The Journal. - The Pentagon's UFO Coverup

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

For decades, one of the biggest questions fueling conspiracy theories has been: is the U.S. government hiding secret knowledge of extraterrestrial life? But when the Pentagon started investigating, it uncovered a different kind of coverup. WSJ's Joel Schectman reports on what's in that investigation, and what the government ultimately decided to leave out of it. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - How a Balloon Burst U.S.-China Relations Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has the United States government ever made contact with UFOs? That question has been on Americans' minds for decades. The idea that the U.S. government is hiding some truth about alien life has long been the stuff of entertainment, French groups, and conspiracy theories. But more recently, that claim has gotten much more serious attention, including from the government itself. Our colleague, Joel Sheckman, who covers national security, has been reporting on it. For the past three years or so, you've had a number of congressional hearings where these whistleblowers have come public saying that they had become aware of secret alien programs within the government.

Do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials? Something I can't discuss in a public setting. That they do that, you know, the government. might even have some form of alien bodies in their possession. If you believe we have crashed craft stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft? As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries.

As Joel has been digging into the government's growing interest in UFOs, he's gained access to an unprecedented Pentagon investigation. The probe looked into report, reported alien sightings, and allegations that the government has been hiding secret alien programs. What Joel learned is that there was a cover-up having to do with aliens. Just not the cover-up people expected. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, October 17th.

Coming up on the show, the real UFO cover-up inside the U.S. government. The Hulu original series, Murdoch, Death in the Family, dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast. This series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series, Murdoch, Debt and the Family, streaming October 15 on Disney Plus. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting.

Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at Dynamic.com. The following The following story comes from conversations with more than 20 current and former U.S. officials, scientists, and military contractors involved in the Pentagon's investigation.

Joel and other journal reporters also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, emails, and text messages. In digging through that Pentagon investigation, Joel fell into some serious wormholes. One of the stranger stories he encountered has to do with an old radio show that aired out of small town Nevada. So at the mid-90s, there was this show on the radio,

which I remember I used to listen to you at high school. It was called Coast to Coast with Art Bell. Glad to be with you. My name is Archbell. It was all about paranormal stuff and people would call in and say that they had met like ghosts and space aliens. Where are you calling from, sir? Missoula.

Missoula, Montana, all right? Have you ever considered the possibility that these creatures are not aliens, but maybe they're from the future? And one day in the mail, you know, in the 90s he got this package that somebody said that they had got it from their father or their grandfather, I would say. And it was said to be like pieces of the spaceship that had crashed outside of Roswell. Roswell is a legendary place in the world of UFO conspiracy theories, tied to a seminal story about a crashed alien spaceship. It was the kind of thing Art Bell and his followers discussed incessantly. The package Art Bell received back in the 90s contained a few shards of metal. They immediately piqued his interest.

You know, these pieces of metal really looked extraordinary. They looked like they might have been a little burnt from, you know, whatever crashed there was. And over the years, this metal kind of got passed between different, like, UFOs. and who had different theories about it. They would do these, like, different, like, kind of different tests on it. And it really was almost kind of like a talismatic kind of property within the UFO community. The metal seemed to be a combination of magnesium, zinc, and bismuth. And they were mixed in a way that UFO believers said could not have come from an earthly source.

Obviously, that had to mean it came from outer space. Over time, ufologists came up with a theory. So they believed that it couldn't have been something of this world and that it might have properties that would allow levitation, like anti-gravity, or that it could have properties that would allow invisibility, that it could turn craft that was built out of it like invisible. The metal got passed from one researcher to another for years, and several pieces of it eventually ended up in the possession of, believe it or not,

the lead singer of the pop punk band, Blink 182, Tom DeLong. DeLong has sung about aliens in songs like, Aliens exist. He's also the co-founder of a group called To the Stars, which promotes research into alien life. They also sell t-shirts that say things like UFOs are real. Here's DeLong talking about To the Stars after he founded it. We will be bringing out to you hundreds of government documents that were just declassified. And we will also be bringing out some insane videos of UFOs. In 2019, the group paid $35,000 for those metal samples that Art Bell got in the mail.

