The Department of Defense's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office was established in 2022 for the purpose of investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena, better known as unidentified flying objects.

In the wake of high-profile allegations by former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch and other Pentagon officials suggesting the U.S. government secretly obtained and reverse-engineered alien technology, the AARO reviewed — as required by the National Defense Authorization Act — all official government investigations into UAP conducted since 1945, researching both classified and unclassified archives and conducting numerous interviews.

The AARO claimed in a report last year that it "found no evidence that any [U.S. government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology."

The report noted further that the AARO found no evidence for claims that the government and private companies have been reverse-engineering alien technology.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this report constituted a cover-up of sorts, as it omitted a number of interesting discoveries the Pentagon investigators made over the course of their review, namely those regarding alien-themed psyops conducted by the military.

It turns out that in a handful of cases dating all the way back to the 1950s, the Pentagon apparently created and/or nurtured false narratives concerning alien technology in order to protect man-made secret weapons projects, to put America's adversaries off the trail of potential national security vulnerabilities, and, in some cases, just to mess with newly assigned officers.

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Hazing the new guys

Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the AARO from July 2022 until December 2023, reportedly discovered that some military officials' deeply held conviction that the military had special alien projects was the result of a "bizarre hazing ritual."

Over the course of decades, certain new commanders of one of the Air Force's classified programs were provided with a picture of what appeared to be a flying saucer during their induction briefings. The officers were reportedly told the aircraft was an "antigravity maneuvering vehicle" and that the program they were joining was part of a broader effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the aircraft.

'We know it went on for decades.'

After being confronted with what appeared to be evidence of alien technology, the commanders were told never to speak a word of it again.

Many officers told about the alien technology never learned that what they were told was apparently bogus — that is, until former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's office handed down the order to end the hazing ritual immediately.

Despite the ritual's retirement, former officers interviewed by Kirkpatrick's investigators apparently maintained the belief that the briefing and the claims therein were legitimate.

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  Bettman/Getty Images

When former President Joe Biden's director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, asked an official about the ritual, the official reportedly told her, "We know it went on for decades. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real."

A DOD spokeswoman told the Journal that the AARO had in fact found evidence of fake alien-themed classified program materials.

UFOs, not Nighthawks

Investigators at the AARO discovered that in the 1980s, an Air Force colonel disseminated fake photos of flying saucers at a bar near Area 51, the famous Air Force facility 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas.

The photos, which the colonel strategically provided to the bar's owner, reportedly went up on the walls, simultaneously feeding the local imagination about what kinds of activities were executed at the mysterious base and discrediting legitimate insights.

'He was screaming in the phone, terrified.'

The now-retired officer told the AARO investigators in 2023 that the purpose of the counter-information campaign was to mislead the world — particularly the Soviet Union — about what was actually being developed and tested at Area 51: the Lockheed F-117A stealth attack aircraft.

According to Lockheed Martin, the first flight of the F-117A took place in 1981. While it achieved operational capacity two years later, the craft and its development were not publicly acknowledged until 1988. It saw combat for the first time during Operation Just Cause on Dec. 19, 1989, participating in military strikes in Panama.

A terrestrial explanation

Kirkpatrick reportedly came across the tale of an Air Force captain's 1967 encounter with a glowing reddish-orange oval at a nuclear missile base in Montana.

One evening, Robert Salas, now 84, was parked at the controls for 10 nuclear missiles in a bunker, ready to lob weapons of mass destruction Moscow's way. However, he received a panicked call from the guard station topside. Apparently a red oval was glowing just above the installation's front gate.

Salas previously told the Calgary Herald that the non-commissioned security officer up above said the object "was making unusual, controlled maneuvers, such as flying very fast, coming to a dead stop, then reversing course and making 90-degree turns."

"He was screaming in the phone, terrified. ... I told him to secure the facility at all costs," said Salas.

Shortly thereafter, the control system for the missiles was disabled.

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 Photo by: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

It wasn't at all clear to Salas what had happened, and he wouldn't soon find out. Salas, later told never to discuss the incident, could only speculate — and of course, he and his comrades did just that.

Kirkpatrick and his team discovered that the American government, not Martians, had disabled the missile system as part of an experiment to determine whether the missiles' concrete and steel containment was sufficiently thick to protect them against the electromagnetic waves created by a nearby nuclear detonation.

'The Air Force shut us out of any information.'

To find out, the Air Force reportedly developed a special electromagnetic pulse generator and activated it on a portable platform 60 feet above the nuclear installation. Once activated and powered up, it apparently glowed. The electromagnetic pulses were fired down cables connected to the bunker, disabling the weapons systems.

It seems there were no aliens — just Uncle Sam making sure it could answer one nuclear strike with another. However, Salas remains convinced that travelers from a galaxy far, far away attempted to intervene to prevent a nuclear war.

"We were never briefed on the activities that were going on," Salas told the Journal. "The Air Force shut us out of any information."

Salas told the Calgary Herald that his Feb. 15, 2023, phone call with an AARO official regarding his 1967 experience was "a milestone" because he had never previously told his story to a government office.

The Journal indicated that interviews with 24 current and former American officials, scientists, and military contractors and a small mountain of relevant documents served as the basis for the account of these counter-information efforts.

Elements of the military, particularly at the Air Force, reportedly sought to hide some details about these counter-information efforts, believing they could hurt careers and expose secret programs. That would explain why they were omitted from the 2024 AARO report.

While there might yet be proof of aliens, it appears that what Salas saw, what was shown in photos at a bar near Area 51, and what was described to generations of new commanders in the USAF wasn't it.

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