Does the US Government Want You To Believe in UFOs?
This June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report on recent military sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs, which the military calls UAP — “unidentified aerial phenomena”). A new wave of public interest in UFOs was recently sparked by three leaked videos, now verified by the Defense Department, in which Navy pilots filmed strange objects that appeared to operate differently than any known aircraft.
The US military has grown increasingly open about internal UFO sightings in recent years, even creating a UAP Task Force to investigate the reports. For many, this has been reason for excitement, offering new knowledge about the mysterious sightings and perhaps even foreshadowing the reveal of alien visitors. A closer examination of the government’s behavior surrounding UFOs, however, suggests another possibility: we are not seeing aliens above us, but our own government.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government used popular fascination with alien spacecraft as a cover story to hide military experiments that were spotted by unauthorized eyes. This approach successfully muddied the waters for the public and misled overly-curious UFO researchers, thus keeping many developmental projects a secret. It also had the unintended consequence of helping turn aliens into a major part of American culture.
This strategy is not a well-coordinated conspiracy, nor is it a formalized process which most government officials are aware of. Instead, lying about UFOs slowly and haphazardly became a favorite trick of military and intelligence agencies during periods of heavy experimentation with airborne technologies. Time and time again, these agencies have kept their projects hidden by quietly encouraging a belief that any evidence of their experiments is actually evidence of aliens. There is no reason to believe that this tactic has been abandoned during today’s new wave of UFO disclosures, and there are several reasons to believe the tactic is still in use.
This article is broken up into five brief sections: the first three covering history, the last two covering the present day. My case is cumulative, in that each section can be read on its own, but the case is strongest when the sections are read together.
- The Roswell Myth explores the 1947 UFO landing at Roswell, a well-known mystery with a little-known explanation. This sets the scene for the following sections.
- Closing the Blue Book examines the conflict within the government about how to handle UFO sightings from the 1940’s to the 1960’s, pitting the secrecy of Area 51 against the transparency of Project Blue Book.
- “I Might Even Feed the Fire” unpacks a stunning government disinformation operation centered in New Mexico during the 1970’s and 1980’s, an operation that is still largely unheard of.
- Of Men and Drone Swarms brings us into modern times, applying what can be learned from this history to the ODNI report and some recent developments on the edge of the military-industrial complex.
- Operational Surprise introduces us to one possible source of government-approved disinformation today, and ends with some brief conclusions.
As a final note, the theory presented here is alien-agnostic: it takes no position on extraterrestrial life or visitation, and is compatible with any position on those issues. Rather than attempting to create a comprehensive theory capable of explaining all UFO phenomena, this theory aims to reveal important truths about government secrecy, bureaucracy, and the military-industrial complex which are vital for anyone interested in finding the truth.
1. The Roswell Myth
In July 1947, a UFO crashed on a farm near Roswell, New Mexico. The military first described the object as a “flying disc,” only to later claim that it was a weather balloon. A local newspaper, however, decided to use a newly-popular term to describe the object: a “flying saucer.” Ever since, the Roswell incident has been a staple of our modern understanding of UFOs — and as we will see in later sections, this popularity was no accident.
Though not well-known to the public, the reality of the Roswell incident was spelled out plainly by a 1995 Air Force report, released nearly half a century after the landing itself. The UFO at Roswell was an experimental balloon, part of the secretive “Project MOGUL” which sought to monitor Soviet missile testing using long-range sound waves. Indeed, the remote deserts of southern New Mexico surrounding Roswell were host to countless military experiments in this era, including the world’s first nuclear explosion in 1945.
In a report following the Roswell incident, Project MOGUL researchers working out of Alamogordo Army Air Field noted they had already been collecting falling debris from the balloons before the incident took place: “balloons have been descending outside of the area in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico.” In fact, the “recovery crews often listened to broadcasts of UFO reports to assist them in their tracking operations.”
As soon as the researchers had completed their tests and left town, one final balloon fell to the ground and was found by a local rancher. The device was brought to a nearby military outpost in Roswell, rather than the Alamogordo outpost from which it was launched. Officials at Roswell were uninvolved with the project and unfamiliar with the device, so they simply described it to the press as a “flying disc.” Yet among the wreckage was a piece of sonar equipment which, if recognized, could easily have revealed the purpose of the experiment to both the public and foreign military intelligence.
