The Pentagon May Have Fuelled UFO Beliefs To Cover Up Secret Weapons Tests

UFOs are once again making headlines, but this time the story isn't about strange lights in the sky - it's about what might be going on behind the scenes. A recent investigation published by The Wall Street Journal suggests that the US government may have deliberately encouraged belief in flying saucers, aliens, and unexplained aerial phenomena. Why? To cover up its own secret defence projects.

This surprising claim comes from within the Pentagon itself. Sean Kirkpatrick, who recently headed a division known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (or AARO for short), has been digging into the history of UFO sightings in the US. AARO was created specifically to investigate reports of unidentified objects in the sky, and Kirkpatrick's findings reveal a rather unexpected twist.

According to Kirkpatrick, American defence officials have, at times, spread misleading information about UFOs on purpose. In some cases, this included making up evidence of alien spacecraft to distract from classified military experiments or advanced weapons systems. Essentially, instead of telling people the truth - that they were testing new technology - it was easier to let them believe they'd seen a flying saucer.

Although this might sound like a dramatic new revelation, many researchers and skeptics have suspected this for years. In fact, back in 2014, a British researcher named Mark Pilkington released a documentary arguing that UFO stories were sometimes manufactured or manipulated by disinformation experts to help keep defence secrets under wraps. The Journal's report adds more detail and fresh examples to that theory.

One of the most eye-catching stories uncovered by Kirkpatrick centres on an incident at a US nuclear missile base in 1967. At the time, a young Air Force officer named Robert Salas was on duty inside a nuclear bunker. These bunkers were part of America's Cold War defences - if war broke out with the Soviet Union, they would have been used to launch nuclear missiles.

According to Salas, a guard outside the bunker saw a "glowing reddish-orange oval" object hovering over the front gate. Shortly after this, the missiles in the facility suddenly became inactive - without any clear cause. It's easy to see how such a bizarre and alarming event helped fuel UFO lore.

But Kirkpatrick's team uncovered a more down-to-earth explanation. During that era, the US military was testing a type of weapon known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator. These devices were designed to simulate the effect of a nuclear explosion without actually setting one off. A real nuclear detonation creates a burst of electromagnetic energy that can disable electronics - and scientists wanted to know whether their own missile systems would survive such an attack.

To test this, the Air Force built machines that emitted powerful pulses of energy, mounted on platforms 60 feet in the air. These generators sometimes glowed with an intense orange light before releasing their energy, much like a bolt of lightning. Kirkpatrick suggests that this test - not an alien craft - was what really caused the glowing object sighting and the temporary shutdown of the missiles.

Another strange detail from the Journal's investigation involves what seems to be a bizarre ritual within some top-secret military programmes. Kirkpatrick claims that for decades, newly promoted officers in certain high-level units were shown a photograph of what looked like a flying saucer. They were told the object was a real antigravity vehicle, and that their new role involved working on a project to reverse-engineer its technology. The operation even had a name - 'Yankee Blue'.

The twist? The flying saucer wasn't real. It was all made up. The purpose of this, according to some officials, was to "haze" new recruits - in other words, to test or initiate them with a kind of prank. But many officers were never told it was fake, and some may have spent years believing they were part of a programme involving alien tech.

In 2023, the Pentagon ordered this practice to stop, but the damage was already done. Whether it really was just a prank, or part of a larger plan to confuse even those inside these classified programmes, isn't clear. Like much of the UFO topic, the truth remains hard to pin down.

And that's really the point. The government's history of spreading misinformation has created an atmosphere of uncertainty. It becomes nearly impossible to know which stories are genuine sightings of unknown objects and which are planted to serve other agendas. Some researchers now argue that this constant confusion isn't an accident - it's a strategy.

When even insiders can't be sure what's real, it makes public trust all the more fragile. And for those who've spent years trying to make sense of the UFO mystery, this can feel like yet another layer of the puzzle. Perhaps the most frustrating truth of all is that, at least when it comes to official statements, we might never know what to believe - and that may be exactly how the system was designed to work.