Disclosure by Other Means

Welcome to UFO Disinformation 2.0

On June 6, 2025, The Wall Street Journal published what, on the surface, appeared to be a masterful exposé. Titled ‘The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology,’ it promised to unmask how Cold War officials deliberately manipulated UFO myths to cover secret U.S. weapons programmes. For the casual reader, it seemed a moment of courageous truth-telling: an acknowledgment that the U.S. government had systematically seeded UFO disinformation for decades.

And yet, on closer inspection, this was not disclosure, but an evolved form of government disinformation dressed in the language of transparency, delivered by one of America’s most influential newspapers. What follows is not merely a critique of a single article, but an analysis of what appears to be the bow-wave of a wider trend: official narratives evolving to conceal truth - not by denying it, but by admitting and twisting the old to hide the new.

Welcome to UFO Disinformation 2.0.

The centrepiece of the WSJ article was its treatment of one of the most iconic incidents in UFO history: the 1967 shutdown of ten nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base, witnessed by then-Captain Robert Salas.

According to the WSJ, Salas was mistaken. The real culprit, it claimed, was not a glowing UFO but a secret Cold War-era EMP (electromagnetic pulse) test, allegedly conducted using a 60-foot-high portable EMP generator stationed directly over the missile silos.

The WSJ asks us to believe that, in the middle of the Cold War, the U.S. military erected a massive, glowing EMP rig directly above an operational ICBM site - without the knowledge of the missile crews, security teams, or chain of command. The logistics alone are preposterous: heavy construction, secure access, electrical infrastructure, and extensive coordination would have been required. None of which, according to multiple witnesses, ever occurred.

Worse still from a credibility angle, the technology supposedly employed - the TEMPS (Transportable Electromagnetic Pulse Simulator) system - was still in early development in 1973, six years after the Malmstrom incident. TEMPS was designed for controlled testing at remote sites, not for deployment at live missile fields, and required highly visible site preparation, mobile trailers, and extensive support equipment. There is no record of any such deployment to Malmstrom - nor any operational reason for it.

Robert Salas’s rebuttal letter to the WSJ, describing its account as ‘fantasy,’ was issued the day after publication. It is both comprehensive and devastating. He documents his extensive engagement with AARO - the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (set up for the investigation of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, UAP, or UFOs) - and the consistent refusal of authorities to verify even basic facts with the U.S. Air Force.

Dozens of individuals were involved at Malmstrom in 1967: missileers, security teams, radar operators, and other personnel who later came forward with their accounts. Independent researcher Raymond Fowler subsequently gathered testimony from several of these former Malmstrom witnesses, reporting independent sightings of UFOs over multiple groups of ICBM silos, known as ‘flights.’

Independent journalist and writer Robert Hastings, whose seminal book 'UFOs & Nukes,' meticulously documents not only Malmstrom but a long pattern of UFO incursions at nuclear facilities across the U.S. and former Soviet Union, emailed the WSJ on 10th June to complain of its story's 'embarrassing lack of factual rigor.'

As Hastings points out, his four decades of research has convincingly established bona fide UFO incursions at US nuclear weapons sites from as early as 1945. His book makes plain that Salas's incident was far from the only one to have occurred at Malmstrom in 1967 or subsequently - nor was ‘intervention’ just about weapons that were prevented from functioning. UFOs & Nukes includes the 1982 Byelokoroviche incident in Ukraine, where an unknown object triggered a launch countdown aborted only seconds before ignition. The UFO-nuclear connection spans decades, continents, and governments.

The WSJ ignores all of this. Which begs the question: why?

Start with AARO’s role. Its original mandate is now painfully clear. Presented as an honest broker for UAP transparency, AARO instead functioned as a whistleblower magnet - a centralised collection point for testimony that could be analysed, filtered, contained, or neutralised.

The public posture of its former head, Sean Kirkpatrick, has been consistent: deflect, minimise, explain away. Since stepping down in December 2023, Kirkpatrick has continued this role unofficially, serving as a roving public relations operative for the Pentagon’s preferred narrative - a narrative that echoes through the WSJ piece.

