Many ufologists claim that the US and UK governments are doing secret research into UFOs while telling their citizens that they do not exist. If this is true, an understanding of deception and disinformation techniques may make us less vulnerable to being fooled. For obvious reasons few governments publish much information about such techniques. However, deception is frequently used during wars, so by studying some historical examples we might learn about what is happening today. Because official disinformation is not the only source of confusion about UFOs, this article will also discuss other sources of misleading information.
Deception is to create a misleading impression in your target audience by your actions. It is something that you do to mislead whoever may be observing you, either on a small or large scale. Deception might be directed at the intelligence services of a country that you are at war with, or at your own citizens during peace time. Most intelligence services see little difference between war and peace time, and unfortunately if you wish to fool the international community you generally have to mislead your own citizens as well. Deception techniques take advantage of the fact that people tend to think that information they had to ferret out is more likely to be true than if it were handed to them on a platter.
An example of deception was revealed in an article in the Sunday Times entitled “Germ war reports exposed as hoax” (1998). The report tells how released Russian intelligence files had revealed that in 1952 the North Koreans had deliberately infected a couple of their own citizens with plague bacilli, and then used tissue samples from their bodies to convince the world that the Americans were using germ warfare in the Korean conflict. The United States had unsuccessfully denied the claims because, as the article says, “Historians had questioned whether the Koreans and Chinese could have mobilised thousands of people and faked evidence from scores of doctors, scientists and officials. But the new papers show they did exactly that.” This illustrates that some governments will occasionally go to inordinate lengths to mislead.
Disinformation is the release or leaking of misleading information. I think it was Churchill who claimed that to keep something secret sometimes one needed “To surround the truth with a tissue of lies.” By releasing three parts disinformation to one part truth you can confuse and mislead your target audience. This is especially important with the UFO phenomenon because, unlike technical secrets which can be kept locked up, UFOs appear in public so a completely different technique is needed to keep them secret.
UFOs were probably first noticed by Western governments soon after WW II. It is not within the scope of this article to discuss why the authorities decided to keep them secret, but once that decision had been made, the best way to do it was obvious. If they could not make UFOs disappear physically, the solution was to make them disappear psychologically using perception management or what the military calls psy-ops (psychological operations). Regardless of what many people were seeing, they simply decided to define UFOs out of existence, and ridicule the minority who did claim to see them. I believe that it will eventually be shown that the UFO cover-up has been the most successful deception campaign in human history. Ironically, it continues to be so effective that those in authority may be concerned that the public will refuse to accept the truth even if concrete evidence is presented to them. In other words, the continued UFO secrecy may partly be a result of the effectiveness of the earlier secrecy.
For ease of recall, the categories used in deception and disinformation involve five verbs beginning with the letter D. These are: to deny, distract, demean, deceive, and divide, and it is not hard to think of examples from the history of ufology that illustrate each of them. These techniques are also frequently used in politics, especially around election times.
Military History. Some might challenge the suggestion that a UFO deception campaign could succeed to the extent that many ufologists claim. However there have been several historical precedents that demonstrate how to keep a secret under difficult circumstances. Michael Lindeman (1999) gives us the example of the US government concealing the fact that German U-boats were attacking merchant ships off the eastern American coast during the early years of WW II. “Today few Americans have even the slightest notion that between December, 1941 and September, 1942, 292 vessels were torpedoed and hundreds of merchant seaman lost, most within sight of American beaches” (p.68). Wreckage and bodies that washed up on the shore were impounded by the military, newspapers were persuaded not to publish stories about it, and “those who were in the government information loop on this policy were strongly informed that any breach of security would be considered treason, a crime punishable by execution” (p.68). Not surprisingly the information was not made public. There is every reason to suspect that a similar policy exists today about UFOs. The question we need to ask is, when is it going to end?
There are a few interesting books about deception that I would recommend. None of them mention UFOs, but they give numerous historical examples which reveal the imagination, cunning, ruthlessness and audacity that exponents of deception and disinformation employ. The first is The Deception Planners: My Secret War (1980) by Dennis Wheatley who was a famous best-selling author at the outbreak of WW II. He describes how he became a deception planner in the offices of the British War Cabinet, and reveals how important such planners were to the war effort. They had access to all War Cabinet documents and came up with some amazing ideas to mislead the Germans into sending troops to places where they would do the least harm. Wheatley clearly sets out the basic guidelines of deception and illustrates them with examples. It does not take much imagination to see that those rules could easily be used today in misleading the public and other governments about what the USA really knows about UFOs. This is an important point. For example, Stanton Friedman claims that by spreading convincing cold war rumours that they had mastered UFO technology, the USA might have deterred other governments from using that same technology to attack them (Lindeman, 1991, p.26).
