From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 19 No 3 (June 2025)
In 2020, just as the first term of his presidency was ending, Donald Trump mandated the release of classified UFO documents from US intelligence agencies. Despite numerous witness hearings held in the US Congress and the establishment in 2022 of AARO, the US government’s All-Domain Anomaly Research Office, the public has yet to learn anything new. The question the world needs to ask is: why haven’t those documents been made available?
AARO is not the USA’s first official UFO investigation body. That honour belongs to ‘Project Saucer’, established by the US Air Force in 1948 to deal with the surge of sightings that followed Kenneth Arnold’s infamous ‘flying saucer’ sighting in June 1947 and the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, also in 1947. One year later, ‘Project Saucer’ morphed into ‘Project Sign’, which was tasked with determining whether some UFOs could be spaceships from another world.
It is often said that the modern era of Ufology began when Arnold reported his seminal sighting. UFOs were, of course, reported much earlier, but those sightings were easier for authorities to ignore. By 1947, when UFOs started crashing and when the media had attained a global reach, the authorities realised that something undesirable was occurring and that action needed to be taken. 1947 should have marked the start of an exciting chapter in UFO research; instead, it signified the beginning of the cover-up – or what others might refer to as the UFO conspiracy.
Initially, at least, the team at Project Sign was of the opinion that some UFOs were “real aircraft” of “unfamiliar configuration,” and delivered a report titled ‘Estimate of the Situation’ that included the statement that “based on the evidence…UFOs were alien spacecraft,” and “if there is an extraterrestrial civilisation which can make such objects… then it is most probable that its development is far in advance of ours. This argument can be supported on probability alone, without recourse to astronomical hypothesis.”
Despite these initial and somewhat promising findings, in 1948, a fly named General Hoyt Vandenburg landed in the ointment. Vandenburg removed UFOs from the public domain by declaring that UFOs were a military problem, a change in classification that led to the wholesale withholding of information from the public and initiated the active dissemination of disinformation. Vandenburg also instituted a policy that “the interplanetary hypothesis” was to be excluded from consideration.
In 1949, Project Sign concluded and Project Grudge began, announcing that the US Air Force “had solved all UFO sightings.” This pronouncement was patently premature, as UFOs continued to be reported, indicating that the issue had clearly not been resolved. Grudge subsequently evolved into Project Blue Book, which became the public face of US Air Force UFO research.
Project Blue Book commenced in 1952 and continued until January 1970. Blue Book was the longest (as far as we know) government UFO research project in the United States, and its status remained top secret for decades. At its beginning, Blue Book was led by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was known to be open-minded about the subject. The famous Dr. J. Allen Hynek was appointed as Blue Book’s technical advisor. Although he had also served as an advisor on Projects Grudge and Sign and was notoriously sceptical at first, a number of inexplicable UFO sightings changed Hynek’s mind. He went on to develop the “close encounter” system (CE 1-3), and Ruppelt later wrote a book called The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
These were the best years of Blue Book’s life according to reports because the personnel pursued the topic with open minds. Despite this open-mindedness, Blue Book was hampered in its research from day one. Vandenburg’s earlier rejection of the ‘interplanetary hypothesis’ during Project Sign meant that an undercurrent of hostility towards the subject permeated all levels of the Air Force, and it is contended that not all UFO reports or data were made available to Blue Book for study. It is almost certain that they had no physical evidence to work with, despite the purported UFO crash at Roswell and a second crash at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948.
Using the limited sightings data they had access to (not enough, according to Hynek, to come to any kind of conclusion), in 1955 Project Blue Book announced in their “Special Report No. 14” that the “majority of [UFO] reports could be accounted for as misinterpretations of known objects, a few as the result of mild hysteria, and a very few as the result of unfamiliar meteorological phenomena and light aberrations. However, a significant number of reports by reliable observers remained unexplained.”
After establishing a sightings categorisation system that included all the usual suspects – balloons, clouds, stars, ball lightning, swamp gas, and ‘psychological manifestations’ (which included such things as religious fanaticism, over-active imaginations, and mental aberrations) – the Air Force found that the category of unknowns accounted for 9% of sightings, which was far too many for comfort. They therefore decided that better reporting skills were required, which resulted in the development of new investigation tools and the delegation of UFO investigations to just one squadron. This strategy concentrated the responsibility for UFO research into the hands of a tiny group of people and reduced the field of ‘unknowns’ to a minuscule 3%, after which the USAF confidently declared it was “improbable that [UFOs] represent observations of technological developments outside the range of present-day scientific knowledge.”