Once the government realized what had happened, they covered their tracks. Three days after the balloon’s discovery, a local newspaper ran a story with information provided by a military officer who lied about the balloon’s purpose and the people involved. But among these lies were a number of facts — launch times, altitudes, etc. — which were accurate. They created, in the words of one military official involved, “a cover story.”
This deceptive tactic — seamlessly blending fact and fiction into one indistinguishable narrative — allowed the military to further complicate the public’s understanding of what really happened. Roswell showed the military just how useful this form of disinformation could be.
2. Closing the Blue Book
Roswell helped push the idea of alien spacecraft into the public imagination, and UFO sightings grew more common in its aftermath. But it was far from the first such incident: one civilian pilot in Washington state had even spotted a “flying saucer” two weeks before Roswell. As excitement grew around these and other sightings, small communities of independent UFO researchers (“UFOlogists”) emerged. Meanwhile, the military created Project Blue Book to investigate the unexplained reports which it had been receiving, both during and after World War II.
Headed in their early days by the open-minded Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, projects like Blue Book made rapid headway into investigating pilot UFO sightings. Simultaneously, the modern post-WWII US security state was taking shape within the government. A struggle emerged between two different bureaucratic approaches to the UFO issue: Project Blue Book sought transparency and fact-finding, while the intelligence community sought secrecy and control of the narrative.
Recommended by the CIA, a 1953 government review known as the Robertson Panel chose to deemphasize UFO research. The Panel doubted that UFO reports were credible threats, but instead worried that belief in UFOs could be dangerous, as a large number of false reports could potentially overload military communications. Along with downplaying and debunking rumors to the public, the Panel’s report suggested manipulating UFOlogist groups to their advantage: they “should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.”
Ruppelt felt that the Panel’s findings had obstructed his investigations, complaining: “We’re ordered to hide sightings when possible, but if a strong report does get out, we have to publish a fast explanation…” Once reassigned away from the project, he fired back by publishing “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects” in 1956, thus bringing the military term “UFO” into the public vocabulary. The book detailed his experiences with Project Blue Book and lent credibility to the UFO phenomenon in the early days of the USA-USSR space race.
Four years later, however, the book’s second edition contained new chapters in which Ruppelt was far more pessimistic about the possibility of alien visitors, even calling UFOs a “Space Age Myth.” This edition included a revealing story about the testing of “flashing red strobe lights” on planes. Though “now used on practically all aircraft,” the earliest experiments with these strobe lights always produced the same results: “people within miles, including other pilots, called in UFO reports. Now these strobe lights are common and no one even bothers to look up.”
The CIA had its own motivations for bringing Blue Book to a halt. In 1955, the Agency teamed up with the Air Force to begin secret testing of the Lockheed U-2, a surveillance jet capable of flying at record-high altitudes. Their initial testing site was a remote stretch of Nevada desert called Groom Lake, better known today as Area 51. Whenever and wherever they tested, UFO sightings rose. When a U-2 had to make an emergency landing at Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB), an air policeman saw the pilot emerge from the futuristic vehicle in a strange suit and “remarked that the pilot looked like a man from Mars.”
In response to these sightings, the CIA encouraged rumors while the Air Force deflected questions. Project Blue Book easily connected the dots between the reported UFO sightings and U-2 flight records, but knew they couldn’t reveal the aircraft to the public.
Many were fooled, but a few particularly observant civilian UFOlogists sensed something was afoot. One even wrote to the CIA in 1958 to correctly accuse them of being “responsible for the flying saucer sightings of the last decade.” The existence of the U-2 wasn’t revealed for another two years, when the Soviet Union shot one down over Sverdlovsk and captured a pilot born in Kentucky. By then, the U-2 had already flown other surveillance missions over China, Indonesia, and the Middle East.
More than half of all UFO sightings in the late 1950s and 1960s were really sightings of the U-2 and other similar experimental jets, according to CIA operatives involved. Flying far higher and faster than any known aircraft, these planes could not be explained by contemporary standards (the SR-71 Blackbird, for example, still holds speed records). According to Hugh Slater, commander of Area 51 from 1964–68, there were 2,850 test flights of the experimental Oxcart under his watch. In his words: “That’s a lot of UFO sightings!”
