How Military Hazing Rituals Turned Into The UFO Disclosure Cult
Wall Street Journal reports on a secret social history of the Cold War
It was never aliens. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least some of the most outspoken advocates for ‘disclosure’ of alleged alien technologies and “biologics” are in fact “victims of a bizarre hazing ritual.”
“For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer,” Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha report. “ The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.”
Some of these commanders were never filled in on the joke. For while hazing is usually understood as physical violence — frat boys with paddles — it is in fact mostly about controlling someone in some way. The subject of the hazing ritual does not learn about the joke unless they are chosen to take part in making someone else the butt of the joke.
For those of us who have served in uniform, this is not surprising stuff. Newly-arrived US Army privates were given absurd missions in my time, especially in moments when they were surplus: Go to the supply room and get a box of grid squares. Or: Go to brigade headquarters and get the keys to the drop zone. Grid squares are printed on maps and the drop zone is a wide-open field. Depending on the precise circumstances of the joke and their time in service, a soldier might never be ‘in on’ such a joke. It will be an unofficial part of the organizational culture.
Here is one anecdote, possibly apocryphal, to illustrate. A bothersome young butterbar (2nd lieutenant) was bothering a signals intelligence (SIGINT) team leader too much during a field exercise. The team leader, a staff sergeant, suddenly complained about a “red wave converter” that was needed, since the team was training to intercept Soviet frequencies. When the lieutenant bothered the repair shop NCO for a red wave converter, that platoon sergeant sent him on to a division office on the other side of the base. According to the legend of the red wave converter, that lieutenant was last seen filling out request forms at corps headquarters.
Anyone old enough to remember the “Humor in Uniform” feature of Reader’s Digest will have read such stories before. WSJ reporters are therefore not making any extraordinary claims when they describe “Yankee Blue,” a hoax presented to hazing victims in which alien technology was supposedly being reverse-engineered. As part of the joke, they “were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake.” This happened to “hundreds of people,” many of whom say they were threatened if they did not stay silent.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the scientist who stood up the all Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in a whole-of-government effort to disclose as much as possible about UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, the new PC term for UFOs), “found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.”
In one Cold War experiment described by the Journal, “an exotic electromagnetic generator” was used to simulate the electromagnetic pulse effect of a nuclear weapon to ensure missile silo equipment would survive it. Robert Salas, an Air Force captain now in his eighties, witnessed the orange glow of one of these experiments, heard the horn blow to signal that the silos had been disabled, and was told never to discuss it again. To this day, Salas remains convinced that he saw “an intergalactic intervention to stop nuclear war which the government has tried to hide” — the postmodern gnosis of the UFO.
The Pentagon, especially the Air Force, was embarrassed by what Fitzpatrick and AARO found. As a result, these disclosures of “evidence of fake classified program materials relating to extraterrestrials” were not included in last year’s Volume 1 of historical documentation. Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, “expects to provide it in another report scheduled for later this year.” One wonders whether David Grusch or Luis Elizondo will be named as victims of hazing.
One need only recall the 2023 hearing with Grusch sitting between Ryan Graves and David Fravor, former US Navy aviators, and how different his testimony was from theirs. For while the two sailors may be wrong in what they believe, they were at least talking about sensor data collected by technology.
Neither of them mentioned aliens. Grusch, on the other hand, claimed to have seen reports and photographs about alien spacecraft and “non-human biologics,” which could mean space monkeys, space dogs, space ants, space mice, or any other perfectly earthbound organism sent aloft in any sort of high-altitude research program by any nation, ever.
In 2024, Kirkpatrick told journalist Steven Greenstreet that a UFO “religion” has used the United States government to fund paranormal “research” with taxpayer money. My own research here at Osborne Ink reveals that belief in extraterrestrial inhabitants on alien planets had been an all-American religious idea for 200 years before Kenneth Arnold reported the first flying saucer sighting.
“Alien contact” started as a religion, and it has returned to religion because that’s what it always was, from the beginning. However, as I acknowledged when I began my research project on the spiritual biography of the flying saucer, there has always been a simultaneous element of sinister hazing involved. So-called ‘men in black’ have become a universally-shared cultural meme.
In one well-documented case, a retired Air Force counterintelligence agent named Richard Doty not only laundered most of the contemporary ‘Roswell origins’ story into popularity through cutouts in the ufology community, he was actually involved in the mental health spiral of at least one civilian UFO ‘witness’ named Paul Bennewitz. Such encounters go back decades, suggesting that the culture of hazing within the military spilled over into the civilian world, sometimes with catastrophic results.
UFO believers will of course reject the Wall Street Journal’s reporting as a furtherance of the cover-up. However, this reporting does not absolve the US government of anything. In fact, it suggests that people in uniform conducted what amounts to a psychological experiment on the American public. I look forward to Part 2 of the Journal’s reporting as well as Volume 2 of the AARO history. When it drops, my very first move will be to look for Doty’s name, followed by Grusch’s.
A Skeptical Narrative of the UFO Cult as a Legacy Government Disinformation Project
So-called ‘Men in Black’ (MIB) have been described as ‘out of this world’ since the first reports of their existence during the first wave of flying saucer hysteria. This was always by design. “The cryptic nature of the MIB indicates something of the complexity of the UFO question, as it involves a continuum of related but discrete phenomena and beliefs,” Peter M. Rojcewicz wrote in