Kirkpatrick - a physicist with a background in intelligence and national security - has offered highly specific but ultimately reductive explanations for anomalous testimony. His reluctance or refusal to take in broad-spectrum evidence across eight decades is noteworthy. Nowhere is his evolving role more visible than in the curious story the WSJ attributes to him directly: the so-called ‘hazing ritual’ that allegedly spawned vast portions of the UFO belief structure within the U.S. national security apparatus.

According to the WSJ, Kirkpatrick’s team uncovered evidence of a decades-long induction practice in which select commanders within certain Air Force special access programmes were shown faked documents and photos depicting supposed alien craft - sometimes labelled ‘Yankee Blue’ - and warned under threat of prosecution never to speak of it again. Many recipients, it is claimed, believed these briefings to be real for years or even decades, some carrying this false knowledge into retirement.

While framed as a psychological prank or loyalty test, the explanation raises more questions than it answers. No evidence is provided as to who designed the practice, who authorised it, or why a supposed joke would proliferate across ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of personnel, as quoted by the WSJ. Nor does it explain why senior national security officials - including Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, were reportedly caught off-guard by its discovery in 2023.

If accurate, such widespread internal deception - aside from its questionable legality - would represent a colossal breakdown of command integrity inside the most sensitive compartments of the U.S. defence establishment.

Most critically, the hazing story serves a powerful narrative function: it provides a retroactive psychological mechanism to dismiss credible whistleblower claims without addressing the empirical data. The hazing claim is itself a narrative manoeuvre - an elegant way to neutralise inconvenient testimony while reinforcing the notion that secrecy persists due to human frailty, not concealed truths.

These kinds of narrative management techniques are not theoretical. I experienced a similar episode while reporting on advanced aerospace technologies in the 1990s. Thanks to the reputation of Jane’s Defence Weekly, I gained rare access to senior officials inside U.S. defence programs, including leadership at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in California - the crucible of some of America’s most secret aircraft developments.

During one 1996 visit, I glimpsed an organisational chart showing an unidentified programme labelled simply ‘Astra’ - positioned at the top of the hierarchy. My curiosity triggered immediate discomfort; I was swiftly ushered out, and later offered an implausible cover story. For years, I watched, expecting this mysterious aircraft to surface. While the RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial surveillance aircraft eventually emerged, it bore no resemblance to what I saw referenced that day.

Years later, a senior Skunk Works executive offered a rueful smile when I raised the subject. "We screwed up," he admitted. "We might be the Skunk Works, but we're not infallible. We're engineers, not spooks." Only then did I realise: my visit had occurred on April 1^st - April Fool’s Day.

The lesson was not lost. In the protection game, multiple layers of obfuscation - including deliberate misdirection and even practical jokes - are deployed to keep highly sensitive programmes hidden in plain sight. As with the WSJ's hazing ritual narrative, sometimes the deception isn’t aimed at foreign adversaries, but at compartmentalising information within the system itself. Secrecy isn’t a straight line - it's a labyrinth of truths, half-truths, and intentional dead ends. A publication as established as the WSJ should have had alarms blaring across editorial departments before its disinformation story went to print - especially as most of its revelations relied on a single source with an obvious agenda.

This wasn’t the only aspect of its reporting that was concerning. When it claimed to have uncovered government use of UFOs as smokescreens dating back to the 1950s, it framed old truths as breaking news, when, in fact, this strategy has been publicly acknowledged for decades.

A 1997 CIA historical journal confirmed that more than half of UFO reports in the 1950s and early 60s were triggered by U-2 and OXCART (A-12/SR-71) spy plane overflights, deliberately explained as mysterious aerial phenomena to conceal surveillance missions. Even more conclusive was the CIA’s 2013 declassification of the official Area 51 history, which openly states that UFO tales were used to disguise these real-world programs.

The hoodwinking of the WSJ - which, perhaps generously, is how some commentators have framed it - is symptomatic of a new chapter in the UFO disinformation saga.

Most telling is how closely the WSJ article echoes concerns raised barely three weeks earlier by the New Paradigm Institute (NPI), which on May 20, 2025, published its white paper: "Disinformation: The U.S. Government’s Suppression of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena and Advanced Science." NPI warns that disinformation tactics have evolved beyond simple denial into controlled disclosure - revealing limited truths while concealing far larger realities.