In the end, secrecy and disinformation won: Project Blue Book was ultimately shut down in 1970, while the U-2 is still in service today. Of the 12,618 cases that Blue Book reviewed, only 5.6% remained “unidentified.”
The CIA’s victory would have long-term consequences: a 1997 government study noted that their “deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories…”
3. “I Might Even Feed the Fire”
In 1980, UFOlogist Bill Moore helped repopularize the events at Roswell by co-authoring “The Roswell Incident,” which argued that an alien landing took place that day and that the government was now in contact with the aliens. The book sent ripples through the growing UFOlogist community, as would Moore’s 1987 publication of the “Majestic 12” papers, which allegedly proved the existence of a secret government organization that monitored the aliens.
Still at the peak of his influence, Moore gave a speech at a national UFO conference in 1989. To audible jeers from the audience, he admitted that he was an informant, feeding information on UFOlogists to the government in exchange for details about their supposed alien contacts. By overestimating how much of the information he had received was accurate, Moore served as a vehicle through which the government spread disinformation throughout the entire UFO community. Though still in circulation today, the Majestic 12 papers were an elaborate forgery by the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI).
One of Bill Moore’s government handlers was AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty, a man who by that time already had experience using alien conspiracies to conceal military secrets. The 2013 documentary “Mirage Men” examines Doty’s involvement in a secret government operation in the 1970s and 80s that aimed to disrupt UFOlogists, whose constant investigations into obscure corners of the government sometimes brought them close to discovering experimental Cold War technology. In this way, the government sought to neutralize the very UFO researchers it had helped create.
One reason for this disinformation campaign was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The law prompted new disclosures of secret government documents, such as a 1978 release which proved that the CIA had investigated UFOs in the past. When UFOlogists brought this evidence of prior government interest to the press, it further legitimized the phenomenon. The UFOlogist responsible for the 1978 release told the New York Times: “U.F.O.’s do exist, they are real, the U.S. Government has been totally untruthful and the cover‐up is massive.” New public curiosity prompted new government responses.
The federal government also feared that Soviet spies could infiltrate UFO communities to purposefully collect secret information. US intelligence knew that the Soviets were interested. In 1977, the USSR launched an official investigation into a mass UFO sighting in the city of Petrozavodsk. Western sources quickly identified the sighting as a test launch of the Kosmos-955 spy satellite, but this explanation was not widely reported in the Soviet Union. The confusion of state officials uninformed about the launch led many Soviet UFOlogists to consider the sighting legitimate even years later, an outcome which one American UFOlogist argued “must be entirely to the liking of Moscow’s military security specialists and news censors, who wish to hide the very existence of the Plesetsk rocket center” from which the satellite was launched.
The Soviet Union was not alone in finding deception valuable. In 1979, a WWII veteran named Paul Bennewitz lived near Kirtland AFB, a major hub of military experimentation outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The owner of a scientific equipment company, a curious Bennewitz began recording strange sights and signals coming from the base. After repeated sightings of a mysterious light doing formations around the base, he decided to contact the Air Force and share his findings about the unusual behavior. The man put in charge of his case was AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty.
When put into contact with him, Doty realized that Bennewitz had unwittingly collected large amounts of secret information about their activities at the base, including experimental aircraft testing. In order to keep their projects a secret, Doty and other Air Force officers decided to encourage Bennewitz to believe that the base sightings were “probably, maybe UFOs.”
Another former AFOSI Special Agent, Walter Bosley, spells out their logic:
If you’ve got an aerial platform that is highly advanced, and the public, who happens to get a glimpse of the thing from time to time — if they’re convinced that it’s from Venus and there’s no way it could be our military, well hey, that’s awesome! Hell yes! If I’m the agent running the protection for that particular program, and that’s helping me cover something for years, I might even feed the fire.
Under the belief that he was cooperating with the Air Force, Bennewitz was subjected to an elaborate psychological campaign by AFOSI (and allegedly other agencies, including the NSA). Similar to the Roswell cover-up, the Air Force sought to provide information that was roughly 80% false, but which also included real military secrets in the other 20% in order to keep Bennewitz invested in the story.
In 1982, Bennewitz first shared the disinformation he had received with other UFOlogists by publishing his theories about an underground alien base near Dulce, the capital of the Jicarilla Apache reservation in northern New Mexico. Today, this theory is still popular enough to serve as a tourist industry for the small town.
