THE REAL REASON for WSJ's Information War Against UFOs | The Richard Dolan Show

Greetings. Last week, the Wall Street Journal, actually, I think four days ago, the Wall Street Journal, that paragon of the establishment, published the first part of what we are told is going to be a two-part series, or maybe a multi-part series, but I think two. It is a pretty strong take on the subject of UFOs. A really strong take, actually. Uh, this is the the top of the article. It's behind a payw wall. Uh, I was able to read it because some very nice uh person, a member of my website uh provided me with the whole article. So, I was able to read it. Uh, I don't I'll I'll link to the article, but you're going to need to uh find a way to get to that. If someone here has the article, they want to paste it in a comment. Hey, I'm not going to complain, but that's up to you. Uh, but I do want to talk about this. So this was is called the Pentagon disinformation that fueled America's UFO mythology. Uh it's by Joel Shectman and Aruna Vizwanatha. Uh they've written pieces for the journal before and also which have touched upon UFOs all in you know not surprisingly a very skeptical tone throughout. The central thesis of this piece is very very interesting is that really much maybe all most of the United States modern belief in UFOs and particularly claims involving crashed saucers uh reverse engineering programs and government cover-ups, all of that. This originated, this did not originate from real encounters or from actual alien technology, but rather it originated from intentional disinformation campaigns conducted by the Pentagon during the Cold War and beyond. So yes, they were trying to make you believe in aliens. All right. Well, before I continue, let me just remind you if you like this video, please do share it, subscribe to my channel, all that. So the article starts it references um a number of previously undisclosed interviews with more than I think two dozen current and former national security officials uh as well as it says thousands of pages of internal documents. So according to the authors, the sources indicate that for decades, the US military and especially the Air Force actively spread false information about UFOs to protect classified weapons programs. So um there are a number of key examples here. One of them involves a former Air Force colonel in the 1980s. We do not know this man's name. He reportedly handed over doctorred photographs of flying saucers to a uh a civilian bar owner near Area 51. These photos were intended to distract public attention away from experimental aircraft being tested at the base. And um and the article really makes a case like this was not an isolated event. This was actually part of a larger pattern of strategic deception. There's another element of the article that talks about what is described as as institutional hazing essentially within uh the classified military programs. They called it Yankee blue. So they had multiple unnamed sources. All of them are unnamed. Uh we're told that new personnel in certain black programs were sometimes misled into believing that they were being inducted into secret alien technology uh retrieval efforts. So the article basically claims that this contributed to the persistent rumors within military circles, within intelligence circles, about non-human craft, um about reverse engineering efforts, and then the these rumors eventually leaked into public discourse. So that's basically that argument. Uh they also revisited the famous 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base incident. This is when nuclear missiles were uh shut down in one way or another uh apparently and I would say uh as far as the evidence and testimony goes during a UFO encounter. Some people say it was something else that caused that. Uh and in fact the the art this article does say something else caused that. It offers a totally new explanation and it says that the malfunction of these missiles, there were quite a few of them was caused by an electro electromagnetic pulse EMP uh test that was conducted by the US government itself. So the US knocked its own missiles out. It wasn't some unknown craft, but the US did an EMP test um basically as a a test to see whether like a nuclear blast would knock out the missile. So rather than detonate a nuclear weapon, they um detonated an um equal EMP blast that would like equal that of a nuclear explosion essentially. And um so that's what they're saying. So that was the true cause of the incident according to the article. And there's more. I mean the article basically just maintains that all of this propagation of UFO stories and lore uh served several important functions for the military. First, it misled foreign adversaries about American capabilities. Uh it helped to hide the existence of classified aircraft. It it gave cover for different types of sensitive national security operations. So, it didn't it did not explicitly deny all um all unexplained aerial sightings. I wouldn't say it went that far, but it did very strongly suggest that the mythology, and that's one of the words they use here, uh, surrounding UFOs and especially the idea of recovered alien craft and all the secret government knowledge, all of this was deliberately fabricated by American officials for strategic reasons. They also drew on some recent um reports like the 2024 Arrow report. um to to support their idea that there's no credible evidence of non-human tech or uh evidence of a cover