A shocking report has revealed that the Pentagon secretly planted a conspiracy theory about UFOs at Area 51 to conceal a secret weapons program.
A 2024 report found that some of the most popular conspiracy theories about unidentified flying objects (UFOs), including claims about aliens at Area 51 in Nevada, were deliberately promoted by the Pentagon to conceal secret military programs.
According to a review published by the Wall Street Journal , a Pentagon investigation revealed that an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51 in the 1980s and gave the owner fake photos of UFOs near the secret site. The retired colonel later admitted to investigators that he was on an official mission to spread misinformation to cover up the government's testing of the first F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.
Military officials at the time believed that concealing new technology from the Soviet Union during the Cold War would be easier by cloaking it in conspiracy theories surrounding Area 51.
This incident is just one example of several cases cited in the report, in which US government agencies allegedly exaggerated the "UFO myth" to protect their military assets.
According to the report, there are other military attempts to cover up secret projects through conspiracy theories, but these have not been publicly revealed.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the All-Area Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was tasked with analyzing thousands of UFO documents and theories in 2022. As his team reviewed decades of letters and memos within the Department of Defense, it emerged that some of these theories had their origins in the Pentagon itself.
In one case, Kirkpatrick's team discovered that the Air Force had used an unconventional internal "prank" tactic, providing individuals with false information about a fictitious unit called "Yankee Blue," which was allegedly investigating UFOs. The targets were instructed not to divulge any details, and some never realized the plot was a hoax.
Interestingly, this strange tradition continued until recently, prompting the Pentagon to issue an order in 2023 to halt it permanently.
The motives behind these false briefings remain unclear, with some suggesting they were intended to test loyalty or deliberately spread misinformation.
According to the report, Kirkpatrick also revealed that the government deliberately failed to inform eyewitnesses of the truth about secret military projects. Among these witnesses was former Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who said he witnessed an unidentified flying object landing over a nuclear missile test site in Montana in 1967, with its light disabling ten nuclear missiles and all electrical systems.
Salas was ordered not to discuss the incident, and for years he believed he had witnessed alien visitors interfering in the Cold War. However, the AARO team later discovered that what he had seen was a secret electromagnetic pulse weapon test designed to test the resistance of American nuclear silos to atomic radiation.
Because the experiment failed, the authorities at the time decided to keep it secret, leaving Salas and others in the dark to figure out for themselves what had happened.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed that not all of the AARO's findings have been made public yet, but promised more transparency in its next report.
"We are committed to publishing the second part of the Historical Record report, which will include the AARO's findings on reports of hoaxes and fake material," the ministry said in a statement.
