"Did the ‘Deep State’ Invent the U.F.O. Craze?"

The people most into UFOs these days are not kids on TikTok, but old-timers with security clearances.

Over the last decade, social media has generated countless fads and frenzies. But one dog that didn’t bark is UFOs. Billions of people carry around cameras with them everywhere, so you’d think that if there’s much of interest to film, it would be wildly popular on social media. And while there no doubt are corners of Twitter devoted to UFOs, the subject seems much less of a popular obsession today than in the second half of the 20th Century.

Instead, UFOs mostly has seemed interesting lately to senior U.S. Senators like Harry Reid and Daniel Inouye, the Pentagon, and other old-timers associated with the military-industrial complex.

Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times:

Did the ‘Deep State’ Invent the U.F.O. Craze?

July 1, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET

By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist

… And now, in a pair of articles last month by two Wall Street Journal reporters, we’ve been given one of the more comprehensive attempts at a non-E.T. explanation of where some of the weirdness originates. Relying heavily on interviews with Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a Pentagon task force investigating the U.F.O. evidence, the reporters reveal several possible mythology-forging projects inside the military-industrial complex: a combination of deliberate psychological operations aimed at covering up top secret technologies, possible bureaucratic pranks and hazing rituals that accidentally made midlevel personnel into U.F.O. believers, and top secret experiments that the government allowed its own personnel to interpret as possible close encounters.

The Journal reporters also follow Kirkpatrick through investigations that did not pan out: A purported piece of extraterrestrial material turned out to have prosaic origins, a claim about Russia reverse-engineering alien technology probably originated in the Russian version of our own U.F.O. disinformation, and a larger pattern emerged where “evidence to support the whistle-blowers’ theories appeared to vanish just as Kirkpatrick got close to it.”

What’s useful about the Journal stories is that they’re more capacious than some prior debunking explanations. For instance, certain skeptics pinned the recent wave of U.F.O.-related governmental signaling on true believers who were inserted into the national security loop by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada (a U.F.O. believer of some sort himself), and who then traded on those credentials to legitimate their theories. But as far as I could tell, this explanation didn’t do justice to the apparent scale of U.F.O. beliefs within the government.

Whereas what the Journal reporters suggest is that U.F.O. belief could have been seeded in multiple different ways over many decades — creating not just a small group of obsessives circulating the same wild theories but also a broader culture in which both deception and misapprehension are at work, the former feeding the latter and the latter encouraging the former, such that parts of the national security state are conditioned to use “aliens” as cover for their secret operations and other parts are conditioned to assume there must be something real there.

This portrait of “deep state” deception and delusion hardly resolves the U.F.O. question.

That’s pretty much what I came up with a quarter of a century ago when I looked into the subject.

Paywall here.