cover up by the government. Uh they argue that many of these aspects of the UFO narrative narrative originated as part of a cold war disinformation strategy that has now taken on a life of its own in the public imagination. That's basically the thesis. um you can you might be able to get a copy of the article. So there's a couple of revealing things about this article. One thing I just think needs to be pointed out here relating to the Wall Street Journal in general. Uh from 2017 onward as the UFO or now UAP story gained momentum really starting in December of that year. I mean we had Navy pilots speaking out. We had Congress uh starting to launch inquiries. Uh if you read go back over the Wall Street Journal's pieces, I mean most of the mostly they remained on the sidelines. Uh they did engage occasionally in this subject and when they did it was usually with a very skeptical reporting uh some occasionally I would say snarky editorials. Uh what you never found with the journal or really with any of these mainstream publications of legacy media is a genuine curiosity or what what you might consider investigative depth. That was never the case with the Wall Street Journal. Uh they had a very clear tone, very distant, very dismissive, and always aligned with official narratives. And that's really what you we all have come to expect with the Wall Street Journal. It is one of the main pillars of the establishment. So in that sense, this latest article is not a departure at all. Uh but I would say it's it feels more like a culmination. You have had years of skepticism. So the journal did not shift to inquiry. No, they doubled down on their uh already chosen position on this. I think what's different with this article is the scale and the intensity of what they're really saying here. This is a this is a complete attempt to recast the entire modern UFO narrative as deliberate Pentagon disinformation. So, it's a continuation of the same attitude, but it's louder maybe. Uh, and as I'm going to suggest, it's a much more strategic expression of the position that they've held all along. But first, before I get into that, I want to break down the article just a little bit more. So, this piece is buil as like a bombshell. But the thing is once you step back and and really examine it, it reveals much more about the intent of the article and the authors than it does about the UFOs that is claiming to explain. So let's start with the sourcing. They reference uh thousands of pages of documents and interviews with two dozen current and former officials. Okay, that sounds impressive, but the article actually offers no documents, uh, no specific declassified reports and very few names at all. Uh, most of the claims are, uh, rest on anonymous sources or really very vague anecdotes. For example, we are told that Air Force officers staged these elaborate hazing rituals uh, to convince their own colleagues that UFO crash retrieval programs were real. First of all, it sounds really bizarre. Uh, but the story really never explains how or why you have multiple generations of military and intelligence insiders across decades and across agencies. Uh, why they would all share the same narrative of reverse engineer technology. That's not a prank. That is a pattern. And then there's the whole framing of the article. From the very first paragraph, you get this very dismissive tone. uh sightings are reduced to costumed conferences in Las Vegas. Uh they they treat uh concerned whistleblowers like basically dupes. The whole history of UFOs is is reimagined as this cold war scop. So basically you the reader, you're told, uh there's nothing to see here. This is just all a clever misdirection. And yeah, you should be a little embarrassed for having believed it all. But then really what's the most glaring thing to me is what the article leaves out. There's no mention of the Navy videos confirmed by the Pentagon. There's no reference to uh pilot testimony from people like David Fraver. There's no acknowledgement of radar data um or uh the the public and the classified congressional briefings that have taken place over the last uh seven now years because none of that fits the narrative. So they just exclude it. And even the Arrow report that came out in 2024 and was cited in the article as a kind of final word gets the same treatment. It's summarized. It's not quoted. It's referenced. It is not uh there's no interrogation of that report in the least. So there's no nuance. Um all the public criticisms from former insiders of the Arrow report, all of that is ignored as well. Really when you look at this article it's this is not an actual investigation which it is built at. It is this is a reframing effort. It is really a part offormational warfare. It's not trying to solve the mystery of UFOs. What it is trying to do is bury it and and replacing it with the story that just lets uh all the institutions off the hook. That's the real takeaway that I get from this. This is a less about uncovering the truth. It's much more about managing perception. um mythology was manufactured and they we've created a you know this new story here uh that is all over there's no mystery left and all the institutions should uh face no further scrutiny at wells as well so that's that's not journalism my friends that is damage control really so I want to step back a little bit more and I want to look a little more critically at this claim made by the journal Um, what you really see is this is just a neat little