Despite the declared “improbability” of UFOs being outside the range of 1950s scientific knowledge (oh, the ego!), the 3% of unknowns weighed heavily on Blue Book’s minds. To combat this, it was decided to develop categories for the unknowns in an attempt to construct a “model of a flying saucer.” This proved entirely impossible, because out of the 3% of sightings deemed ‘unknown’, the variety of reported UFO shapes and sizes – boomerangs, saucers, spheres, cross and cigar shapes – foiled the attempt and led to the conclusion that this wide variety represented “observations of not one but several classes of objects that might have been flying saucers.” [Emphasis added.]
Enter the CIA
In 1952, while Blue Book’s Special Report No. 14 was still in progress, a discussion paper titled “Flying Saucers” was being distributed at the CIA. This discussion paper dismissed civilian UFO sightings as “temperature inversions” and “ionised clouds,” while also highlighting the most sensational military UFO encounters of the time – the death of Captain Thomas F. Mantell and the “Fargo dog fight.”
Mantell died when his aircraft crashed while attempting to intercept a UFO out of Godman Field, Kentucky, in January 1948. The Fargo dogfight occurred over Fargo, North Dakota, also in 1948, when a moving light was pursued for over 20 minutes by a Lieutenant Gorman at 17,000 feet. At that time, USAF pilots had been ordered to intercept UFOs with a mandate not to shoot. In 1953, it actually became “a crime for military personnel to discuss classified UFO reports with unauthorised persons. Violations faced up to two years in prison and/or fines of up to $10,000.”
The CIA discussion paper categorised the types of UFOs commonly reported during the late 1940s and very early 1950s. Mirroring exactly the types of UFOs still seen today, the paper described daytime sightings of spherical and elliptical objects with ‘bright metallic’ lustres, “some small (2 or 3 feet across), most estimated at 100 feet in diameter, and a few 1000 feet wide.” They went on to describe variants in this group such as “torpedos, triangles, pencils, [and] even mattress shapes.”
Even the night-time UFOs haven’t changed over the years, and the CIA reported lights “of various luminosities, such as green, flaming-red or blue-white fire balls, moving points of lights and luminous streamers.” Speed and manoeuvrability remain unchanged from present-day sightings, with “three general levels of speed” listed – “hovering; moderate; …and stupendous, up to 18,000 miles per hour. Violent manoeuvring was reported… and accelerations have been given as high as 20 g’s.”
Compared to the information found in the Blue Book report, the CIA either knew more about UFOs than the Air Force did or was simply more forthcoming with its information. An Intelligence Directive from the National Security Council that accompanied the CIA discussion paper authorised the CIA Director “to carry out a program of research to solve the problem of instant positive identification of UFOs” and “to coordinate this directive with the Department of Defense and the Psychological Strategy Board.”
The main sticking point seemed to be the inability of military authorities to adequately discern “hardware from phantom.” It was 1952, during the Cold War, and Russian tensions were mounting. The ability to identify a real threat (the Russians) from a non-threat (UFOs) was becoming an increasing concern. But even worse than this threat was the one represented by the general public, as the CIA believed that a “fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible,” and this could lead to the “touching-off of mass hysteria and panic.” To combat this, the CIA recommended that a “national policy should be established as to what should be told the public.” The CIA requested that the National Security Council commence its own research into the UFO problem, again with the input of the “Psychological Strategy Board.” This last measure was taken because the CIA had determined that “flying saucers pose two elements of danger which have national security implications. The first involves mass psychological implications, and the second concerns the vulnerability of the United States to air attack.”
The Robertson Panel
The conflation of mass psychology with national security continued into 1953, when a January memo from the CIA documented an advisory meeting to discuss its proposed strategy. This was the infamous Robertson Panel, which included Howard P. Robertson (Director of the Weapons Evaluation Group) as the chair, along with CIA officers, astrophysicists, nuclear weapons experts, and Professor J. Allen Hynek, who had been a consultant to Blue Book. External consultants included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.
This esteemed panel made several unusual suggestions for addressing the UFO “problem.” They announced that “there was no single explanation for a majority of the things seen” and “no evidence of a direct threat to national security.” However, they believed they should not encourage any public interest in UFOs as it was “possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in ‘nocturnal meandering lights’.”
