Censorship, counter-intelligence, cover-ups and disinformation have long been used to protect national security secrets. In the era of flight, governments began using these techniques to protect secret aerial objects, sometimes even suggesting UFO reports were caused by alien spacecraft rather than top-secret aircraft. As early as 1942, US officials took steps to cover up their advances in jet plane technology, and by 1945 a widespread censorship campaign covered-up the fact that Japan's intercontinental balloons were reaching the US west coast, briefly halting plutonium production and killing a handful of civilians. In 1947, the Army publicly claimed that unusual debris recovered by Roswell personnel had come from a weather balloon, but in 1994 Air Force historians concluded that the weather balloon explanation had likely been a cover for Project Mogul. By 2013, the film Mirage Men revealed an organized campaign to spread disinformation about UFOs had been in operation by the late 1970s. In 2025, it was revealed that since the 1950s, the United States Air Force had a systemic practice of spreading false UFO stories about extraterrestrials and a reverse-engineering program.
Claims of insiders spreading UFO tales Since the 1950s, people have publicly claimed that government or military insiders were spreading stories about spaceships piloted by extraterrestrials. Donald Keyhoe made the claim in books like The Flying Saucers Are Real and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. In subsequent decades, Jacques Vallée and J. Allen Hynek promoted claims of insiders spreading UFO lore. The 1980s saw such claims being made by journalist Linda Moulton Howe, Canadian former transportation minister Paul Hellyer, Army officer Philip Corso, and conspiracy figures Paul Bennewitz, William Cooper, John Lear and Bob Lazar. By the 1990s and 21st century, claimants included astronaut Edgar Mitchell, disclosure movement leader Steven Greer, journalist Leslie Kean, physicists Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis, immunologist Garry Nolan, musician Tom DeLonge, JFK advisor Harald Malmgren, and Pentagon figures Luis Elizondo and David Grusch. Legends held that Jackie Gleason had been told aliens were real by Richard Nixon. Director Steven Spielberg claimed Ronald Reagan had suggested aliens were real during a White House screening of E.T. in the 1980s.
Chronology
P-59 Airacomet
To protect the secrets of the US's first jet fighter, the Bell P-59 Airacomet, the Army Air Corps began a deception campaign against some of its own pilots. The designation was chosen as disinformation, to suggest it was a development of the unrelated Bell XP-59 fighter project which had been canceled. On the ground, the plane was fitted with a false propeller to disguise its novel propulsion system. However, occasionally nearby pilots training on P-38s would spot the experimental craft. In response, chief test pilot Jack Woolam began wearing a gorilla mask, derby hat and holding a cigar. Some trainees witnessed a mysterious unidentified plane with no propeller apparently piloted by an absurdly-dressed gorilla.
Fu-Go balloons
During the 1940s, Japan developed intercontinental balloon bombs. The Fu-Go balloon bomb was the first weapon system with intercontinental range, predating the intercontinental ballistic missile. Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army launched about 9,300 balloons from sites on coastal Honshu, of which about 300 were found or observed in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. One breach occurred in late February, when Representative Arthur L. Miller mentioned the balloons in a weekly column he sent to all 91 newspapers in his Nebraska district, which stated in part: "As a final act of desperation, it is believed that the Japs may release fire balloons aimed at our great forests in the northwest". In response, intelligence officers at the Seventh Service Command in Omaha contacted the editors at all 91 papers, requesting censorship; this was largely successful, with only two papers printing the column. In late March, the United Press (UP) wrote a detailed article on the balloons intended for its national distributors; the Army officer who reported the breach commented that it included "a lot of mechanical detail on the thing, in addition to being a hell of a scare story". Censors contacted the UP, which replied that the article had not yet been teletyped; all five copies were retrieved and destroyed. Investigators determined the information originated from a briefing to Colorado state legislators, which had been leaked in an open session. The most damaging attack occurred on March 10, 1945, when a balloon descended near Toppenish, Washington, and collided with electric transmission lines, causing a short circuit which cut off power to the Manhattan Project's production facility at the state's Hanford Engineer Works. It took three days for its plutonium-producing nuclear reactors to be restored to full capacity; the plutonium was later used in Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. On May 5, 1945, six civilians were killed by one of the bombs near Bly, Oregon, becoming the war's only fatalities in the contiguous U.S. In late April, censors investigated the nationally-syndicated comic strip Tim Tyler's Luck by Lyman Young, which depicted a Japanese balloon recovered by the crew of an U.S. submarine. In subsequent weeks, its protagonists fought monster vines which sprang from seeds the balloon was carrying, created by an evil Japanese horticulturalist. A few weeks later, the comic strip Smilin' Jack by Zack Mosley depicted a plane crashing into a Japanese balloon, which exploded and started a fire upon falling to the ground. In both cases, the Office of Censorship deemed it unnecessary to censor the Sunday comics.
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