story that collapses even under the most modest scrutiny. For starters, there have been hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of UFO sightings since the 1940s. The National UFO Reporting Center alone, one of my favorite websites, has more than 100,000 sightings that they've collected. Uh, the MUFON database has countless more. And, you know, around the world there's just so many others. So to say that the US government invented UFOs to cloak uh black projects ignores another problem which is the very extensive and real concern that this phenomenon has triggered within the highest levels of military and intelligence organizations for decades. In fact for an entire human lifetime. You go all the way back to the late 1940s. You have the US Air Force. You have the CIA, the FBI, the Navy, uh later the NSA. All of them have taken UFOs seriously. In 1952 alone, you had such a spike in sightings, including over the nation's capital, that the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, initiated their own internal investigation, uh resulting in one of the most remarkable memos that I've become aware of in the declassified literature from uh scientific director H. Marshall Chadwell of the CIA to the director of the CIA, Walter Beetle Smith, where he says, "These sightings of unusual objects over sensitive installations at such altitudes and speeds are not attributable to normal u natural phenomenon or known types of aerial vehicles." That's a pretty straightforward statement there. So, and then you have by 1953, the Robertson panel convenes not to debunk sightings based on fact, but to manage public perception and to discourage civilian interest. That is not the behavior of an agency unconcerned with reality. That's the behavior of a government threatened by a phenomenon that it could not control. And it's the behavior of a government that seek sought to minimize uh UFO reality, UFO consciousness, not to heighten it as this Wall Street Journal article maintains. And this is a pattern that you see for decades. You have generals, you have defense analysts, you presidents uh talking privately and occasionally publicly about their concern. You had Edward Rupelt. He was the first head of Project Blue Book. talked about craft with capabilities uh beyond anything we could conceive. That's a quote in his book. Is that part of the disinformation program? Wall Street Journal. Guys, you have CIA documents repeatedly discussing the need to monitor UFO reports as potential indicators of Soviet or even non-human technology. The data is the documents are all there. And then you look globally u and you know again the Wall Street Journal article makes no mention none of the international character of this phenomenon which is quite astonishing because you cannot understand UFOs without going global. The Soviet Union maintained one of the world's most comprehensive state sponsored UFO programs. From the 1960s through the 1980s, you had Soviet military and scientific institutions studying incidents involving discshaped craft, electromagnetic interference, um interactions with nuclear facilities, just like many of the cases that we get here in the US. So that's the Soviet concern. In France, uh, the National Space Agency has maintained a dedicated UFO unit, Gayan, for over 40 years. In the UK, you had the former Ministry of Defense officials like Nick Pope uh, publicly attesting to the seriousness with uh, with which some of these cases were treated. Even China, Brazil have all and many other countries have had waves of sightings involving structured craft tracked by radar seen by train observers and all of that. So you cannot chalk that up to some Pentagon SCAB. Uh these are sovereign nations often adversarial to the US running their own investigations completely outside the framework uh work of American disinformation. So to claim as the Wall Street Journal does that UFOs are a myth invented by US military deception, it it's not just historically inaccurate, it's intellectually lazy. It dismisses the depth of the military concern, all the scope of the evidence and the the uh sheer global consistency of this phenomenon. So it's not fantasy. This is reality and and has been recognized quietly by many of the world's most powerful institutions. So when you now you have to ask like why was this article so overthe-top? Like why why would these writers go so far? Like if you're reading this as a serious researcher, you have to be asking that. Like why frame the entire modern history of UFOs, the crash retrievals, the whistleblower accounts, the all the persistent leaks? You're going to label all of that as a product of an elaborate disinfo campaign or pranks and some kind of cold war, I don't know, slight of hand. The whole sheer scope of the claims of this article, it's it's almost theatrical. Like we're being told that multiple generations of these professionals were fooled or manipulated or complicit in this sprawling hoax that somehow escaped correction until now. Until now. So, you really have to ask yourself like, I'm supposed to believe that what looks like a consistent signal across history is really just um institutional noise that they created. From a researcher standpoint, this is a very curious and I would say mystifying argument that you would make. It's it's so unbelievably weak that you wonder who who is this designed for? What what is this, you know, who is this being written for? Because the tone, the timing, and the framing suggests