To this end, the Scientific Advisory Panel recommended the establishment of an ‘Educational Program’ that “should have two major aims: training and debunking,” which “would result in reduction in public interest” in UFOs. Or, in their own words, “reduce the current gullibility of the public in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction.” Somewhat insidiously, this debunking would be achieved via “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.”
The Panel “felt strongly” that “psychologists familiar with mass psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the program,” and UFO research organisations were also in the crosshairs, as it was believed that “such organisations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.”
The Never-Ending Story
Back in 1953, this ‘education program’ was given an estimated timeframe of effectiveness of 1.5 to 2 years, by which time the CIA and USAF believed it would have figured out flying saucers and solved the problem. However, as we have seen, the ‘program’ has been in effect every year ever since, the ‘problem’ has not gone away, and to this day UFO research has been hampered by 70 years of media-driven ‘education’ imposed upon the citizens of the Western world by the combined forces of the USA’s intelligence organisations. These insidious measures were instituted by a group of select individuals who somehow managed to marshal the forces of authority, along with the unconscious forces of the human psyche, as weapons of mass manipulation.
Aside from the existence of an actual policy put in place to debunk UFOs, one could argue that ‘operant conditioning’ has also been at play. Operant conditioning is defined as “a process of changing behaviour by rewarding or punishing a subject each time an action is performed until the subject associates the action with pleasure or distress.” Regarding UFOs, there has thus far been no associated pleasure at all, but the apportioning of distress is unparalleled. As we have seen, members of the military have historically been threatened with hefty fines or jail time if they discussed classified material such as UFOs, and in more recent years, they have been threatened with losing their status and positions. For members of the general public, ridicule and social isolation have been the primary punishments, along with a decline in social status if they dared to speak too enthusiastically about their interests.
For the most egregious transgressors, erasure from history is the punishment of choice. Witness the recent case of Harald Malmgren, a former presidential advisor who made a deathbed confession that he had not only handled UFO material but that extraterrestrial beings – “biologics” – had survived the Roswell crash. For this transgression, his Wikipedia page has been maliciously ‘updated’ and all references to his historical role on Capitol Hill have been erased.
Even the staff at Project Blue Book were not immune to this conditioning – victims, ironically, of their own hype. Blue Book continued for another 15 years after it published ‘Special Report No. 14’, but its rotating roster of commanding officers became increasingly hostile towards UFO research and showed every indication they had succumbed to their own educational program by dismissing the UFO phenomenon while actively researching it.
The UFO cover-up has been a meticulously planned strategy, born during the Cold War when the unchecked power of the newly formed arms of the US intelligence community discovered that mass media, combined with predictive psychology, could serve as a powerful tool for societal control. When Blue Book ceased operations in January 1970, the ‘education program’ had done its job, and the populace had become dismissive of flying saucers and little green men. But while Blue Book was dead, it seems that somewhere at the CIA, the dream lived on.
The Conspiracy Continues
Two years after President Trump’s 2020 mandate to release all classified UFO information, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established. A small selection of AARO’s stated duties includes surveillance, analysis, governance, mitigation, and defeat. Is that mitigation and defeat of UFOs or mitigation and defeat of the public’s belief in UFOs? As if in answer to that question, in February 2025 AARO released a document that claimed to have resolved the mystery of the unidentified object filmed by the US Navy in the ‘Go Fast’ video.
The ‘Go Fast’ video, filmed in 2015 but not released to the public until 2020, made great waves when it first hit social media, as it came on the heels of the infamous ‘Tic-Tac’ video. Filmed by a US Navy F/A-18 aircraft travelling at an altitude of 13,000 feet off the coast of Florida, the ‘Go Fast’ video showed a spherical object travelling at an estimated 252 knots (2466 kilometres) per hour in the crosshairs of a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera.
Analysis by AARO utilising complex trigonometry and the effects of parallax (an optical effect caused by the position of an object when viewed along differing lines of sight) resulted in the declaration that the ‘Go Fast’ UFO was not going fast at all, “did not demonstrate anomalous performance characteristics,” and was instead travelling a mere 8 to 148 kilometres per hour with a boost from the wind that might have pushed it as fast as 259 kilometres per hour. And despite being unable to accurately measure the size of the object due to the poor resolution of the footage, AARO decreed that the object was a mere “one metre or less in size – comparable to a small drone or bird.”