A more recent book on deception is The Art of Military Deception (1997) by Mark Lloyd which gives an historical overview of the subject from ancient times to the present. Some of his examples should be of interest to ufologists. During WW II the British set up propaganda radio stations that, while actually based in England, pretended to be German stations transmitting from Europe. One of them was specifically aimed at German U-boat crews. It played the latest German dance music, had request programs and, “contained dedications for genuine birthdays and anniversaries gleaned from censored mail passing between German navy prisoners of war and their families” (p.150). Among the music, news stories and highly detailed reports of bomb damage in Germany was, “slipped subversive information, morale-sapping innuendo and highly accurate details of the situation on the home front” (p.151). As Lloyd points out, “The effect on U-boat crews, cramped, in constant danger and thousands of miles from home in the mid-Atlantic, can well be imagined” (p.151). As this example reveals, rather than simply disseminating false information, a deception source may aim to become a trusted organ of influence with the purpose of gently guiding their target audience’s views in a desired direction. To do this they do have to publish some accurate information. Conspiracy theorists generally assume that the US government monitors UFO researchers, and may at times wish to divert their attention away from areas of higher national security significance towards less threatening topics. One way of doing this would be for them to have secretly funded a public UFO research organisation or magazine whose covert intention would have been to centralise the attention of ufologists, keep them distracted and amused with low level, narrowly focussed ‘scientific’ information, while actually discussing very little of genuine relevance. In other words, ufologists perhaps need to pay attention not to what some of today’s UFO magazines are getting excited about, but rather what it is that they consistently do not discuss. We also need to realise that there is every chance that a few leading ufologists are not as dedicated to revealing the truth as they might appear. We need to distinguish however between what we could call double-agent ufologists and those who publish misleading information in order to help sell their books or promote themselves, although pretending to be the latter would be ideal cover for those who were actually the former.
Another book that reveals the high level of secrecy and planning that goes into covert deception activities is Op JB: The Last Great Secret of the Second World War (1996) by Christopher Creighton, which describes how British Intelligence secretly smuggled Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and executor, out of the ruins of Berlin at the end of the war and gave him a new identity in England, despite the worldwide manhunt for him. This was done in exchange for Bormann giving them access to the vast fortune that the Germans had looted from across Europe. The book also reveals the absolute ruthlessness used to keep vital information secret. For example, Creighton claims that, as an undercover British agent, he was required to blow up a Dutch submarine and all its crew just to prevent them from revealing that British and US Intelligence had been forewarned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. This suggests that, as a last resort, people might be killed (‘terminated with extreme prejudice’) to protect important enough UFO information, provided that it could be done in a deniable fashion.
A final recommendation is the book By Way of Deception: The Making & Unmaking of a Mossad Officer (1990) by Victor Ostrovsky & Claire Hoy. Once again UFOs are not mentioned, but I believe that anyone that is serious about ufology needs to read a few such books to learn, firstly just how little they previously knew about deception, and secondly how imaginative, ruthless, cynical, well-trained and well-funded the professionals who work in such fields really are. Unfortunately, and with no disrespect intended, this means that, in comparison to those managing the UFO cover-up, the average ufologist is an absolute amateur, and we need to realise that if the authorities really want to mislead us, there is probably very little we can do about it.
Examples. Let us look at a few examples of possible UFO deception. In his book Above Top Secret (1989, p.397) Timothy Good describes a 1962 incident where some US navy aviators, who were temporarily at Wright-Patterson Air Force base, entered a hanger looking for sports equipment to use during their daily fitness workout. Once inside they were stunned to find a flying saucer-shaped object about four metres wide suspended by two engine test stands. It was roped off and surrounded by eight guards. They were promptly told to leave “by an air police sentry with a sub-machine gun”, and later the senior pilot was reprimanded by his general for breaking security. There are several points to be made about this incident. If the story is true, we could ask why something that is so secret that it warrants eight guards is kept in an unlocked room. Surely a better means of security would have been to lock the door and put the guards outside, thus ensuring that they too did not see what was inside? Secondly, if one didn’t want people to see the UFO, why rope it off? A screen would have been far more effective. The standard of security in this example was so incompetent that whoever was supervising it should have been promptly court-martialled, unless it was deliberately designed that way. I do not know if this scenario was actually an example of deception, but we could ask what purpose the incident might have served if it was? By ‘accidentally’ allowing the pilots to see the craft surrounded with armed guards, and then accentuating the importance of the situation with a security reprimand from their general, the whole incident probably became indelibly etched in their minds. Timothy Good writes that, once outside, the pilots “had reassured each other that the good old US had developed, or had all along, flying saucers in service” (Good, 1989, p.398), and the story then found its way into his best-selling UFO book for anyone to read. So much for secrecy! Perhaps the whole episode was carefully designed to reassure US servicemen, and later the public, that the Pentagon had the UFO situation under control, even if it didn’t.