to me that this article is not name uh not aimed at the general public at all. This was not a story meant to inform. This was a message and it was a message meant to reassure to reassure someone. And to understand that, we really need to look at who that someone is. That someone is Congress. This article did not land in a vacuum. This article arrived just as lawmakers are preparing for another potential vote on the unidentified anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, that is the UAPDA. This legislation was first attempted in 2023. It was shut down totally. It passed a little bit in 2024. Basically, it was stripped out of a lot of its um provisions. So, it got passed in a truncated form. It's not dead. And in fact, there is every reason to believe that it will be brought back for reconsideration um possibly probably I'm going to say as soon as this fall. And if it passes in full, this act will change the landscape permanently. And I am quite convinced this is why you're seeing a sudden push to discredit the entire premise of of UFOs happening. Now, this is about shaping the narrative before that vote. So, let me just talk a little bit about this act. I've discussed it a few times in the past. Let's go a little more into this because if you want to understand why it is so unwelcome to entrenched interests just look at what it actually proposes. So first it would establish an independent review board and this would be outside the Pentagon and intelligence communities uh authority. This is very important. Doesn't mean that would it actually in practice have independence? No one knows. I can't predict that. No one can. But that is how it is being designed and that's important enough. It would have the legal authority to review uh to declassify and to release historical records related to um anything having to do with UFOs, non-human technologies and or any government UAP programs as well. That's very significant. U also it includes eminent domain provisions. So that means basically that any private corporation or contractor currently in possession of non-human materials could and let's say would be legally compelled to turn them over to the US government for public review also quite significant as you could imagine. Uh it also mandates a structured timeline for disclosure. No more indefinite delays. No more bureaucratic sloww walking and and no more letting unelected officials decide what the public is should be allowed to know. So there's more in there, but those are very powerful provisions. If this legislation were to pass, and if it does pass, this would be the first time in modern history that the secrecy surrounding UAPs would be subject subjected to an external and forcible accountability. That's quite significant and that's what makes it an existential threat not to national security. It makes it an existential threat to the control structures that have protected this secret for many decades. So going back to the Wall Street Journal article, this wasn't just some curious editorial decision. Uh I read this as a textbook example of the broader strategies that are have been used for ages to suppress meaningful UFO disclosure. Uh ridicule narrative uh switcheroos and narrative inversion inversion and and targeted disinformation. These tools have been used for decades and always uh when you look back through the history at very key inflection points. That is when institutional control risks being challenged. You think of it during the 19 late 1960s when UFO sightings came to such a peak that something became known as a condan committee was initiated and came down very hard against UFOs. You saw it in the early 1990s when the Roswell story was building again uh with lots of witnesses coming out and then the Air Force came out with its very very strong um disinfo on Project Mogul and the and the crash test dummies and all of that as a way to explain Roswell. This is what happens. So that's what we're I think we're seeing here. So, and and the other thing you can notice about the article is I referred to this a bit a moment ago, but the tone this is a tone that you could you read it carefully and you can see it wasn't really seeking to inform or certainly not to invite curiosity about the subject. It really sought to humiliate the narrative. It wasn't we were mistaken. It was you were too dumb to ever believe. And that also that's a very long established pattern. So when when the evidence can no longer be ignored, what does the system do? It shifts to managing the perception. And ridicule is a firewall. So that's what that that's that is what that's all about. But then you get a deeper layer and this is actually quite important. Uh someone recently pointed out to me Wall Street Journal isn't just a newspaper. This is the mouthpiece of the global financial system. and to support that system. Um, its job isn't just to report events. It is to stabilize narratives that protect markets and investor confidence and geopolitical dominance by the United States. So, if disclosure were to truly take hold, like if the public and the media and um members of Congress really begin asking the true questions, what happens next? Well, one thing that might happen is that defense stocks or or other types of stocks and investments um you know might lose some value if if you've got breakthrough technologies that have been suppressed for decades. Let's just say that that's true. What happens to energy markets if nonhuman propulsion systems become a matter