AFOSI’s main problem was that Bennewitz was smarter than they expected. The closer their campaign brought him to the Air Force, the more discoveries about their real activities he made, forcing them to continuously escalate their efforts to keep him off-track. In 1983, the agency went so far as to build a fake UFO landing pad in the desert for Bennewitz to find.
Doty — who many contend is still lying in self-serving ways — claims he once tried to personally dissuade Bennewitz, telling him it was all a “sanctioned counterintelligence operation… he tapped into something on the base, and we didn’t want him to ever disclose that.”
By that point, Bennewitz didn’t believe him. In 1988, his mental state had deteriorated to the point that his family checked him into a psychiatric hospital. He died quietly in 2003.
As was the case with Bill Moore, some of the theories fed to Paul Bennewitz still circulate in UFO communities. Despite this, some UFOlogists continue to maintain that government collaboration is worthwhile, as it can produce new fragments of classified truth. One UFOlogist in “Mirage Men” argues that government agents lie…
…but they talk. And if they talk, once in a while you’re going to get a piece of something in that huge pile of crap that will actually connect to what you want, and if you don’t let them take you somewhere like they did with Paul, kinda keep an even keel, I think you’re OK.
To this day, the scale of the psychological operations by AFOSI and others in this era is unknown. The son of a New Mexico state police officer recently published a book reviewing his father’s research on mysterious cattle mutilations near Dulce. His conclusion? After extremely unorthodox nuclear tests nearby, the government was likely engaging in covert testing of livestock to check for radiation in the local food chain. He further alleges that the CIA promoted theories about aliens “to discredit [his father] and make people think he was crazy.”
In a related incident, a conspiracy theory which Doty tried to feed to a UFOlogist in 1983 reemerged online under strange circumstances in 2005, but quickly fizzled out.
4. Of Drone Swarms and Men
The new ODNI report on UFOs begins humbly: “The limited amount of high-quality reporting… hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions…” Here’s what they do know: since 2004, there have been 144 reported sightings of UFOs within the US government, only one of which has been confidently explained. 80 of the 144 reported UAP sightings were caught on multiple sensors. 18 involved a UFO which appeared to exhibit new or unusual flight patterns: extreme speeds, sudden sharp turns, etc.
The full list of the UFO cases reviewed in the report is classified, but we can be certain that it includes the three Navy pilot videos which prompted the report in the first place. The first video was taken in 2004 after two weeks of unusual behavior off the California coast. The other two were filmed off the coasts of Virginia and Florida in 2015; during this period, soldiers had “almost daily” sightings of unusual activity.
The true nature of the UFOs in the pilot videos is unknown. Among a list of possibilities, the ODNI offers “airborne clutter” and “natural atmospheric phenomena.” Some skeptics have provided their own explanations which could plausibly explain the sightings and their flight patterns in mundane ways. On the other end of the spectrum, the possibility of alien visitors remains unfalsifiable.
Despite fears in Washington, it is highly unlikely that any foreign military would beat our own to developing aircraft capable of advanced flight patterns. The US military spends more on R&D than all other wealthy nations put together. One estimate suggests that the US has more total military aircraft than China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia combined. In fact, the annual US “black budget” which funds secret programs is larger than the entire Russian military budget. It’s possible that some simpler UFO sightings are the work of foreign militaries, but it’s a highly unlikely explanation for any sightings which involve truly “unusual” flight abilities.
Is it possible that some of these UFOs are our own experimental aircraft? The ODNI report was “unable to confirm” that US military testing explained any of their 144 reported sightings, but this tells us little. After all, the existence of secret government projects is rarely ever shared with those outside of the project due to both confidentiality and compartmentalization.
Though hard evidence is elusive, secret test flights are a more plausible explanation for recent UFO sightings than one might imagine. First, it is important to understand that the US military-industrial complex is quietly developing futuristic aviation technology, and they are doing it right now.
Area 51 added a new hangar in 2016, additional storage space which could be used for any number of new developmental projects. Perhaps it’s the SR-72 (an upgrade to the SR-71 first tested at Area 51 half a century ago), which is rumored to be further along in development than acknowledged. Or perhaps it’s the RQ-180 drone, which is believed to have been photographed for the first time late last year.