Cergy-Pontoise. Even if various government are involved in UFO deception, their motives and methods may vary considerably. The apparent abduction of Franck Fontaine at Cergy-Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris in November 1979 is a good example. The story is quite complex and is described in several UFO books (Evans, 1984). Franck and a couple of his friends were loading their car with clothes to sell on their stall in a market about sixty kilometres away. They had got up before dawn and, while the others brought the clothes down from their flat, Franck remained in the car to stop it stalling. They then saw a brilliantly shining UFO and several smaller lights near the car and, after some confusion, Franck was found to be missing. The incident was reported to the police and received nation-wide publicity. One week later Franck reappeared near where he had disappeared and was amazed to discover that he had been missing for so long. Most books that mention it leave the case open, however in Jacques Vallee’s book Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception (1991, p.149) we get quite a different story. Vallee quotes an unnamed official from French Air Force headquarters who, in November 1980, admitted that the Cergy-Pontoise abduction had actually been carried out by the French government in order to observe the reactions and behaviour of the police, media, scientific investigators and the public. The abduction had been authorised by a member of the French cabinet and no more than fifteen people knew what had happened. Franck Fontaine had been grabbed, kept drugged in a secure place for a week and then returned to where he had been abducted without knowing what had really happened to him. Vallee advises that, to eliminate such official deception in future, abductees should be promptly checked for syringe marks and given blood and urine tests to check for any knockout drugs. If Vallee’s report is true, we have the ironic situation of a leading Western government trying to fool the public into thinking that UFO abductions do exist, rather that their usual denials. The question that ufologists may need to ask themselves now, is whether other countries carry out similar fake abductions to assess public reactions, and if so, how often do they do it?
Patent Applications. In 1997, Sydney engineer and inventor Ted Roach published a small book entitled The Physics of A Flying Saucer. Roach believes that the propulsion of UFOs involves discoveries about a unified field theory and the nature of time. He describes how he had submitted several patent applications to the Australian Industrial Property Organisation (AIPO) for, “ten inventions for machines in gravitational, electric and magnetic fields” and claims that, “The pending patent comprised the physics of flying saucers and other applications using the Unified Field Theory and six dimensions of space time” (p.21). In reply to his application Roach received a letter from the AIPO which said that, “due to the nature of the invention and the possible military interest, the applications have been forwarded to the Department of Defence and the Australian Safeguards Office for a determination as to whether or not a publication prohibition order should be placed on the inventions” (p.116). In the meantime Roach was told not to reveal details of his invention. A couple of months later his application was cleared by both those authorities, and a copy of the relevant letter appears in the back of his book.
Most people would probably have never heard of the Australian Safeguards Office, however it is well known to many ufologists and ‘free energy’ researchers, that patent applications in most Western countries can result in a new invention being confiscated by the authorities and an information blackout being placed on the subject. This generally only happens if the Safeguards Office believes that the invention has genuine national security implications, otherwise there is no point in classifying it. So what are we to conclude from Roach’s case? If Roach is telling the truth, can we assume that he was allowed to proceed with his patent application because someone decided that his invention wouldn’t work, or was of no relevance? As Roach points out (p.21), if UFOs don’t exist why should anyone be interested in his invention? Are we to conclude therefore that the Australian Department of Defence and the Australian Safeguards Office do know that UFOs exist? Or should we be cautious and suspect that someone behind the scenes saw Roach’s patent application as an ideal opportunity to muddy the waters a bit more by pretending to be interested in his inventions, confiscating them for a few months, and then handing them back knowing that he would probably write about the incident in a book? I do not know the answer to these questions, but it may be possible that, if UFOs do exist, the authorities do not want any information about their propulsion systems to be made public for reasons of national security, and so are obliged to intercept patent applications such as Roach’s, just in case they are on the right track.
