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

Summary

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...