What People Get Wrong This Week: UFO Misinformation
Disinformation tends to metastasize. The lie mutates with each retelling until the end product bears no resemblance to the original. This phenomenon is especially evident in the UFO world, where decades of institutional secrecy have created fertile ground for speculation to flourish.
Late last week , The Wall Street Journal published a report revealing how various government and military agencies have been spreading disinformation about UFOs since at least the 1950s. Based on a study by the congressionally mandated All-Area Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) that has never been made public, the WSJ report sheds light on (or explains) UFO events as diverse as Area 51, the Malmstrom nuclear missile incident, and the Air Force’s Yankee Blue program — three events that have shaped public opinion about UFOs for decades and, according to the report, were themselves shaped by official disinformation. If the report is accurate, much of what people believe about UFOs is wrong because of the deliberate lies our government feeds us.
Has the mystery of Area 51 been revealed?
Any UFO enthusiast will tell you that Area 51, part of the Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range in Nevada, is a storage site for alien bodies and UFO debris. It’s the nexus of countless extraterrestrial conspiracy theories, and new information suggests it’s partly due to a spontaneous Air Force disinformation campaign.
According to AARO, in the 1980s, an Air Force colonel visited a bar near a military training ground and began telling a story about a UFO. He also had photographs, which he handed to the bartender, who promptly posted them above the bar. But the photographs were fake. According to the retired Air Force colonel, the idea was to create confusion about F-117 Nighthawk sightings. Any report of a strange craft flying over Nevada could be lumped in with the thousands of other UFO reports, rather than the Soviets taking it seriously. Even after the Cold War ended, countless bar patrons were likely shown UFO photographs and went home to tell their friends, and so the game of UFO Telephone continues.
The Strange History of Yankee Blue
Now we move from Cold War strategic disinformation to internal military trolling. For decades, Air Force officers were routinely briefed on a supposedly top-secret project called “Yankee Blue.” They were handed photos of UFOs, told about the Air Force’s efforts to reverse engineer a crashed alien spacecraft, and sworn to secrecy. But there was no “Yankee Blue.” According to AARO research, Yankee Blue was kind of a taunt — a joke, bro. The Defense Department told people to stop joking about it in 2023.
I’m sure true UFO believers will say, “Of course they’ll say it’s a hoax. What better way to cover it up if someone talks?” and there’s some logic to that, but then again, making up UFO stories to see if a newbie will believe them seems so plausible, I think Occam’s razor suggests it’s true. It would be fun to see who believed it and who didn’t. Still, there’s no way to know how many military officials believed it, how many blabbed to their buddies after a few drinks, and how those stories affected the broader culture’s views on UFOs.
Malmstrom UFO Incident Debunked?
It’s not as famous as Area 51, but the Malmstrom UFO incident has been repeated often in UFO circles. According to UFO lore, a flying saucer appeared and disabled a battery of intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. According to the AARO report, that didn’t happen.
On March 24, 1967, 26-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Robert Salas was deep underground at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, monitoring 10 Minuteman missiles. The phone rang, and a panicked noncommissioned officer reported seeing an oval UFO glowing red and hovering over the installation’s main gate. Then, Salas says, the missiles’ guidance systems were disabled, preventing them from being launched. The missiles were undamaged and returned to service a day later, but Salas was visited by Air Force officials who swore him to secrecy.
But according to the AARO report, the missile system malfunction was the result of a secret electromagnetic pulse test to see if the silos could withstand a nuclear attack and still function. The results suggested that the missiles failed the test. Perhaps in the interest of limiting how many people learned that the silo couldn’t respond to a first strike, the Powers That Be apparently decided not to disclose the test to Salas or anyone else involved.
Salas remained silent until the mid-1990s, but then began to speak publicly about the incident. Among other high-profile appearances, Salas testified before Congress , wrote a book about the incident , and testified before AARO itself, always telling the same story about how the UFOs turned off the missile because he believed they disapproved of nuclear weapons—a story that (at least according to this account) is completely untrue.
What harm does a little misinformation do?
The incidents documented by the Wall Street Journal are just a few of the many instances of UFO disinformation spread by the U.S. government. The CIA and the Air Force routinely lied about UFO sightings throughout the Cold War. The Air Force allegedly had a full-time disinformation officer whose job it was to mislead opinion leaders in the UFO community. But, like, why ? They’re hiding something, right? Maybe. Or maybe they’re just hiding.
Many in the UFO community view government disinformation as an attempt to distract from the real alien story, such as the treaties we signed with the gray aliens. When some researcher stumbles upon evidence of a grand alien cover-up scheme, it is far more effective for the government to bury it in lies, to make the UFO people look crazy, than to try to cover it up.
But as these three examples show, a more likely explanation is that the government is hiding its own boring secrets and embarrassing failures even from itself: experimental spy planes need to be hidden from the public, and failed nuclear tests need to be hidden from the rest of the military, so they just make up all sorts of nonsense and feed it to the right people.
It’s bad enough that a respected military officer like Robert Salas spent his life writing about a UFO attack that never happened, and that Air Force officers kept a deep secret that was actually a joke, but there are larger implications. People’s lives are wasted investigating false claims made by cynical officials. Trust in government and institutions becomes laughable. And if there is any real truth about UFOs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find. In trying to keep its secrets, the government hasn’t just distorted our understanding of aliens—it’s rewritten a corner of our cultural reality, one lie at a time.