Fake Photos. There are numerous examples where misleading UFO-related information appears not to have been generated by disinformation experts. Plenty of magazines and Internet sites publish suspect UFO information. An example of a misleading UFO-related photograph can be found in the February 1996 edition of Encounters magazine (‘Gotcha’, p.68). The cover photo, described as a ‘World Exclusive’, showed two jet fighters accompanying a black triangular craft that is being refuelled in midair. The photo seems to have been taken towards a bright yellow sunset so that all four craft are just black silhouettes. The article inside (p.68) claims that the photo was taken from the ground by a man on holiday in Cornwall, and reveals that the military has been concealing their connection with such craft. However, an article in the March/April 1996 edition of UFO Magazine (p.4) by Bill Rose claimed that the details in the Encounters story were completely fictitious, and that the ariel refuelling photo is actually a, “simulation photograph of an Aurora Project aircraft” created by him to illustrate a sighting of such a craft being refuelled by a KC-135 tanker over the North Sea in 1989. Bill Rose’s UFO Magazine articles are very informative and well-referenced?he appears to be a mine of information on modern military aircraft?and it seems reasonable to believe his account of the photo’s origins. So here we have a simulated B&W photo, created with good intentions to illustrate a genuine sighting report, which ends up being superimposed onto a colour photo of a sunset on the cover of a rival UFO magazine to illustrate a fictitious conspiracy theory article about the air force. Ironically, Bill Rose’s article also suggests that the original triangular craft sighting helps prove that the US or British air force have secretly developed such a craft. It would be hard to invent a more confusing scenario that does so little to enhance the credibility of UFO research.
Insider Leaks. The UFO literature increasingly contains revelations by people who claim to have had something to do with UFOs or aliens while working for their governments. Examples are Bob Lazar (1991); Nick Pope (1996, 1997); Col. Philip Corso’s book The Day After Roswell (1997); Dan Sherman’s Above Black: Project Preserve Destiny (1997); Michael Wolf’s The Catchers of Heaven (1996); and Ingo Swann’s Penetration (1998). Dr Steven Greer who runs the Centre for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (www.cseti.org/) claims to have numerous US government insiders prepared to testify before an official UFO inquiry, if given permission to break their security oaths. Some insider leaks may be because these people are no longer worried about breaking their security oaths because they are old and sick, while others may have been persuaded to take part in one last disinformation project. So, how much insider information should we believe? It is a standard security practice to compartmentalise highly classified research, meaning that top secret information is only given to those with a need to know. Christopher Creighton (1996) claims that, of the dozens of people involved in smuggling Martin Bormann out of Germany, only three or four actually knew who he was. The rest were only told he was someone important. This suggests that few insiders would be able to leak the full picture about government UFO research, even if they wanted to. An example of an insider not being given the full picture is Michael Wolf (1996) who claims to have been the head of a friendly US team profiling the various alien groups visiting earth, while another branch of the military (which he says he wasn’t supposed to know about) was using futuristic energy-beam weapons to attempt to shoot them down. This duplicitous state of affairs? simultaneously friendly and hostile? sounds so ridiculous that one is tempted to believe that it might be true. However, a good disinformation planner would obviously attempt to create plausible scenarios.
Some leading ufologists warn us to be extremely suspicious of insiders offering convincing UFO information. Such a scenario might be a deception set-up in which the ufologist?if sufficiently naive? publishes the information using his or her credibility (‘Trust me, I’m a ufologist!’), only to have it convincingly refuted some time later. Not only does this sabotage his or her credibility, and that of ufology in general, but it also helps persuade others that might in future be leaked genuine inside information, not to believe it, or to abandon the field all together out of sheer frustration.
Disinformation or Education? In this vein we need to ask ourselves whether the Majestic 12 documents (which supposedly describes a top secret UFO briefing given to President-elect Eisenhower in 1952) or the ‘Alien Autopsy’ film are genuine? (A copy of the MJ12 documents can be found in the appendix of Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret.) Could a sophisticated disinformation game be being played here? Those in charge of the UFO cover-up ?assuming that someone is in charge of it?probably have contingency plans ready in case, for example, a UFO landed in the middle the Olympic Games, or a football grand final. They would hopefully also know that one day they must reveal at least part of the truth about UFOs, so they might be preparing us for such a revelation by feeding us genuine UFO information in a semi-fictitious but entertaining form. It has even been suggested that popular films such as Men In Black are part of that educational program. When one considers the Pentagon’s increasingly unlikely Roswell explanations?parachute test-dummies indeed!?we could be excused for suspecting that they are implying that the Roswell story does have some validity, but that it is still too early for them to admit it out loud. Let us be aware therefore that any future US president’s ‘full and frank admission’ about UFOs has every probability of being only a self-serving part of the whole picture.
