Outside the Beltway

Pentagon Fueled Area 51 Conspiracy

An Air Force colonel spread misinformation to hide the stealth program.

James Joyner · Saturday, June 7, 2025 · 8 comments

WSJ (“The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology“):

A truth tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself.

The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology.

But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. 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. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.

This episode, reported now for the first time, was just one of a series of discoveries the Pentagon team made as it investigated decades of claims that Washington was hiding what it knew about extraterrestrial life. That effort culminated in a report, released last year by the Defense Department, that found allegations of a government coverup to be baseless.

In fact, a Wall Street Journal investigation reveals, the report itself amounted to a coverup—but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe. The public disclosure left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.

At the same time, the very nature of Pentagon operations—an opaque bureaucracy that kept secret programs embedded within secret programs, cloaked in cover stories—created fertile ground for the myths to spread.

[…]

Now, evidence is emerging that government efforts to propagate UFO mythology date back all the way to the 1950s.

This 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, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen 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. Stories tended to take on a life of their own, such as the three-decade journey of a purported piece of space metal that turned out to be nothing of the sort. And one long-running practice was more like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control.

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 that could have helped put some UFO rumors to rest, both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment, the Journal investigation found. The Air Force in particular pushed to omit some details it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage careers.

The lack of full transparency has only given more fuel to conspiracy theories. Members of Congress have formed a caucus, composed mainly of Republicans, to examine unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, in bureaucratic speak. The caucus has demanded the intelligence community disclose which agencies “are involved with UAP crash retrieval programs.”

MAGA skepticism about the “deep state” further feeds the notion that government bureaucrats have been keeping those secrets from the American public. At a November hearing of two House Oversight subcommittees, Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, cast doubt on the Pentagon’s report. “I’m not a mathematician, but I can tell you that doesn’t add up,” she said. 

Winston Churchill reportedly declared, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” I suppose the same is true of cold wars. Still, this sort of thing is fraught.

In a democracy, the going assumption is that the people have a right to know what their government is doing so that they can make informed voting choices. This is complicated by the need for keep secrets from potential adversaries, particularly in the military and national security spaces. We have long accepted that some information is sufficiently sensitive that it must be classified, with its release only to those who have been thoroughly vetted and have a Need To Know. For various reasons, this inevitably results in gross overclassification.

Secrecy is one thing. Outright deception is another. The latter surely requires a higher threshold, at least when the target is one’s own citizenry. Offhand, concealing the development of the stealth program, which was a game-changer in the competition with the Soviets, strikes me as sufficiently important to justify it.

However, the existence of stealth aircraft, dating back to the F-117, has been publicly known for decades. Hell, we retired the aircraft from operational service almost two decades ago now. It’s not at all clear to me why the deception couldn’t have been revealed long ago. I can think of no obvious reason why it should have been actively covered up as recently as last year.