But what WSJ reported does shine a new light on old news, and it’s worth taking this report at face value before trying to think of any arguments in favor or opposed to it. The WSJ reports that the Area 51 lore stems from a deliberate attempt by the military to gin up UFO conspiracies by giving fake pictures of UFOs to a local bar, because “Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world.”
By all accounts, this is a thorough report, 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.” The implication here is that WSJ got access to some documents from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), because the second act of it is an interview with Sean Kirkpatrick, “a precise, bespectacled scientist who once spent years studying vibrations in laser crystals” who was AARO’s first director.
Kirkpatrick goes on to tell the WSJ anecdotes about reflections of the sun from Starlink satellites explaining “many pilot accounts of floating orbs,” as well as “a bizarre hazing ritual…dubbed Yankee Blue,” where 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 WSJ reports that “Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates.”
The article closes with a story supposedly explaining the famed incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967 where Air Force Captain Robert Salas and many others said they saw a glowing oval object appear above the gate, and then all ten nuclear missiles were soon disabled. Kirkpatrick told the WSJ that this was the Pentagon testing an “exotic electromagnetic generator that simulated this pulse of disruptive energy” that could disable nuclear weapons. Its ability to neutralize America’s first-strike nuclear capability in war is why this was kept so secret, according to Kirkpatrick.
OK now we can start to critique or support it (you can guess which direction I lean by the order I put those words in). Again, I wholeheartedly agree with the WSJ’s report that “The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames” of UFO conspiracies because there’s tons of evidence proving this to be true. In 1997, the CIA released a study that, according to the New York Times, found “the military lied to the American public about the true nature of many unidentified flying objects in an effort to hide its growing fleets of spy planes.” I cannot stress enough the degree to which this supposed big reveal is some of the oldest news imaginable in the field of UAP study.
Second, anyone who has ever dug into this mess knows that one of the first things you learn is that all studies from Project Blue Book like Jacques Vallée worked on to Luis Elizondo’s AATIP to any of MUFON’s investigations outside the government reveal that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95 percent of UFO reports prove to be explainable. Anecdotal evidence about prosaic explanations is generally useless because like the government lying to us—we already know—and the fact that Kirkpatrick and the WSJ do not bring any statistical data to contextualize Kirkpatrick’s claims of “many [explainable] pilot accounts” is also suspect. How many are explainable? Because if it’s 95 percent, we can also file that under old news being pushed as new news. But we don’t know because WSJ’s report never puts a number to these claims.
Third, the public UAP report that Kirkpatrick and AARO published contained a litany of basic factual errors and glaring mistakes, which really calls their credibility into question. It wrongly stated that Harry Reid, the very famous former Democratic Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, was from New Mexico. There were a multitude of broken links in it, and it also listed the wrong date for the famed 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting that kicked off this modern era of UFO fascination, among other simple facts it got wrong. Last year, Christopher Mellon, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, authored an extensive critique of AARO’s “seriously flawed” report that detailed the staggering number of mistakes it made.
When you miss that many basic things about names, dates and places, it is very difficult to trust the conclusions you come to based off those faulty facts. This is not an unfounded assertion, as the government has revealed itself to be untrustworthy in their UFO reports in the past. The 1966 Low Memo reassured University of Colorado administrators that the Condon Committee would return a thesis that UFOs are bunk while the government study was still being conducted, and in late January 1967, Edward Condon said the subject was “nonsense…but I’m not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.” If you are reaching conclusions before you finish your scientific studies, you are not doing science, you are taking part in a messaging campaign.
Fourth, “a bizarre hazing ritual” in the Air Force called “Yankee Blue” that has absolutely no explanation for why it exists, yet wholly endangers America’s ability to collect good intelligence by misinforming every new intelligence officer doing highly secretive work, is not exactly a convincing argument to explain the litany of people both in and outside the Air Force reporting on their experiences with UAPs (the Navy has actually been the biggest source for this new age of disclosure). My bullshit detector went ballistic when I read that paragraph.
And lastly, the notion that the military is testing new technology on its own people is not totally without precedent, but when I had this discussion with my UAP source when they pointed me in the direction of US Air Force Plant 42 almost a year ago, they cast doubt on these kinds of claims. They said that they could not rule it out, but knew of no specific instances where new advanced technology was tested on unwitting members of the armed forces conducting their training exercises. They noted that the government creates super top-secret areas to test this stuff away from prying eyes for a reason, and that even if they had good reason to test things on unwitting pilots, there is a huge risk that comes with creating more witnesses to something the government doesn’t want people to know about, and the benefit of testing it on them would need to outweigh that risk they are taking.
