A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the Pentagon itself fueled much of the “mythology” surrounding UFOs. Citing current and former government sources, reporters Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha write that a decades-long hazing ritual left “hundreds and hundreds” of Air Force personnel convinced that the Pentagon harbored a “secret alien project.”
The report also alleges that an Air Force colonel intentionally stoked UFO speculation at a Nevada bar in the 1980s as cover for the development of the first stealth fighter. Similarly, their sources claim that there is a “terrestrial explanation” for a prominent incident involving UFOs and nuclear weapons.
While each of these points merits close attention, the Journal’s reporting must also be scrutinized for what it omits.
Schectman and Viswanatha suggest that “MAGA skepticism about the ‘deep state’” is motivating Republican members of Congress to investigate government involvement with UFOs. Yet they make no mention of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds’s (R-S.D.) bipartisan 64-page UAP Disclosure Act, which alleges that a secret government “legacy program” has recovered UFOs and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”
In a recent interview on NewsNation, Rounds confirmed that he and Schumer will reintroduce the legislation in the coming weeks. Schumer alleged on the Senate floor in December 2023 that the federal government has “gathered a great deal of information about [UFOs] over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people” — and, per “multiple credible sources,” with Congress as well.
Moreover, the authors omit eyebrow-raising comments from lawmakers and officials describing individuals alleging “firsthand” knowledge of unreported UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. This includes comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), current director of the Pentagon UFO analysis office Jon Kosloski, veteran congressional staffer Kirk McConnell and former intelligence official David Grusch.
The fact that multiple high-ranking officials have claimed firsthand knowledge of secret UFO programs does not square easily with a “bizarre hazing ritual” involving bogus “alien projects.”
According to the Journal, Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office, uncovered broad hazing practices in which “thousands” of Air Force officers were briefed on secret “alien” activities over several decades. The prank apparently included requiring personnel to sign non-disclosure agreements that carried the threat of jail or execution, leaving officers “scared to death” if they revealed the nonexistent program.
But no evidence of such systemic, widespread hazing about extraterrestrials has yet emerged. Nor can Kirkpatrick and his former office keep their stories straight. A year after supposedly discovering such extensive hazing activity, Kirkpatrick and the Pentagon claimed that longstanding allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs are the product of “circular reporting” from a “small group” of alien believers. Yet now, supposedly, “thousands” of personnel were led to believe that such programs exist. Which one is it?
Kirk McConnell recently retired after serving 37 years on the congressional Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, where he held the highest, most compartmented security clearances. He was also one of the Senate’s lead staffers on UFOs.
McConnell told us that he is “confident” that he “was never told by Kirkpatrick or anyone else from [the Pentagon’s UFO office] or the Department of Defense that the Department had uncovered and documented a significant number of instances where Department of Defense officials actively and knowingly spread misinformation about UAP in order to provide cover for special access programs or to play jokes on their colleagues.”
Similarly, we know Air Force personnel who have observed UFOs, but none who have received any briefings on bogus “alien” programs. The Pentagon’s UFO analysis program, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, must clarify the scope and scale of any such hazing rituals immediately.
At the same time, an Air Force colonel disseminating UFO pictures at a Nevada bar in the 1980s, ostensibly as a cover for the then-nascent Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter program, appears to violate prohibitions on domestic influence operations by the military.
Finally, Schectman and Viswanatha report that investigators discovered a “terrestrial explanation” for one of the better-known incidents involving UFOs and nuclear weapons. In March 1967, according to former Air Force missile and targeting officers, 10 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles shut down from alert status as security guards observed a UFO hovering above the front gate of a missile facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. The Journal’s sources claim that an unannounced electromagnetic pulse test caused the “UFO” and subsequent shutdown of the missiles.
But the government documents Schectman and Viswanatha cite in support of this supposed explanation in fact debunk it. The documents state that the “proposal for the design, development, fabrication, and testing” of the system supposedly responsible for the Malmstrom UFO incident was not submitted until 1971, four years after the event. How could this system, which was not developed and tested until 1973, cause an incident that had occurred six years earlier?
Moreover, Schectman and Viswanatha suggest that this electromagnetic generator created the object observed hovering over the missile facility’s main gate. “When activated,” they write, “this device, placed on a portable platform 60 feet above the facility, would gather power until it glowed, sometimes with a blinding orange light.”
Let’s set aside that the system apparently had not been tested, let alone proposed, when the Malmstrom incident occurred. The notion is preposterous that such a large electrical generator, requiring 10 3,250-pound concrete braces, could be constructed just outside the front gate of a Malmstrom Air Force Base’s Missile Alert Facility undetected by the armed guards that patrol the area.
Similarly, it strains credulity to suggest that an electromagnetic pulse, which disables and destroys sensitive electronic equipment, would be tested against an active nuclear missile facility at the height of the Cold War. Additional documentation cited by Schectman describes testing such destructive electrical pulses only under meticulously controlled conditions and environments — and certainly not against nuclear weapons and unsuspecting Air Force officers.
Intentionally or not, Schectman and Viswanatha’s reduction of the well-documented UFO-nuclear nexus to a single 1967 incident — with a questionable “explanation,” no less — does their readers a disservice. So does their failure to mention that the Pentagon now admits openly that it is stumped by “several dozen” “true anomalies” and “really peculiar” UFO incidents.
The same unexplained phenomena perplexing the government today have been reported since at least the 1940s.
Rear Admiral (ret.) Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., is a former acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce and a Navy oceanographer. He is on the advisory boards for the Sol Foundation and the UAP Disclosure Fund. Christopher Mellon was the minority staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for intelligence. He is the chairman of the board of the UAP Disclosure Fund. Marik von Rennenkampff was an analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and an appointee at the Department of Defense. He is a contributor to the Sol Foundation.