This peculiarly confident conclusion, which involved counting pixels to estimate the object’s size, reconstructing winds from 10-year-old weather data, and disregarding the ability of professional military pilots to gauge the speeds of other aerial objects, absurdly fails to consider the fact that just because a UFO is not flying fast does not mean it is not a UFO!
This tactic is straight out of Blue Book – not so much dredged out of the 1950s, but rather lovingly maintained for generation after generation. And if drones had been around in 1952, you can bet your bottom dollar Blue Book would have been using them as scapegoats, much like authorities are using them today. Unfortunately, the AARO report suggests that despite its stated objective to openly and honestly investigate UFOs, AARO plans to continue on the well-worn path of obfuscation (where possible) and outright denial (as a last resort) in order to maintain UFO secrecy. And if all that fails, they will bamboozle us with science and swamp gas.
UFOs are Boring
As an aside, Blue Book’s ‘Special Report No. 14’ highlighted a unique type of ennui that set in during their flying saucer investigation. After reviewing reams of reports, they described how “the feeling that ‘saucers’ are real fades, and is replaced by a feeling of scepticism regarding their existence. The reader eventually reaches a point of saturation, after which the reports contain no new information and are no longer of any interest. This feeling of surfeit was universal among the personnel who worked on this project.”
This effect could already be in play within the AARO team and may also affect the public at large. It might also explain the sudden loss of interest in the recent ‘drone’ phenomena on behalf of the public and perhaps even on the part of the authorities.
Towards the end of November 2024, footage of objects that appeared variously as drones, bright lights, orbs, jellyfish, triangles, and dark UFOs began to circulate on social media. Initially reported from a town in New Jersey, sightings from all over the USA and other parts of the world started to flood the internet. Despite some clear footage showing anomalous UFO activity, the censorship machine kicked into high gear, and the government, military, and mainstream media issued consistent messaging reminiscent of the CIA’s ‘education program’. They maintained that the ‘drones’ posed no danger to the public, asserting that these mysterious objects were merely planes, helicopters, or misidentified stars and planets. Shortly after, all discussion of the mystery drones abruptly stopped, even though they continued to be seen and reported by a confused public.
The Never-Ending Deception
The combined forces of US intelligence agencies have evolved into adept media manipulators, enacting PSYOPS (psychological operations) on populations while disseminating misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy ‘theories’, and outright lies. The US military-industrial complex has eagerly climbed aboard this train and has been concealing its new and nascent technologies behind the cloak of UFOs, using ridicule to further obscure the topic. This situation has not changed despite the establishment of AARO, which seems to have been given a copy of the Air Force playbook and is now happily regurgitating the same old strategies. Despite recent attempts by US Senators to introduce a UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA), it has failed to materialise due to political manoeuvring behind the scenes, along with the machinations of influential players in the military-industrial complex who will do anything to maintain the current status quo.
The sad reality is that despite 70 years of research, we still don’t know anything about UFOs. After generations of assiduous psychological assault, operant conditioning, and outright gaslighting, the besieged and bewildered public can be forgiven for retreating behind a wall of dismissal and disinterest. This disinterest is global in nature, and we see it playing out daily in numerous arenas – health, politics, finance, and education, to name a few. As long as the government tells us everything is okay, we have nothing to worry about, right? …Errr… right?
Footnotes
1. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, archive.org/details/project-blue-book-special-report/page/n1/mode/2up
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. ‘Flying Saucers’, CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020013-6.pdf (URL no longer available)
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book
6. ‘Flying Saucers’, CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP81R00560R000100020013-6.pdf (URL no longer available)
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000015339.pdf
10. ‘Comments and Suggestions of UFO Panel’, CIA Reading Room, cia.gov/readingroom/document/0000015458
11. Ibid
12. Ibid
13. Ibid
14. dictionary.com/browse/conditioning
15. uapf.substack.com/p/wikipedias-quiet-war-how-activists
16. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office
17. ‘Go Fast’ video: youtube.com/watch?v=YPcgSliHp5Y
18. All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office U.S. Department of Defense Case: “Go Fast” Case Resolution, February 6, 2025. aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/ AARO_GoFast_Case_Resolution_Card_Methodology_Final.pdf
19. Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, archive.org/details/project-blue-book-special-report/page/n1/mode/2up
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