of public record? What happens to trust in uh scientific or financial institutions or military institutions if it turns out that there's been collusion with decades of silence? So in that sense really this article makes perfect sense. Its job wasn't to explain the UFO mystery. Its job was to contain this mystery. This is think of this as a narrative antibiotic and it's given when the immune system of the established order detects a viral threat. In this case, transparency or disclosure. This is not about journalism. Again, this is about system maintenance. The system must maintain itself. It's really no surprise. We we might find ourselves startled by the bluntness of it all. I I was startled by the bluntness of this article. I will not lie to you. Um but but when you really think of the timing, the framing, and the sheer obviousness of the narrative being pushed, we really should not be surprised. This is what we must expect them to do. When institutions that have long operated in secrecy start to feel pressure, like real pressure, they will respond the way that any organism does. And it that is self-p protection. Not it's not going to do it through debate. It's going to do it through again narrative control. Not by engaging honestly. No, it's going to it's going to survive by redirecting your attention or in this case the attention of the members of Congress to essentially embarrass them and shame them into voting the UAP Disclosure Act down. That's the whole point of this. So as to undermine the credibility of the subject in uh question to secure their interests. That's what it is. This article is not an aberration. This is a feature of the system as it currently exists. This is a system built to absorb and to neutralize disruptive truths. And from a certain vantage point, frankly, it's it's even understandable. It's not to defend it, but we really need to understand their position here. And when you do that, you can see like if the structures of finance and defense and fill in the blank, science and government, if they've all been built on layers of deception and lies and omission of the truth, then disclosure is not a it's not just some truth event that you may want or that I may want. Disclosure is a stress test. It's a destabilizer. So yeah, they're going to push back and yes, they're going to deploy ridicule and deniability and and and sew the seed of doubt as they they constantly do. That is what entrenched systems do. But the fact that they're doing it now with such force and visibility uh might be an indication of something important which is that maybe the wall is cracking. So as researchers or as historians or as citizens our our role is not to argue on their terms. Our role is to stay grounded to stay observant and to for us to continue to reveal the deeper structures and architecture of what is unfolding unfolding because the truth doesn't arrive all at once. You know it this is something that I have learned over many years. 15 years ago, I co-authored a book on disclosure and we envisioned a kind of major uh event in which some undeniable event is witnessed and it causes this avalanche. Well, that's not what's happened, right? Maybe that could happen. Maybe it it might still happen. But what we are seeing is that the truth is pushed forward in fits and starts against enormous resistance that has lasted for a long time now. and it's still there. So when that resistance becomes loud and desperate and coordinated, do not take that as a defeat. Take that as confirmation. Now, a week ago, I was at contact in the desert conference out in Palm Springs, California. Uh my wife and I enjoyed seeing many people there, including I'm sure some of you watching right now. So, it's great to see you. So during that week, uh, my friend Danny Shien of the New Paradigm Institute. Danny's really one of the great constitutional lawyers of our time, uh, created and distributed a petition to gain public support for the 2025 UAP Disclosure Act. I will just say it is very easy to feel discouraged about attempts to change legislation on this subject and that often includes myself. I'm one of those people. I think like this is not going to go anywhere. You're going up against a a huge wall of opposition. Uh yeah, all of that. But I do believe that this act is a good and worthy piece of legislation. Nothing's perfect. Uh and it's hard to imagine that there is a single cure all that's going to cut through all the, you know, generations of extreme secrecy on this subject. But I do think it's a very, very good start. and I do think it deserves our support. This is the web page for it. If you would like to support the UAP Disclosure Act, and I am encouraging you to do so, this petition, this is organized by Danny's New Paradigm Institute. This will go directly to members of Congress. And it's look, if we're ever going to show genuine grassroots support for a UAP transparency or UFO disclosure, this is basically it's the perfect opportunity to do that. Now, when you go to the link here, and I've got that indicated for you, uh, ufos.proapda2025, Pro/UAPPDA2205. You will notice that it asks for your name and your mailing address. This is this makes a lot of people hesitant. Would make me hesitant. Uh the point of that is to show that Congress knows you're a real person. Your your address is not made public on this. I should emphasize that. So if you know the whole address thing would give a lot of people pause because privacy does matter. But if you are comfortable