Evidence is emerging in June 2025 that US  government efforts to propagate UFO disinformation date back all the way to the 1950s. The WSJ account is based on interviews with two dozen current and former U.S. officials, scientists and military contractors involved in the inquiry, as well as thousands of pages of documents, recordings, emails and text messages.  At times, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen [of flying extraterrestrial saucers] 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…

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 it released about UFOS that could have helped put some UFO rumors to rest, both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment… The Air Force in particular pushed to omit some details it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage careers…

As Sean Kirkpatrick head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) pursued his investigation between 2022 and 2023, he started to uncover a hall of mirrors within the Pentagon, cloaked in official and nonofficial cover. On one level, the secrecy was understandable. The U.S., after all, had been locked in an existential battle with the Soviet Union for decades, each side determined to win the upper hand in the race for ever-more-exotic weapons….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. …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. 

Excerpt from Joel Schectman et al., The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology, WSJ, June 6, 2025