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"UFO" in the traditional sense (ostensibly alien spacecraft) has been used as a disinformation tactic since the late 40s. It worked at Roswell (which was, in fact, a crashed secret American balloon) so it got rolled into the strategies used to cover up secret military projects. I'm making up these percentages, but I'd say 75% of UFO sightings are totally banal misidentifications, 10% of them are outright fakes, 9% of them are unknown-to-the-public aircraft or other tech, and 1% are legitimately weird shit that nobody understands.
This may be a very long-winded way of saying "I agree with you," but I suppose we'll see:
I agree that UFOs are or have been used to cover other sensitive programs, but if you read US released government correspondence from the 1940s, it seems that there was a bottom-up aspect to this (coming through reporting channels, including official ones) and legitimate concern in official circles. For instance, in a July 1947 FBI memo (post-Roswell), we learn that General Schulgen reached out to the FBI to take initial reports of UFOs from citizens. Mr. Fitch, writing the memo for D.M. Ladd, head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, says that he was told by Schulgen that research was underway to see if UFOs were celestial objects, mechanical objects, or hysteria, possibly spread by "individuals of Communist sympathies". Fitch adds his personal note, saying that a lot of the alleged sightings are pranks and that it would, essentially, accomplish nothing to sic the Bureau on this.
There are several handwritten notes on the memo. One of them, possibly from Clyde Tolson, reads "I think we should do this." The other, believed to be from Hoover himself (although I can't read handwriting so I can't personally vouch for that) concurs, but says that "before agreeing...we must insist upon full access to discs recovered...in the ?? case the Army grabbed it & would not let us share[?] it for cursory examination"
Possibly the US disinformation apparatus is so advanced that it creates breadcrumbs in private documents that aren't likely to be released until after the death of the authors, but that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that J. Edgar Hoover was having the wool pulled over his eyes by General Schulgen. But Schulgen wrote a memo in October of 1947 (again, post-Roswell) expressing concern that the flying saucers were real – and were Soviet. He articulated the characteristics of flying saucers as seen by observers and requested technical data on the characteristics of a flying disk. He was particularly interested in the possibility that the disks had an ancestry in the Horten designs developed for Nazi Germany during World War Two and mentions a report indicating the Russians were "planning to build a fleet of 1,8000 Horten VIII (six engine pusher) type flying wing aircraft" (needless to say, the Russians never did this).
Now, interestingly (and to your point) a fake version of this document was circulated that was altered to play up a potential extraterrestrial explanation and downplay or remove the Russian angle – make of that what you will. But it seems clear that if there was an alien psyop shortly after Roswell then not only did Schulgen not get the memo but he didn't even get the intended message about the flying saucers being aliens.
But the evidence I've seen suggests strongly that, in the 1940s, either USAF general staff were hoisted by their own disinformation petard, or they were legitimately concerned about the reported characteristics of "flying discs" and the geopolitical implications. I think it's more likely that there were reported genuinely anomalous UFO phenomena, which were reported during the Second World War and in years prior. In fact there's some surviving evidence from alleged Italian government correspondence that not only were they sighted in the 1930s, but one crashed in Italy in 1933; unfortunately I am not familiar enough with things like "the norms of Italian government telegrams in the 1930s" to have a strong opinion about this. To the extent that it's a US/USAF psyop (which I agree is more than 0%) I suspect they are piggybacking on an existing, genuine phenomena (which may not be "real" but was real enough to be a genuine cause for concern).
very interesting, thanks.
Knowing nothing about this but your comment, it occurs to me that a combination of compartmentalization and Shulgen just being a kooky general could be sufficient. But also, you are right, there is a lot of unexplained weirdness that is insufficiently captured by "it's just disinfo."
Yeah, sufficient compartmentalization can lead to very weird results (and I think does explain some of the weirdness we see around the UFO topic). But on the other hand, at a certain point it's much easier for me to believe that the weirdness around UFOs is because they're "real" than some 18D chess by omnicompetent Air Force counterintelligence nerds. Particularly when the military – which has a direct financial incentive to tell Congress that everyone and their mother is some sort of a threat – settles on something like "well okay sure fine UAP are 'real' and we don't know what they are but it's probably not a big deal."
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