If you’ve ever actually sat through an episode of Rogan or the “Shawn Ryan Show” when these programs turn to the evergreen wackadoodle fields of UFOs and quietly muttered to yourself about, you know, the laws of physics, then you should be feeling sweet, sweet vindication thanks to a new Wall Street Journal investigation. You might, however, feel less great about the U.S. government.
The Journal has unveiled only part one of its deep dive into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena but woo-boy does it ever prime us for the follow-up. In a nutshell, the whole convoluted narrative, all that Area 51-to-“X-Files” stuff dating back to the mid-1940s, was basically a full-on psyop to distract the public and, not incidentally, intimidate military insiders. The most fascinating aspect was a fake, alien-tech-reverse-engineering project, dubbed (no joke) “Yankee Blue,” that was foisted on high-level Air Force officers for decades. A probe (sorry) started in 2022 determined that it was part of what the Journal termed a “bizarre hazing ritual.”
Don’t believe!
The basis for this subterfuge was altogether predictable. The Pentagon wanted to keep its top-secret Cold War weapons programs top secret and turned to the oldest trick in the book to distract friend and foes alike: misdirection. The public gorged on flying saucer stories, while uniformed personnel, according to the Journal, were threatened with jail or execution if they gabbed.
The whole affair has always, obviously, been about information warfare and in that respect, the Department of Defense succeeded wildly. Tales of crashed other-worldly spacecraft in the Nevada desert have grown to quite literally supernatural dimensions. Shawn Ryan and Tucker Carlson recently jawboned on the latter’s podcast about how UFOs might have a spiritual element, possibly a demonic one.
The Pentagon has been getting great ratings for this UFO gibberish for 75 years now, so nobody should be surprised at how the podcast bros have seized on the story. They actually enjoy more legitimate cover than they have in a long time, as Congressional Republicans and MAGA stalwarts have been pushing for additional investigations to bolster their attacks on the so-called “deep state.”
Legitimate sci-fi tech hiding inside disinformation and mythmaking
There’s some truly awesome material in the Journal’s investigation. While the flying saucers are of course B.S., the Pentagon did actually create an electromagnetic-pulse weapon of sorts in the late 1960s and tested it on actual nuclear missiles in Montana — EMPs would be generated by nuclear blasts, and the U.S. was worried that a Soviet first strike would knock out its ability to respond with its own ICBM launches. The guys in the missile silos didn’t know what the “glowing” oval hovering outside the base was, but they knew their missiles were disabled, and they were told to never, ever talk about the event.
Honestly, I secretly love this stuff. I’ve had serious discussions with people about assorted UFO theories, my personal favorite being that the sightings are not of extraterrestrial craft but interdimensional ones: the “aliens” are visitors from parallel universes. Plausible!
Not really. The Pentagon shot down pretty much all speculation about UFOs when it released a report on the topic last year. In fact, the Journal’s investigation was spurred by disclosures in the report that some of the claims investigated were, um… part of the psyop. So yes, the government has been lying to us about the flying saucers. But it doesn’t take long to study the basic physics and learn that manipulating gravity without accessing a gargantuan amount of energy is impossible. The truth is out there: falling prey to the belief that UFOs are even a thing is like running a willing psyop on yourself.