Kirkpatrick’s Credibility Is the Main Problem Here
Frankly, Sean Kirkpatrick has proven himself to be biased and untrustworthy on this subject. From AARO to all his interviews on UFOs, his argument has amounted to ‘I am 100 percent certain there’s nothing to see here, it’s all just total made-up hysteria and confusion from people like the commander of the Black Aces,’ and his shockingly sloppy AARO report really harms his credibility. It’s difficult not to hear the echoes of Edward Condon every time Kirkpatrick opens his mouth. My general rule in who to believe in this dark forest is to never trust anyone whose finances or reputation are based on a wholly conclusive argument to this mystery in any direction, and Kirkpatrick qualifies for that judgement in my book.
The central thesis of people like Kirkpatrick who push anecdotal evidence as unimpeachable data is that our armed forces are filled with blithering idiots who fail to learn the basic lessons in their training. If David Fravor, Commander of the Black Aces and witness to the Tic Tac reported in that famed 2017 NYT report, is not a dependable witness up in the air, then there is no such thing. If Kirkpatrick’s characterization of our armed forces is correct, then America is truly screwed if we ever find ourselves in a hot shooting war with another country because apparently our pilots are confused by reflections of the sun.
But what degrades this WSJ report more than anything isn’t necessarily Kirkpatrick’s lack of credibility or the story’s insistence on old news being new news, but the language it uses to describe people who don’t align with Kirkpatrick’s beliefs on this, demonstrating a clear bias in how the reporters want to frame this story. It refers to those investigating this subject as “the UFO conspiracy industry” and it calls Robert Salas, now 84 years old but who first reported his experience at Malmstrom Air Force Base over thirty years ago, an “octogenarian” in a clear attempt to paint him as a confused old man. I can’t imagine many other contexts where the Wall Street Journal would be so insultingly dismissive of a military veteran who served on a nuclear missile base during the Cold War.
George Knapp, the famous UFO reporter who has won many awards for reporting on things other than UAPs, said on his podcast Weaponized that the argument behind the central scoop the WSJ leads with is wrong too. The Las Vegas-based Knapp more than anyone has investigated Area 51, and in his 2005 KLAS report on it, he talked about Chuck Clark, an “Area 51 gadfly” who discovered that the military had hidden sensors on public land around Area 51. Clark wrote a popular book that still is sold online to this day called The Area 51 & S-4 Handbook that draws a picture around the area from his investigations which discovered these sensors. The idea that Area 51 is a phenomenon solely because the military planted that notion is simply not true, as there are much more than just a few fake pictures in a bar that drove the public’s imagination over it.
Robert Hastings wrote the exhaustingly researched book, UFOs and Nukes, where he spoke to military veterans and studied documentation spanning over multiple decades to conclude that there is some sort of correlation between UAPs and nuclear sites, and the subtext of the last section in the WSJ report is that Kirkpatrick is rebuking that entire book. Hastings wrote a response to this WSJ report, saying he e-mailed the Journal’s Corrections Editor and the reporters on the story, “criticizing one particular part of the factually-inaccurate, arguably-absurd piece.” Hastings writes that Kirkpatrick and the WSJ’s claim that an EMP brought down the nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base conflicts with a story he was told by Captain Robert C. Jamison who also served on the base. Hastings writes that “According to Captain Jamison, multiple targeting teams, including his, were given an unprecedented ‘special UFO briefing’ prior to being released to the field, during which it was stated that a ‘UFO’ had caused the multiple-missile failures.”
I do not want to question all the details of the WSJ’s reporting (mainly just the “bizarre” Yankee Blue story they can’t even explain and Kirkpatrick’s EMP claim that’s in dispute with witness testimony), and I fully trust that Kirkpatrick’s debunking examples and WSJ’s reports of the government willfully pushing a UFO narrative around Area 51 are true. What I take umbrage at is the assertion that this is new, unique, or a damning indictment of the “UFO conspiracy industry.” These neat little rhetorical tricks to delegitimize military witnesses like David Fravor and Robert Salas degrade the WSJ’s reporting, especially when Kirkpatrick gets the genius crystals scientist treatment. It’s difficult not to contextualize Kirkpatrick’s presence in this article within the informational warfare that the WSJ is reporting on.
The thing I try to stay most alert on when diving into this ocean of bullshit is how much narrative-shaping the intelligence services have over this subject. Disinformation warfare aside, UFOs are a terrific way to plant a very unique lie in another country’s intelligence apparatus, and then track it as the other country digests it, revealing many basic aspects of how adversaries collect intelligence on a range of subjects that have nothing to do with weird stuff in the sky, and Vallée has written about how this is likely the genesis of a lot of lore in this subject. UFOs are a minefield of bullshit not because of the crazies and all their wild theories that stray from what little we do know, but because three-letter agencies around the world make it so for a variety of self-interested reasons. Given the staggering sloppiness of Kirkpatrick and AARO’s report and the bias demonstrated within WSJ’s article piggybacking off his conclusions, it’s difficult not to wonder if he is part of one of those government efforts to deceive the public.
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