"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.

In a 2017 Taki’s Magazine column on the revival of UFO Fever among elderly US Senators but not on social media, I wrote:

It’s also possible that besides reflecting the hopes and dreams of government contractors, flying-saucer mania reflected government disinformation.

The late science-fiction novelist Jerry Pournelle told me in 2000 that when the Soviets were testing their Fractional Orbit Bombardment System for outwitting the U.S. distant early warning system in the Arctic by attacking from the south, an occasional missile would come down over Latin America, embarrassingly. After the first accurate reports would come in from observers, according to Jerry, Soviet KGB agents in Spanish-speaking countries would flood newspapers with absurd accounts of little green men to discredit the accurate tales.

The 2013 documentary Mirage Men argued that the U.S. government had been up to much the same in the West. Rather than the government suppressing awareness of UFOs, perhaps the government promoted flying saucers to cloud public awareness of what it had stumbled upon in the interests of keeping accurate information out of the hands of the Russians?

For example, the Roswell incident was dismissed by the government as a mere weather balloon that crash-landed. In reality, it was part of the top secret Project Mogul: a high-tech strategic reconnaissance balloon made out of state-of-the-art synthetic substances that was supposed to float across the Soviet Union checking for atomic-bomb tests. When the UFO conspiracy theorists revived Roswell in the 1970s, perhaps the government found it useful to encourage flying-saucer paranoia?

The earliest witnesses to UFOs tended to be solid citizens. For example, Kelly Johnson, the legendary engineer head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, spent ten minutes staring at an unidentifiable something in the western sky in the early 1950s. The next day, a ten-man crew of an aircraft the Skunk Works was working with asked him if he’d seen it too? So they jointly filed a report with the Air Force. (The Air Force concluded they had observed a rare type of cloud.)

But over time, the social standing of witnesses declined, so that by the 1996 movie Independence Day, Randy Quaid has a memorable role as a stereotypical not-quite-right in the head ex-pilot obsessed with UFOs.

In turn, the Soviets devoted much money to spying on Lockheed’s Skunk Works. A Soviet electronic warfare ship disguised as a fishing trawler was often stationed off Santa Monica to try to pick up radio signals from Burbank. Experimental aircraft on the runway at Lockheed had to be trundled back into hangars whenever Soviet reconnaissance satellites appeared overhead.

No doubt the Soviets also had local agents trying to learn more about what was flying out of Area 51. Soviet espionage had proved hugely effective at learning American secrets during the 1940s, using indigenous communists such as teenage atomic-bomb prodigy Ted Hall. But the McCarthy era disabled the Communist Party USA, so 1950s Soviet spymaster Rudolf Abel, as portrayed in the 2015 Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies, spent most of his time in New York painting.

If the U.S. government really did spread flying-saucer rumors to confuse witnesses out West, it was hugely successful. The [F-117] stealth fighter, for instance, was apparently unknown to the Soviets from its Have Blue predecessor’s first flight at Area 51 in 1977 until the Pentagon announced its existence in 1980.

The stealth fighter, which bounced radar beams away, was so alien in form that it looked like it had been designed by one of those ETs they keep locked away at Area 51. Ironically, America’s strategically successful stealth program was based on a Soviet physicist’s equations. Yet the feds managed to keep the Soviets so distracted they never figured that out until it was too late for their empire.

Similarly the transport and testing of the CIA’s Mach 3 A-12/SR-71 superplane in the early 1960s includes two funny stories. Lockheed was hauling the plane late at night in a giant box from Burbank to Area 51 north of Las Vegas for testing when the truck driver collided with a parked Greyhound bus. CIA men with submachine guns descended upon the busdriver and shoved over $5,000 in cash into his hands to get the bus fixed and never tell anyone what he’d seen.

In 1964, a test flight of the unannounced plane crashed in Utah. The remote region was cordoned off with the story that an existing fighter had crashed carrying a nuclear bomb. But what to do with the carload of people who’d seen the radically shaped plane crash close-up? The armed CIA agents gave them $25,000 in cash and a dire warning about what would happen to them if they ever talked about it.