The Wall Street Journal has reported that the U.S. government, at times, played an active role in creating and spreading some of the UFO conspiracy theories it would later seek to discredit.
According to newly uncovered findings, a Pentagon office tasked with reviewing claims of hidden extraterrestrial programs found that the origins of several long-standing rumors can be traced back to deliberate disinformation campaigns initiated by the U.S. military itself.
One particularly striking case occurred in the 1980s near the top-secret Area 51 military installation in Nevada. An Air Force officer visited a local bar and handed the owner doctored photographs that appeared to show flying saucers. These images soon became embedded in local lore and contributed to the broader UFO mythology that surrounds the site. However, in 2023, the officer publicly admitted that the photos were faked.
He revealed that the intention behind the deception was to mislead the public and divert attention from classified military projects—specifically, the development of the then-secret F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft. During the Cold War, military officials believed it was more beneficial to allow civilians to believe they had seen something extraterrestrial rather than risk exposing sensitive U.S. defense technologies to foreign adversaries.
The findings were part of a broader investigation conducted by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a specialized Pentagon entity established by Congress to evaluate reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). AARO investigators were granted unprecedented access to decades' worth of classified documents, secret programs, and intelligence records related to aerial sightings and alleged extraterrestrial activity.
In its first public report released in 2024, AARO concluded that there was no verifiable evidence to support claims that the U.S. government was secretly harboring alien technology or running clandestine extraterrestrial programs. However, The Wall Street Journal now reports that the official Pentagon assessment may have omitted crucial context.
According to the Journal’s investigation, while the AARO report dismissed alien-related allegations as unsubstantiated, it did not fully disclose the extent to which U.S. military agencies had actively cultivated and promoted the myths in earlier decades as part of broader efforts to shield classified defense initiatives from public and foreign scrutiny.
These revelations offer a more complex picture of the government’s historical engagement with the UFO phenomenon suggesting that, far from being passive observers of conspiracy theories, U.S. officials in some cases helped manufacture them for strategic purposes.