In my earlier post "Mystery Orbs Should Make Us More Humble," I discussed a very unsatisfactory article written by the former "UAP grand chief" Sean Kirkpatrick. The US Department of Defense had an office dedicated to investigating reports of UFOs (or UAP, variously defined as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). The office was officially called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. Sean Kirkpatrick led the office in 2022 and 2023, but resigned around the end of 2023.
Kirkpatrick wrote an article that appeared in Scientific American, one entitled "Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter." My post on the article noted that Kirkpatrick made some statements in that article that made him sound ill-suited for the role that he had, partially because of an attitude that you might call a "why-am-I-wasting-my-time-on-this-stuff?" attitude.
Now we have a big new article involving Sean Kirkpatrick. But it is not one he has written himself. Sean has teamed up with a Wall Street Journal writer, who has written a UFO/UAP article in which Sean has a starring role. It is a very strange mishmash entitled "The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology." I call it a mishmash because of a few little scraps here and there which do not amount to anything that sounds like any unified coherent plausible narrative.
The first anecdote told by the story seems hard-to-believe and not very important even if it is true. We read about some colonel who supposedly gave a bar owner fake UFO photos, which the bar owner put on his walls. The bar was near Area 51. We are told that this was done so that people would think sightings of strange craft around that area were UFOs, rather than suspect the truth: the government was testing a new type of aircraft.
The story sounds far-fetched. If you wanted to spread misinformation about what was seen around area 51, why do something so ineffective as making fake photos that would go up on the wall of a bar?
There follows in the article paragraph after paragraph not giving specific examples, but trying to create the idea that government officials may have done something to create false ideas about UFOs, maybe to confuse people so that they would not know about classified information.
We have this far-fetched account, which includes no specific confessions by anyone involved:
"But Kirkpatrick soon discovered that some of the obsession with secrecy verged on the farcical. A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick’s investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses.
It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual.
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."
The account sounds hard to believe. Why would someone mislead "commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs" into thinking that there was some captured UFO that was being reverse-engineered? The explanation of a "hazing ritual" makes no sense at all. A "hazing ritual" is some trick or ordeal typically pulled on people at the bottom of some academic or military hierarchy, usually so that people higher up on such a hierarchy can remind the people at the bottom of their lower status. It sounds unbelievable that such a "hazing ritual" would be applied to "commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs."
We have a quote that may initially sound impressive, but which is actually unimpressive, because it does not come from a named witness, and does not speak precisely. The quote is this:
"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.“
But what exactly is the "it" being referred to here from this anonymous source? We don't know. So the quote means little.
The story ends with an account that does not sound right. We read about how a mysterious disabling of a nuclear launch system was associated with the sighting of one or more mysterious light anomalies some thought were UFOs. The article attempts to persuade us that the explanation was some weird device the government was using to test the effect of electromagnetic pulse effects (EMP). But the article fails to link in any convincing way the construction and activation of such a device with the reported events of nuclear launch systems being mysteriously deactivated. An article by Kevin Wright points out one reason the claim does not hold water: any device testing EMP effects would probably not merely temporarily turn off a nuclear launch system, but also do permanent damage to such a system. It would be crazy for the government to be deliberately creating EMP effects near nuclear launch systems.
We are left with a mishmash of bits and pieces that fails to add up to some convincing narrative of the government systematically providing disinformation to mislead people about UFOs. The story mostly sounds like a deal in which Sean Kirkpatrick is trying to further convince people that there's nothing to UFOs or UAPs, as he tried to do in his Scientific American article in 2024. The Wall Street Journal article's main photo is a giant photo of Sean.
I do know this much: US government web sites continue to state enormously false claims about the nature of the human genome consisting of DNA and its genes. I documented this false information in my post "The US Government's False Claims About DNA." That post was written in 2022, and the very false claims I documented still exist on the US government web pages I cited. We have heard some claims that the new US administration is attempting to correct pages with false biology information, but no such correction has occurred in the pages I discuss in that post.
I cannot think of any reason why anyone at the US government would have engaged in "hazing rituals" to deceive "new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs," as the recent Wall Street Journal article claims. I do understand well a reason why biology authorities would be making false claims about the nature of DNA. That reason is explained in my widely-read post here.
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