Area 51 UFO Rumours Spread Intentionally by Pentagon

Doctored images of ‘flying saucers’ distributed to throw locals off scent about what was really going on.

If the Area 51 shenanigans couldn't get any more bizarre, it now appears that Pentagon officials spent years spreading disinformation about UFOs in an attempt to hide secret weapons programmes at the Nevada base.

By fabricating and planting “evidence” about alien research, they unleashed persistent myths about extraterrestrial activity in the US, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.

In one case in the 1980s, a US Air Force colonel visited a bar near the highly classified military base, deep in the Nevada desert, and gave the owner images of what looked like flying saucers. The photographs were then pinned to the walls – and the idea was planted that Area 51 was being used to secretly test recovered alien technology.

However, the images were doctored, the now-retired colonel reportedly confessed to Pentagon investigators.

The disinformation mission was part of an effort to hide the testing of new top-secret stealth aircraft, developed to penetrate the Soviet Union’s air defences. Military officials, fearing that the F-117 programme might be exposed, hoped locals would believe the other worldly-looking jets instead came from outside Earth.

The WSJ said the disinformation efforts were uncovered during an extensive review by a Pentagon team into long-running conspiracy theories about Washington allegedly hiding research into aliens. However, the newspaper said a report of the review’s findings, published last year, “itself amounted to a cover-up – but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe”.

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