Does the government operate a secret program to "back engineer" alien technology recovered from crashed spacecraft? This is taken as gospel truth by a large number of UFO enthusiasts.
And there is eyewitness testimony to support that claim. A dozen military officers told Sean Kirkpatrick, who headed up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) looking into reports of "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP) as the Pentagon now terms UFOs, that they were threatened with arrest, prison, and even execution if they revealed the existence of programs studying or trying to exploit alien technology.
Hundreds of officers had been told about the program when they first joined a unit investigating UFOs, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the program didn't exist. The officers were victims of an elaborate hazing ritual. Some of the officers never found out they were being pranked.
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. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.
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.
Was this the origin of the stories about a secret Pentagon program to adapt alien technology for use by the U.S. Air Force? Kirkpatrick's deputy briefed the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, on the hazing ritual. She was aghast that superior officers tolerated such behavior. She also wanted to know how extensive the hazing was.
“Ma’am, we know it went on for decades. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real," said Kirkpatrick's aide.
The AARO came to prominence two years ago when the House Oversight Committee held two days of hearings on UAPs and the "implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency" of those sightings. Several witnesses at those hearings testified about programs to examine alien technology from crashed UAPs.
The Pentagon acknowledged that AARO had uncovered evidence of a fake classified program and apologized for not including that information in their final report on UAPs.
“The department is committed to releasing a second volume of its Historical Record Report, to include AARO’s findings on reports of potential pranks and inauthentic materials,” Gough said.
Glad to hear that, because going all the way back to the 1950s and the creation of the Roswell myth to cover a classified program to spy on Russian nuclear testing, the Pentagon has been using America's fascination with UFOs and fear of aliens to hide the nation's most critical classified projects.
At times, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own, such as the three-decade journey of a purported piece of space metal that turned out to be nothing of the sort. And one long-running practice was more like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control.
Investigators are still trying to determine whether the spread of disinformation was the act of local commanders and officers or a more centralized, institutional program.
The Pentagon omitted key facts in the public version of the 2024 report that could have helped put some UFO rumors to rest, both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment, the Journal investigation found. The Air Force in particular pushed to omit some Few details it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage careers.
The conspiracy theorists were half right. The Pentagon was covering up the disinformation campaign to throw investigators off and keep programs such as stealth technology from being examined too closely.
How dare they lie to us, some might ask. It kept the U.S. superiority in stealth technology supreme for 30 years.
The F-117 entered service in 1981 after 25 years of development. The Russians didn't develop a stealth fighter until 2010, and it didn't go into service until 2020. China's first stealth fighter became operational in 2009. As far as military secrets go, the program to keep the details of the U.S. stealth program under wraps was a huge success.
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