The last few times I wrote about unidentified flying objects, in 2023, there had been a series of curious happenings that convinced me that some group of people inside our government wanted Americans to believe that the national security state had secret knowledge about UFOs.

First, the kinds of people coming forward with claims and the footage and accounts of mysterious flying objects being publicized were more serious-seeming, more difficult to eye-roll away, than what we’d seen in prior eras of UFO enthusiasm.

Second, the sudden bipartisan interest from senators and congressmen was real and substantial, suggesting that a bit more was visible behind the curtain than we knew.

But third, at the same time, all the leaks and insider accounts fell consistently short of what UFO believers call, expectantly, “disclosure” — offering enough to feed speculation about secret government programs, but not nearly enough to overcome a basic skeptical default.

At the time, I argued that all the high-level political and media interest was removing the impediment that many believers argue stands between us and the truth — the alleged fear, among those with secret knowledge, of being jailed or killed if they speak out.

Eighteen months later, as you may have noticed, no Lockheed Martin employees have brought forward detailed plans of the alien spacecraft hidden in their corporate vault, and no former heads of the Department of Energy have confessed to keeping a great bureaucratic secret hidden since the dawn of the Atomic Age. Instead we’ve had more interviews and first-person accounts but no actual disclosure — even of the Jeffrey Epstein or JFK files variety — from a Trump administration that includes a few UFO-curious figures in its ranks.

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-extraterrestrial 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 UFO 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 UFO believers, and top secret experiments that the government allowed its own personnel to interpret as possible close encounters.

What the Journal reporters suggest is that UFO 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 doesn’t explain the weird aerial encounters which are, as far as I can tell from public and private information, still taken quite seriously as an unresolved problem by defense and intelligence officials. Nor does it tell us how to understand the phenomenon of personal paranormal encounters, the UFO-as-religious-experience zone where “aliens” seem to play angelic or demonic or faerie-adjacent parts.

Nor should anyone assume that the debunking explanations filtered through Kirkpatrick and other sources to the Journal are themselves trustworthy. It’s certainly interesting that military sources are now saying that famous UFO incidents at nuclear bases in the 1960s, where glowing orange orbs appeared and nuclear weapons were disabled, were actually top secret tests of the effects of electromagnetic pulses on America’s nuclear arsenals. Should the people who actually experienced those incidents and spent years trying to figure out what happened take this new explanation as gospel? I would say probably not.

It could be that sometimes the military-industrial complex uses UFOs as cover stories for secret projects, and sometimes uses secret projects as cover stories for actual encounters with nonhuman intelligence; it could be that the Journal’s military sources intend to pile disinformation atop disinformation.

But defaulting to the psy-op explanation doesn’t just leave a set of weird UFO-related phenomena unexplained. It also leaves an obvious question open and unanswered. If many stories of insider UFO knowledge originate in deliberate disinformation projects and we have been living through a veritable golden age of strange leaks and tales of insider knowledge, then what, exactly, might this era’s particular psy-op be intended to conceal?