Pentagon ‘spread Area 51 UFO rumours to cover up secret weapons programmes'

Telegraph

2 days ago

Pentagon officials have spent years spreading disinformation about UFOs as part of attempts to hide secret weapon programmes at Area 51, a report has claimed.
The efforts included fabricating and planting 'evidence' about alien research, helping to unleash persisting myths about extraterrestrial activity in the US, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
In one case in the 1980s, a US Air Force colonel visited a bar near the highly classified military base, deep in the Nevada desert, and gave the owner images of what looked like flying saucers.
The photographs were then pinned to the walls – and the idea was planted that Area 51 was being used to secretly test recovered alien technology.
However, the images were doctored, the now-retired colonel reportedly confessed to Pentagon investigators in 2023.
The disinformation mission was part of an effort to hide the testing of new top-secret stealth aircraft, developed to penetrate the Soviet Union's air defences.
Military officials, fearing that the F-117 programme might be exposed, hoped locals would believe the other worldly-looking jets instead came from outside Earth.
The Wall Street Journal said the disinformation efforts were uncovered during an extensive review by a Pentagon team into long-running conspiracy theories about Washington allegedly hiding research into aliens.
However, the newspaper said a report of the review's findings, published last year, 'itself amounted to a cover-up – but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe'.
While the investigation found no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial beings or crafts – or a related government cover-up – it 'omitted key facts... both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment,' The Wall Street Journal alleged.
Investigators found that many reported UFO sightings were usually of drones, rockets or birds and, in some rare cases, misidentified new experimental space, rocket or air systems.
But the newspaper said evidence also emerged, dating back to the 1950s, of government agencies fanning the flames of alien-related conspiracy theories to protect military assets.
Investigators are reportedly still trying to work out if the disinformation tactics were a centralised, institutionalised programme or led by local officers.
The newspaper said one rumour that was spread by officials had spun widely out of control over the decades and had originated from a 'bizarre hazing ritual' for new commanders of a classified air force programme.
It said recruits would be handed a piece of paper with a photograph of a 'flying saucer' as part of their induction briefing. Officers were then told they would be joining a top-secret fake unit, dubbed Yankee Blue, that was trying to reverse-engineer alien aircraft. The commanders were also ordered never to mention it again.
But investigators found that many never discovered it was fake. In 2023, a memo was circulated ordering the hazing ritual to stop, although the damage was largely done, investigators found.
The discovery reportedly led to Joe Biden's then director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, wanting to know whether the practice was directly responsible for the ongoing myth that Washington had concealed an alien programme from the American people.