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

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/08/0520...

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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