They wanted to test the metal for intergalactic properties. And to the stars successfully got the U.S. Army to help them out. The government enlisted Lockheed Martin, a major military contractor, to look into the metal. The metal ended up at Skunkworks, a research lab at Lodhurt. Lockheed Martin, that focuses on developing highly classified and advanced military technology. The thing that's really bizarre about it is that Lockheed Martin's skunkwork laboratories, it's where they develop all these, like, really high-level, like, stealth aircraft, but it's also the place where it was long believed that, by UFO believers,

that this was where, like, the secret alien spaceships were being reverse-engineered. And so you actually had the story kind of become true, because now they actually were trying to reverse engineer this piece of metal, like in the very laboratory where that was said to happen. Almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. An actual, literal, self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. But the metal samples still had one more stop after Skunkworks, the Pentagon.

This is where the story of the metal lands on Joel's radar, because it was one of the many bizarre tales that government investigators were looking into, according to his reporting. It was in 2022 that the story. the Pentagon had decided to start looking more closely into alleged alien encounters. Congress created the all-domain anomaly resolution office, or Arrow. With just a few dozen staffers in a classified budget, Arrow began combing through countless reports of alleged sightings of UFOs, or, as the government calls them, UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

Part of Arrow's goal was to investigate these sightings, especially one's near military installations, to see if they had a more terrestrial explanation. Whether we believe in aliens or not, right, like the fact of having, you know, unidentified aircraft passing over, you know, U.S. military facilities, having nobody be able to, like, figure out what's going on with that. Like, that's an issue.

So part of Arrow's job was to try to look at those accounts and try to figure out what was going on, right? And to try to do, like, intelligence work and figure out, okay, is this like an adversary of craft? If so, what country is it hobbyists? Is it an illusion? What is this, basically? And if it's aliens, it's aliens.

But from the perspective of, like, from that part of their job, it's to try to figure out, like, you know, what are some of these sightings in the sky? And, you know, is that something that's, like, dangerous, right? The person who was hired to get Arrow off the ground was named Sean Kirkpatrick. Though Arrow is still a young office, the spotlight on UAP in recent months, underscores the importance of its work and the need for UAP to be taken seriously as a matter of national security. So, Sean Kirkpatrick, had a very interesting career.

He was a physicist that became involved with U.S. intelligence, like, very early in his career. He worked for the CIA. He worked for military intelligence. He was actually kind of like a laser scientist. Right towards the end of his career, when he was about to retire, you know, they came to him with this idea that he was going to lead. this new investigative agency that was supposed to investigate these claims that the government might be housing secret alien technology.

So just to be clear, the Pentagon was asking Kirkpatrick to look into sort of the government itself to see if there was evidence of a cover-up of alien technology. Exactly. And what was extraordinary about it was that he was given, like, full access to, like, the files of CIA and the military. And he was given the power to go to these type of secret sites, you know, to scour area 51 and other kind of secret locations that we don't even know about, right, and see, like, you know, what is it that's actually going out there? But instead of aliens, Kirkpatrick and Arrow found something else. That's after the break.

20th Century Studios presents A legendary movie of that Springsteen, deliver me from nowhere Come, no, man! James like us! Maybe we were born! Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White That's it, that's the Sam.

Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strong. It's a story you ought to tell. I think we got that. Yeah, we got that one. Springsteen, Deliver me from No. nowhere. Only in theaters October 24th. Get tickets now. As Kirkpatrick's investigation unfolded, his team found that many reported UAP sightings turned out to have some pretty mundane explanations. A lot of it wound up being things like

balloons, birds, and drones. But there were a few stories that were harder to explain. One of them happened in 1967. The story goes like this. During the Cold War, Air Force guards were assigned to look after bunkers that housed nuclear missiles. Their job was to be on standby, ready to launch those nukes

if the Soviet Union were ever to attack. At one bunker in Montana, an Air Force captain was on the night watch when he got a call from the guard station. A glowing, reddish-orange orb had suddenly appeared, floating in the air. The guards were terrified. they'd taken their rifles out and pointed them up at the orb.

And then, an alarm started going off in the bunker because the nuclear missiles had just been mysteriously disabled. This is one of the stories that Kirkpatrick's office was looking into. They spoke to like half a dozen people who had had the experience of being at the controls and having what they described as like UFO sightings and what they believed to be like UFOs attacking like the silos and shutting down the weapon systems.

In his investigation, Kirkpatrick dug into their stories to understand what happened. And he learned that there was a scientific, if somewhat convoluted, explanation behind the glowing orbs. Kirkpatrick's team found that around that time, the Air Force had been testing if nuclear control systems could withstand the electrical magnetic pulse or EMP that would be generated if the Soviet Union were to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. To test that resilience, the Air Force developed an exotic generator that was put on a platform 60 feet above the bunker. They would set them up, they would glow like bright orange or red, and then they would shoot an electromagnetic pulse that would really look like – it would really be actually like a bolt of lightning.