Maybe the hangar was built for the Next Generation fighter jet that reportedly “broke records” during testing, or even for the the B-21 bomber that begins official testing next year. It could also be something else entirely. The US currently possesses a space-based weapon so secret that we only even know it exists because of an internal Pentagon fight over whether or not to reveal it.
Yet another piece of this puzzle points to experimental aircraft. Both the 2021 ODNI report and the 1953 Robertson Panel report identified the exact same problem with their reviews: UFO reports were clustered around military bases. They suggest this may be data collection bias — bases pay especially close attention to their surrounding airspace, and thus have more to report. But there’s another explanation: given the abundance and the opaque nature of restricted airspace, military installations serve as optimal locations for both testing and detecting experimental aircraft. It’s plausible that bases report an unusually high number of UFOs because some of those UFOs were quietly launched from the bases themselves.
If these new aircraft are meant to be secret, why fly them within sensor range of other military aircraft? Speculatively, this could actually serve a purpose. “Close encounters” between standard and confidential aircraft could serve as field tests for the latter, gauging the experimental craft’s ability to evade detection and pursuit in a live environment where engagement is unlikely. If this sounds implausible, just wait until you hear about another recent incident that was likely reviewed in the ODNI report.
In July 2019, several US Navy ships off the coast of San Diego were swarmed by at least six drones of unknown origin. The drones (which were also caught on radar) possessed flight capabilities far beyond commercially-available technology, but they ultimately left the Navy ships undamaged. Soldiers involved were baffled, and an investigation went nowhere. The military still claims that the drones are unidentified.
Each of the ships was in the proximity of San Clemente Island, a major Navy-owned testing ground, though authorities there denied any drone flights at that time. This April, however, the US Navy held exercises to test new equipment off the coast of San Diego, including a secretive “super swarm project” led by the Office of Naval Research (one of the agencies which uses San Clemente Island for testing). After the exercises were complete, a Navy publication confirmed that they included “a swarm drone attack” against a target vessel.
There is no concrete evidence that the Navy secretly tested this developmental technology on its own ships in 2019. But two years later, the Navy now admits that it possesses the exact type of technology necessary to do so, and that it is now testing this technology on its own ships in the exact same area where the incident took place. In fact, this is also the same region where the 2004 Navy pilot video was shot, a sighting conveniently experienced by a Navy vessel that was testing a brand new sensor system.
Mysteries like these will only become more common. In the years following the release of the Navy pilot videos, one military scientist filed several bizarre patents on behalf of the Navy while working at one of their main aircraft testing bases. Though physicists are skeptical that his proposals are even possible, they would theoretically allow for the unprecedented levels of speed and maneuverability seen in the videos.
Regardless of the feasibility of these futuristic patents, the military is interested. When the US Patent and Trademark Office hesitated to grant one of the patent proposals, an executive at the US Naval Aviation Enterprise sent a letter urging its approval. Though mostly dedicated to arguing that the concept could be feasible in the future, the letter also echoes Cold War anxieties of the past: we need this patent, it argues, because “China is already investing significantly in this area…”
The patent application has since been accepted. The Navy scientist who filed the patent has a new job… at the Air Force.
5. Operational Surprise
Though the ODNI report never mentions aliens, they featured prominently in its mainstream press coverage. The New York Times’ headline announced that the study “Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either.” Tucker Carlson’s coverage often began with a graphic of an alien head.
The media’s choice to cover the story from this angle is meant to appeal to our national UFO fascination, a cultural curiosity which has been quietly shaped by government activity of the past. Recent developments, however, suggest that the government may still be involved in shaping the narrative of this story.
The UFO organization most interviewed by the press today is To The Stars Academy (TTSA), created in 2017 by UFOlogist and former Blink-182 vocalist Tom DeLonge. The strange group first got its start when DeLonge met Air Force Major General Neil McCasland and proposed to create a UFO research organization with government support. McCasland, whose career has focused on experimental aviation technology, responded to DeLonge by connecting him to a CIA operative.
According to his own account, DeLonge was eventually put in touch with a “very specific person” in the government who could feed him information, including government confirmation that aliens exist. Hooked on this prospect, DeLonge followed down the path of prior UFOlogists and began cooperating with the government.