NASA & SETI. Following on from the ‘Are we being educated?’ question, what are we to make of the US space agency NASA and a majority of its astronauts acting as if UFOs do not exist? How could NASA not know about UFOs? Is their behaviour just a public deception? Although a civilian agency, NASA is still subject to national security restrictions, regardless of how much its employees might dislike it. In his book Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis (1995, p.24), NASA rocket scientist Paul Hill points out that, while he worked there, NASA’s policy was that, regardless of the evidence, UFOs do not exist. He was not happy with this situation, but could do nothing about it. Unlike the military, scientists tend to see scientific discoveries as transcending national boundaries. So we could have some sympathy for those NASA scientists who might dearly wish to make what they know about UFOs public, but are perhaps reluctantly obliged either to keep silent or make misleading statements about them. However, even if not actively engaged in spreading disinformation, such silence does contribute to misleading the public.
That brings us to the various Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects, which are now funded largely by private enterprise. How is it possible for millions of dollars and hours of valuable radio telescope time?which includes Australia’s Parkes radio telescope?to be spent listening for alien radio messages while some of those very aliens appear to be flying over our heads. An article in Flying Saucer Review by Jorge Martin (1999, p.23) reports that numerous UFOs, including some very large ones, have been seen near the radio astronomy observatory at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, which is involved in SETI.
There are not many researchers employed by SETI (computers do most of the listening) so is it possible that they too have been misinformed about UFOs? In an end-of-the-millennium article in Scientific American (Dec, 1999) entitled “Is There Life Elsewhere in the Universe?” SETI scientists Jill Tarter and Christopher Chyba write that, “Despite tabloid reports of aliens and artefacts everywhere, scientific exploration so far has revealed no good evidence for any such things” (p.85). It is hard to know whether such comments are the product of ignorance or deception. It is clearly untrue that UFO information comes only from tabloids, and Tarter and Chyba neglect to mention which ‘scientific exploration’ it was that ‘revealed no good evidence’ for UFOs. Had they been more honest, they might have admitted that there was plenty of good scientific evidence for the existence of UFOs, but that they were either unwilling or not permitted to mention it.
Could SETI have a covert purpose apart from listening for aliens? As Terence McKenna (1991) writes, “To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.” Even if we did pick up an alien message from a planet that was, let’s say, twenty-five light-years away, what are we then going to do? It would be a very tedious conversation if we answered it, and then had to wait another fifty years (twenty-five years there and twenty-five back) for their reply. While keeping a few computer engineers, software designers and astronomers in gainful employment, perhaps SETI actually serves the more important purpose of introducing the public to the idea that there are almost certainly aliens out there somewhere. Rather than listening for aliens, SETI’s main function may be to send a non-threatening message about aliens to the public here on Earth, as a prelude to informing them that those aliens are already here. Most SETI scientists might be unaware of this covert motive, which would make the whole project a masterpiece of deception.
Freedom of Information. Many ufologists had hoped that FOI legislation would provide access to numerous revealing UFO related documents. However this has not generally proved to be the case. For a start, all FOI legislation has exemption clauses preventing the release of documents that might jeopardise national security, and the bureaucrats are not silly enough to give the game away by saying “Sorry we cannot release those documents on the grounds of national security”. Instead they adopt more frustrating tactics. They may take ages to answer your letter, or deny having the documents, or ask exorbitant fees for copying them (Fawcett & Greenwood, 1984). Some of the documents that have been released suggest that the US and British governments do take UFOs seriously. Nevertheless FOI documents provide an ideal deception opportunity, and so we should be cautious in interpreting them. An Internet site that contains a large number of UFO-related US government documents is The Black Vault (www.blackvault.com/).
It has been claimed that when the US government started to research UFOs in the late forties they set in place a security system the likes of which had never been seen before. That system has no doubt been redesigned numerous times since then, but would still appear to be working effectively. Col. Corso (1997) claims that some UFO debris was handed over to trusted defence contractors to reverse-engineer. Even if this is not true, it is still possible that a significant proportion of UFO research has been conducted by private enterprise where the paperwork is protected by commercial secrecy and beyond the reach of FOI legislation. In Ingo Swann’s book Penetration (1998) he claims to have worked briefly for a US organisation which was so secretive that it left no paper-trail at all. It would obviously be impossible to obtain documents from an organisation that does not have any.