And that surge called like an electromagnetic pulse can easily shut down like the hardware that you would need in order to launch these missiles. But the Air Force didn't want anyone to know about these tests. If the Soviet Union heard about it, it could give them an advantage over the U.S. It could be a way to disable America's nuclear arsenal. So the Air Force staff who witnessed these incidents were kept in the dark. Well, they were told not to discuss it because, you know, they didn't want to get it out that there was this vulnerability. But then, you know, when people don't have, like, a real explanation, you know, they try to come up with the best explanation they can think of. And it's like, you know, what were they sort of supposed to believe?

To this day, the men who witnessed these incidents still think they had an extraterrestrial encounter. Kirkpatrick also found cases where the disinformation was intentional and happened over and over. One of them was a secret Air Force program called Yankee Blue, a version of which went back decades. It was so secret that when Kirkpatrick's team questioned one former Air Force officer about it, The officer was visibly terrified. As part of Yankee Blue, new Air Force commanders were shown a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. And they were told by their superiors that it was, quote, an anti-gravity maneuvering vehicle that the government was secretly studying.

These new officers were told to guard this information with their lives, never to repeat it to anybody, even their families. Otherwise, they could go to jail or even be executed. And decades later, they still believed it. What Kirkpatrick found was that this was a hazing ritual that went back like decades and really continued until, like, his investigation discovered it. The story ended up being left out of Arrow's final report. According to Joel's reporting, Air Force officials pressured the office to omit details

that it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage consequences. careers. In a statement, a Defense Department spokeswoman said the department didn't include the fake extraterrestrial program in the report because the investigation wasn't completed, but expects to make it public in another report later this year. Last year, an Arrow representative delivered an update to a congressional subcommittee. It is important to underscore that to date, Arrow has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology. Ultimately, the report found that there is no evidence of UFOs visiting Earth or of the military reverse engineering alien technology.

But what Joel found is that based on Kirkpatrick's undisclosed findings, military officers have engaged in a campaign of disinformation about UFOs for decades. It's a tool that's been used to distract from actual military secrets. The Arrow report made no mention of the Pentagon's own role in spreading that disinformation. Instead, it said the myth spread because of a small group of true believers in the military telling and retelling the same stories. In a sense, they're trying to blame, you know, like a few bad apples or some people that, you know, just were like true believers. But what they left out of that report and what we found was that it was clear that the Pentagon beared like pretty significant responsibility for the spreading of the story itself, right? Since the stories have come out, Joel says that he's gotten some pushback.

back from UFO believers, some of those same people that have been demanding answers about the government's alleged UFO programs. I had thought because we were revealing a Pentagon cover-up of a sort that they would, you know, that it would have like a little bit of credence in that sense. But I think that they were very skeptical and believed that the information that had been, you know, the information that we had found had been sort of fed to us as like just another layer of the cover-up. And they came up with, like, quite a few, like, sort of, like, Byzantine conspiracy theories about me and my co-writer.

But, you know, the truth is sometimes a lot stranger than fiction. And I think the idea that you'd have, like, a hazing program like that that would go on for 40 years, like, trying to deceive people in your own military, you know, in a way, it's even, like, stranger than believing in aliens, right? Like, it's a very odd thing for them to have done. And, you know, you can understand why people would be mistrustful of that explanation. One last thing, those strange pieces of metal, the ones that you heard about at the beginning of this episode. When the metal samples went to the Pentagon, it was Kirkpatrick, who had a piece of it examined as part of his investigation. He went and got a second opinion from a top government research facility, and it turned out that it wasn't from outer space. It's not some alien technology that has anti-gravity properties.

Most likely, it came from some manufacturing tests during the World War II era, back when they were trying to create a new lightweight metal for military equipment. At least, that's what the U.S. government says. That's all for today, Friday, October 17th. Additional reporting in this episode from Aruna Viswanata. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gidcari, Rachel Humphreys, Sophie Codner, Ryan Knudson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de LaRosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Pierce Shingi, Jivica Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zemise, and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley, remixed for today's episode by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week from Alconis Negros, Catherine Anderson, Marcus Bagala, Johan Glossner, Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Emma Munger, Retchaton, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Kate Gallagher, Mary Mathis, and Nicole Posulka. Thanks for listening. See you on Monday.