the sound of it) seen through misty air (which would not be that surprising in November). So it sounds like you definitely had an experience and the term UFO applies (or UAP these days I guess). It does not seem like extraterrestrials would be required for it though. The wind co
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I added a description of the incident above. Rationally, I would think it was man-made as well. But, if it was, it was something well beyond what the public at the time knew of our capabilities.
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Your experience certainly could have been of something real. Hard to say what of course. It's not like lighter than air craft are not a thing. Hot air balloons, helium, hydrogen, etc. It's also not like people have not made them in the shape of traditional "hubcap" UFOs or other spacecraft in the past with the specific event of buzzing people with them and making them think they have seen a UFO. Also, it's not as if there are not a lot more ways that might not be immediately obvious. Any decent magician/ill
Things like this are the root (Score:2)
American governmental PsyOps against citizens is completely unacceptable. The American people have the right to know the truth about their circumstances, including any actions taken by their own government that may impact them. To deliberately deceive them for nefarious purposes is a betrayal of trust and an affront to democratic values.I am deeply concerned that these PsyOps campaigns are only furthering the mistrust and suspicion of the American public towards their government, and indeed towards any auth
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PsyOps on U.S. citizens were theoretically made legal with the partial repeal of the Smith-Mundt act during the Obama Administration. The part that was repealed? The part that prevented state department, Internews, and other heavily government funded news “information” operations from feeding supposedly neutral narratives to U.S. citizens. One such operation, operated by NGO cutouts but largely government funded, was a well attended media summit that trained news and social media executives how
Of course they did (Score:2)
Unintended consequences (Score:2)
Advertisers, governments, the military and others have been lying to us for years.
Sometimes the lies can be kinda justified, like in wartime to keep secrets from the enemy.
Other times lying is used to cover up incompetence, fraud or inconvenient truths that may lead to loss of profit or political power.
Reasonable people develop a strong sense of skepticism. Others decide to stop believing everything except for the most insane fringe delusions.
Lying causes unintended consequences that are almost always bad
Paul Bennewitz (Score:2)
Look up Richard Dodi and Paul Bennewitz if you want real evidence about how they will dispose of ordinary citizens for their military psyop campaigns.
It's a "UFO Story" but literally nobody investigating the phenomena believes that it was a real UFO story.
Still, a smart American entrepreneur died at the hands of military intelligence.
Dodi is now "on the UFO circuit" giving talks to chumps.
Gee, no kidding! (Score:1)
The XFiles (Score:2)
This is pretty much literally one of the main plot lines in the XFiles, the feds even laughing about the lone gunmen for spreading the lies the feds had specifically made up to be spread.
Who is telling the truth? (Score:1)
Recently, I read in Slashdot a post about the book "Imminent" from Mr. Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon program responsible for the investigation of UFOs.
Being fascinated by the subject, I obviously bought the book and read it carefully.
I really do want to believe. That is why, I have been carrying a camera with me for about 50 years...
But I was unfortunately not convinced by this book. I myself never saw real evidence of UAP or orbs, not in general, but especially not in my backyard, as it seems to be