Religion. Another category of deception is the sensitive subject of self-deception. There are some people with strongly held religious views who are convinced that UFOs and abductions are the work of the devil, designed to fool humanity into straying from the path of righteousness. Such people seldom consider that it may be they who are misled, and their dogmatism does not compensate for their lack of concrete evidence, or disregard for the basic principles of science. It is bad enough that our governments appear to be deceiving us about UFOs without various religious groups adding more confusion to the subject. As an example, consider the following information that was e-mailed from Alex Ruxton to about fifty UFO ufologists and research groups worldwide in January 2000. Ruxton claims that there are “200 million reptilian devils that are now in a state of hibernation underneath the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico!... They are scheduled to resurface very soon. They already have their battle plans prepared. The majority of their troops will be sent to invade the leading industrialized nations. We do not have much time left…. If you think that I am kidding then please find the hole in my story.” Ruxton’s evidence comes largely from the Book of Revelation, and his website describes his theory in detail. Unfortunately, there are so many holes in his story that most people would probably not even bother replying. However, to be fair, we should acknowledge that much of the information supposedly provided by aliens to abductees over the last few decades is fairly garbled. Are aliens also trying to mislead us, or are our technical and cultural differences so great that we would be incapable of understanding them whatever they told us?
Thankfully, some students of religion are more rational. Timothy Paul Prevett claims to have completed an honours thesis in 1998 at Regents Theological College on the ‘Demonic Eschatological Hypothesis’ (DEH) which claims that “ETs are a demonic deception heralding the approach of the return of Christ”. After reviewing the available literature, Prevett concludes that UFOs, “should be seriously and calmly investigated by the full power of science” because, “the DEH is unsatisfying and theologically questionable. There are too many possibilities, and little ground for dogmatism” (Prevett, 1998).
To justify the belief that we are being deceived about UFOs, it helps to believe that a well-funded, well-informed, top secret UFO research project does exist. However, the assumption that an ubiquitous, all-powerful, unknowable, superior authority, has the disturbing matter of UFOs under control could itself be seen as a type of reassuring religious belief. We therefore need to be careful that we are not deceiving ourselves into believing that ‘the authorities’ know more than we do about UFOs, because deep down we are frightened that they really know very little. Could they be using UFO disinformation to reassure us while they desperately try to work out what to do? After all, a military mentality is probably the least appropriate mind-set to research a phenomenon that appears to be a combination of nuts-and-bolts, paranormal and spiritual ingredients. Or have we also been mislead about that?
Humour. To illustrate that UFO disinformation does occasionally have its lighter side, a short article in the MUFON UFO Journal (‘509th’, 1999) describes how that magazine had been sent a shoulder patch supposedly now used by the 509th Bomb Wing whose members were formerly stationed at Roswell (and recovered the July 1947 crash debris), but who now fly B-2 stealth planes from Whiteman Air Force Base. The circular patch displays the Latin phrase ‘Gustatus Similis Pullus’?which means ‘tastes like chicken’? and shows an alien’s head above a delta-winged craft. So, do the 509th really eat aliens for breakfast? The MUFON UFO Journal editor contacted Whiteman AFB and was told that, although ‘pretty funny’, the hoax patch did not belong to the 509th.
Conclusion. This article has only been able to address a small proportion of the questionable information about UFOs available to the public, but it is nevertheless obvious that we have to be careful about what we choose to believe, because there are those out there who seem determined to mislead us for one reason or another, while others may actually be trying to educate us. Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get even more confusing as some new air force planes appear to be modelled on genuine UFOs, and rumours exist that the US government may one day stage a fake alien attack in order perhaps to justify the subsequent militarisation of space (Hayakawa). Helmut Lammer (1999, p.14) even believes that US military involvement in some abductions may be related to mind control research on their own citizens. It is claimed that the second most popular type of Internet sites are UFO related ones. Unfortunately, this means that an ever increasing number of people are available to be misinformed. Let us hope that one day soon someone in authority?human or alien?has the decency and courage to begin telling us what is really going on about UFOs. ?
References
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Source: Journal of Alternative Realities - Volume 8, Number 1 2000