DeLonge asked his handlers for some government officials to join him at his new outlet, TTSA. One such official is Luis Elizondo, an intelligence agent who the media introduces as the former head of a UFO research project that ran inside the Pentagon from 2007–2012. Just one problem: no one can actually confirm that Elizondo ever held that position. According to one journalist, these former intelligence officials working at TTSA “still have security clearances, still have networks in Washington, still are in the business, if you will.”
When appearing in the media, the former intelligence officials at To The Stars Academy cast doubt on the possibility that UFO reports are US military experiments. One told CBS’ 60 Minutes that the recent UFO sightings are “not us. That’s one thing we know… with a very high degree of confidence…”
Even more suspicious, TTSA also has roots in the military-industrial complex. DeLonge and McCasland’s first meeting was at an event held by Skunk Works, the experimental aircraft team at Lockheed Martin who originally designed the U-2 and are now designing the SR-72. Skunk Works’ former program director now works at TTSA, where he has discussed research into a vehicle that “mimics the capabilities observed in [UAP]” by using technology similar to that in the controversial Navy patent discussed above.
Is this all just a coincidence? A convoluted disinformation scheme? Something else entirely? There is no way to know.
According to a 2011 US military handbook, “military deception” operations are those which “deliberately mislead adversary military decisionmakers about US military capabilities, intentions, and operations.” After US officers “carefully weigh the likely benefits of a deception operation against a potential short and long-term loss of credibility with the media or local audiences,” they sometimes “support military deception operations designed to preserve operational surprise…” It is unlikely that the government has abandoned this concept in the last decade.
Determining which sources to trust and how much of them to trust is complicated by the very nature of disinformation. If we have trouble concluding the truth about a military deception operation with certainty, then the operation was a success. The line between real state secrets and misleading rumors is purposefully imperceptible.
As the window of accountability for past actions closes, we only learn about prior deceptions long after they occur. A corollary is that recent government releases such as the ODNI report may contain considerable disinformation that will only be corrected far into the future.
The Pentagon did not voluntarily release the Navy pilot videos, and only verified them in response to a wave of FOIA requests. The new ODNI report also did not come at the military’s offering, but was requested by Senator Marco Rubio. Nearly every modern incident that has provoked the Pentagon to collect or release information on UFOs has been in response to outside pressure rather than willful disclosures. If the military were indeed trying to hide new aircraft testing, then these external demands for transparency would leave them in need of a convincing counter-narrative. History shows that UFOs serve this role well.
In 2019, only a third of Americans believed that some UFO sightings have been alien spacecraft. But because 68% believed the government knew more than it was admitting, recent military announcements have likely changed public opinion significantly. According to a poll from this June, 51% of Americans believe that the military’s UFO sightings are “probably” or “definitely” proof of aliens.
Historian Kate Dorsch argues that “…UFOs are intrinsically bound up in the way the U.S. military understands the world.” In her analysis, the UFO phenomenon has its origins in the earliest days of the Cold War: fear of a new foreign threat whose potential is poorly understood; public curiosity about rapid technological developments; and the creation of the US Air Force itself, a branch of the military operating in our skies.
The Pentagon’s recent change of heart on UFO secrecy comes at a time when multiple different experimental aircraft are conducting test flights and even more are planned for the near future. Government anxiety about the supposed military threat posed by China has grown to levels of hysteria. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s decision to keep Trump’s Space Force will allow a brand new bureaucracy to take root within the military-industrial complex. In other words, the conditions that first prompted the military’s use of UFO rumors were quite similar to our conditions today.
But if the history of this strategy suggests the government is still lying to the public, it would also suggest that these lies could backfire. Even when successful in the short-term, defending “operational surprise” by stoking rumors of aliens has consistently created new public interest in UFOs. Greater public interest means more people watching the skies, which means more spotted aircraft, which in turn means even more disinformation campaigns.
The government’s overriding commitment to maintaining secrecy around its developmental military projects distorts our modern culture in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend (at least until these secrets are revealed in some obscure report published in the 2070s). It is impossible for the public to have a productive conversation about something that is hardly even understood, and that may well be the point.
Project Blue Book was created to investigate UFO sightings by the US military, and it was destroyed because it did its job too well. Only time will tell if the Pentagon’s new UAP Task Force is as sincere, and if so, whether it will be allowed to stay sincere for long.