to add your name to this, you're you're going to help provide ground swell of support for a a piece of legislation that I think is uh a worthy and worthwhile piece of legislation to um promote. By the way, that's a QR code so that if you uh if you're watching this on your laptop, your phone could QR it and take you directly to the petition. If you're seeing this on your on your phone, uh it's probably just easier to type in ufos.proapda2025. It's probably simpler. So that's I don't usually uh go out there and engage in advocacy, but I I'm just going to tell you quite honestly, I believe in this piece of legislation. To the extent that I can believe in any piece of legislation, I I think this is a very good one, and I would personally like to see it passed. I don't know that it's a magic bullet. I don't I can't imagine that it is. There's always going to be institutional pressure against uh any kind of UAP transparency. I think that's a given. But I mean, you think about it. If if you're not going to if we don't push something like this within our own legislative system, then what else do we got? What else is there? Right? So, I say let's go for it and see see what kind of pressure we can see uh put forth and maybe we'll get lucky than we think. You never know. Now, one last thing I just want to mention here. Um I guess in closing, I I want to continue to emphasize that there is a reality here that most people I I really believe still don't see. Maybe they do, but it then it slips away as soon as you try to hold it. It's the reality that we're not alone here on this world of ours and probably haven't been for a long time. Something someone else is here, something intelligent, something advanced and not human. It's not a fantasy. It's not a cold war story. It's real and it and it is here now and it's been here for a while. So that is the quiet thread running through decades of reports and decades of sightings and documents and testimony. And I think somehow it still has not fully registered with most of us. It's very easy even in research circles like PE myself people that I know like it's easy to forget what this means because we all get pulled into the all into the machinery into the into the hamster wheel of our lives like and and in this subject it's like who said what and is that person doing disinformation or what agency knew this at what time and what committee did this or didn't do that and but the center of this is so much bigger than that where it's It's contact. It's craft. It's beings. Not not theoretical, not someday. It's now. But the the problem I as I see it is that this is a very hard reality to hold on to. It's hard to uh for us to grasp most of the time like what this really implies. We don't have any precedent for this. We don't have any mental category. Our institutions are built to ignore it. our culture is not prepared, so it slips back into abstraction or into denial. I don't think people reject this because they're close-minded. I might have thought that in the past. I actually think people reject it because they don't know what to do with it. And I think that's a big part of why there's resistance. Of course, there is. It's the closer the closer you get to the truth, the harder the push back becomes. And some of it comes from the top, you know, intelligence networks or defense or media uh personalities or media filters, but a lot of it, I think, is deeper than that. It's structural. It's psychological. You know, I think real disclosure, it doesn't just upset power. It forces us to rethink who we are. And that is not easy. And I think we should just recognize that. You know, it I mean I I've thought for years and many people have said to me for years, we just need truth. We just need disclosure. Yes. Yes. But it's not a bad thing to recognize just how massive a transformation this would be. And then, you know, you look at this and you think some days it feels like we're just moving backwards, like we're just watching the truth get repackaged over and over again and buried over and over again and reshaped uh constantly just to protect the status quo and that is frustrating and sometimes frankly that is exhausting and some people just give up. I don't think we should give up. I I do think that the truth in our society on on all of these things matters. It's not just a slogan. It's like it's something that we want to build our lives around and it's what keeps the floor beneath our feet. I mean, if we lose a commitment to understanding what is true in our world and if we decide it just doesn't matter anymore, then what is left? Just power. So, no, I don't think, you know, we don't have all the answers. I don't I don't know if we're ever really going to have all of the answers. Um, and I sometimes wonder, are we even asking the right questions? A lot of the times I think we're not. However, we are here. We are still looking. We are still listening. We're still holding on to this thread and we're not letting go. And uh, that does count for something. So, for now, let's just hang on to that thread. Let us not despair. Let us realize this is never going to be an easy win. Let us remember there's always going to be resistance every step of the way. That is not a reason to give up. All right. Well, that's that. Glad you were here with me. If you like this video, please do share it. Subscribe to my channel. Uh do check out my website at richelmembers.com. Great people over there. And let us keep fighting the good fight. Later.