In its formal response to the WSJ, NPI accuses the Pentagon of ‘gaslighting the public - again,’ arguing that the Journal’s report is not a corrective but a fresh iteration of disinformation masquerading as disclosure. By admitting decades-old manipulation while dismissing credible whistleblowers, nuclear incidents, and international cases, the article engages in what NPI calls ‘perception management.’ In this framing, the Malmstrom EMP narrative becomes not just implausible but a deliberate device to neutralise troubling evidence while appearing transparent.

The timing of these two publications - NPI’s white paper and the WSJ article - suggests the battle over UFO disclosure has entered a new phase: a managed public messaging effort, potentially designed by elements within the national security apparatus, to shape public perception in advance of additional official statements. These forthcoming disclosures - likely from agencies like AARO, the Department of Defense, or the Intelligence Community - may offer carefully curated fragments of information that create the illusion of transparency while continuing to obscure the most sensitive and potentially disruptive underlying truths about unidentified anomalous phenomena.

As the Journal admits, albeit in the wrong context and for the wrong reasons, its article fits into a far longer, more sophisticated tradition of U.S. government UFO disinformation.

During the 1950s and 60s, official government UFO ‘research projects’ like Grudge and Blue Book functioned less as serious scientific inquiries than as PR exercises - designed to contain public anxiety while diverting serious examination and analysis. These efforts largely framed UFOs as harmless misidentifications, natural phenomena, or Cold War hysteria.

By the late 1970s, the disinformation apparatus entered a darker, more complex phase. The Paul Bennewitz affair at Kirtland Air Force Base marked a shift: deliberate psychological manipulation of a private citizen who had stumbled onto classified programs, including possible directed energy and satellite tracking technologies. Simultaneously, myths around Area 51 - including claims of reverse-engineered alien craft - served as covers for advanced stealth platforms like the F-117 Nighthawk and highly novel, emerging classified electronic warfare technologies, both of which, conveniently, could appear to the untrained eye as classic UFOs.

Which brings us to the present.

For the past five years or so, highly anomalous ‘drone swarm’ incursions have been reported over some of America’s most sensitive assets and sites: Navy vessels off California, Air Force bases in Virginia and Guam, nuclear facilities, and recently, commercial airspace over New Jersey. These objects remain unidentified and unclaimed. Is this an intelligence failure to resolve unknown aerial incursions? Or, as in earlier eras, are these incidents masking a new class of black programmes?

In that light, the WSJ’s narrative may serve the same function as those earlier stories: to cordon off a breakthrough class of technologies - irrespective of their origin - while appearing transparent. It may also hide ignorance - an inability within command systems such as NORAD to understand what is unfolding before its eyes (and on its radar screens) - which would be just as dangerous. The core strategy remains constant: reveal just enough to divert attention from what it wants to remain hidden.

With generative AI, deepfakes, algorithmic targeting, and cognitive warfare capabilities, disinformation is no longer about simple suppression. It is about engineering consensus reality - weaponising partial truths to obscure far more unsettling revelations about the true nature of reality; admitting while redirecting, revealing while concealing. It appears to open doors, while quietly bolting shut the ones that matter most.

The war for truth has entered its most sophisticated phase yet - a new era of narrative warfare - one where disclosure itself becomes the mechanism of deception.

Of course, 'official' manipulation of media narratives is nothing new. As NPI notes in its white paper, the CIA's post-war Operation Mockingbird successfully infiltrated major news organisations to steer public opinion in support of national security objectives. But in an age where information is globally accessible, the WSJ story marks a new low: the visible corrosion of truth at the point where two entrenched old guards - the national security establishment and the legacy media - struggle to retain control over their respective domains.

In the short term, the article may have fulfilled the purpose of those who sold it to the WSJ as ‘fact’ - seeding doubt in the minds of people they wanted to influence, especially a core cadre of Congressional leaders who, until recently, at least, have had the bit firmly in their teeth on the UFO disclosure issue. But its longer-term impact may have unintended consequences - corroding from within, damaging the very credibility of those who are orchestrating the deception. In intelligence circles, this is known as 'blowback': when you become ensnared in your own disinformation op.

The truth, at some point, always leaks through. The harder ‘they’ work to contain it, the more visible their struggle becomes.