You Can’t Believe Your Eyes: The Secret Decoy Program That Explains The New UFO Craze.
TL;DR: The upcoming UFO report to Congress is not likely to reveal the existence of aliens. The modern UFO phenomenon is likely the result of military decoy technology and a byzantine military and intelligence bureaucracy that hides information from itself and takes advantage of accidentally outing its own program to fool Chinese military planners.
After 70 years, the UFO topic is remerging into mainstream culture because of a series of videos released by the Pentagon in 2017.
In the recent COVID relief legislation, Florida Senator Marco Rubio placed a provision requiring the intelligence and defense community to make a report of all it knows on the topic of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
With the report planned to release in June 2021, it’s useful to evaluate what we know about how the new UFO investigations started and review what the images and videos could be showing.
The Background
TL;DR: The current frenzy started with the 2017 release of three videos to the New York Times. The story made the front page of the Times and launched the men responsible for getting the information released into the spotlight. Their goal was to use public pressure to push congress to take investigations seriously.
The strangest part of the modern UFO story may not be the UFO, but how the story got started five years ago.
I’ve written the background in more detail here. The summary, however, is that the former Blink-182 rock star Tom Delonge left the bank in 2015 after announcing that he was working with “high level” government officials to reveal the truth about Aliens.
The 2016 Wikileaks dump of the DNC email server proved Delonge told the truth.
On the server were email exchanges between Delonge and Clinton campaign chairman and former White House chief of staff John Podesta. Podesta helped make several introductions for Delonge and expressed interest in the UFO topic.
After Delonge made a bizarre appearance on Joe Rogan in October 2017, making claims about videos, recovered wreckage, and high-level government officials working to get the truth out — it looked like Delonge was nuts.
In December 2017, the New York Times front-page story revealed the existence of a Pentagon program to investigate UFOs and include the now-famous “Gimbal,” “GoFast” and “Flir” videos.
The director of the Pentagon UFO program, Louis Elizondo, and a former deputy secretary, Christopher Mellon (recently on Joe Rogan), had the videos released and worked with an organization founded by Delonge to advocate for deeper investigations of the phenomena.
Their goal?
Use the media sensation around UFOs to create public pressure for Congress to require the defense and intelligence agencies to investigate what pilots had been seeing for decades.
It worked, and here we are.
The Report
TL;DR: Florida Senator Marco Rubio placed a provision in a COVID funding package that required the defense and intelligence agency to report what they know about UAP to congress before the end of June. Few people expect the report will be comprehensive.
The report to Congress is due next month, but few people know what it will include.
The main issue with the report seems to be that no one exactly knows who to ask or where to find the information about the government’s decades-long interactions with and investigations of UFOs.
As a result, there are questions of whether the right information can even be found in time to make a useful report.
The second issue is whether the arm of the government of contractors that know the most is interested in cooperating. How could you validate the information given or check to see what information was withheld?
After all, there could be good reasons to hide the truth if the technology is a secret U.S. military technology or if the truth would create mass panic.
Worse, maybe there is a strategic reason to overstate what the U.S. knows and has — to cause adversaries to re-evaluate U.S. military capabilities.
In any case, it’s actually unlikely that an issue so layered with stigma, confusion, and strategic importance is likely to receive a full disclose from a one-off report. The best-case scenario is the report encourages the government to allocate more resources to the investigation.
What Is The Phenomena
TL;DR: The UAP could fall under one or more of six possible causes given the fact pattern made available to the public. The scenarios range from black projects, decoy systems and aliens.
There are only a handful of scenarios that could be leading to the UFO sightings by military pilots.
Technological
1. Military Aviation and Naval Equipment is Compromised.
A foreign adversary has infiltrated the highest levels of our aerospace industry and hacked the sensor arrays to simulate a UFO encounter. However, this would not explain the visual sightings.
2. A US Black Project.
The folks at DARPA have cooked up drones that can defy the laws of physics and hid them from us for decades. If this is the case, why are our secret projects chasing and playing games of supersonic chicken with our pilots?
3. Foreign Black Project.
Yikes! The Russians and Chinese have invented a technology that allows them to defy the laws of physics (or appear to defy the laws of physics) and violate our airspace at will and with impunity.
Psychological
4. US Counterintelligence Effort.
It’s a false flag operation designed by our government, and everyone involved (from Delonge to the pilots) are agents (knowingly or not) in the scheme. Are we trying to fool an adversary? Are they planning a false invasion to cower the American people while the Deep State takes control? Who knows.
Biological
5. Unknown Aerial Phenomena.
The things pilots are seeing are not intelligent but are some sort of atmospheric, oceanic, or volcanic happening that move hypersonically and change direction on a dime, but we can’t yet explain what causes them.
6. Unknown Form of Intelligence.
Are they robots, reptilians, or grays? Maybe they are visitors from the same earth but in another dimension. Either way, judging from their technology, we probably aren’t in a good position to challenge them if they decided to do anything besides swoop around off our coasts.
Notable Elements in UAP The Fact Pattern
TL;DR: The existence of several weapons programs designed to fool radar and sensor systems, the location of sightings along the US coast, and rising antagonism to China starting in 2017 shades the UAP video releases.
- The Navy has been developing the Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors (NEMESIS) program for decades. The idea of NEMESIS is to simulate targets on enemy sensor systems so adversaries can’t tell what’s real and what’s an illusion.
- All of the videos released: have come from the Navy and were recorded in Naval training grounds off the U.S. coast. Despite decades of operations abroad, no videos have been released showing UAPs outside of the United States.
- The encounters started shortly after the Navy moved to advanced sensor systems and radar technology in the early aughts. No known videos pre-date the 2004 Nimitz incident.
- The UAP story began going public in late 2017 just months after the Trump administration began taking a more adversarial stance against China and the country’s growing Naval power in the South China Sea.
- Full recordings of the encounters have not been released, and neither have the additional: radar, eye witness, or other corresponding sensor data. Elizondo and Mellon said the unreleased data re-enforces the mystery and bizarre nature of the phenomena.
- A public admission that the U.S. has sophisticated sensor spoofing technology or incredibly advanced aerospace technology could create global chaos. Adversaries would scramble to gain a strategic advantage over the United States by launching cyberattacks, squeezing supply chains, or taking other asymmetric actions.
- Aside from the Nimitz incident, it’s unclear how many encounters have been within the visual range of pilots. Recently released cockpit photos taken from an iPhone aren’t compelling without additional data from sensors and radar. One photo even looks like a floating batman balloon.
Best Estimate Given Available Information
TL;DR: The developers of an advanced decoy system may have started field testing the system on pilots and crews training off the US coast. The videos we see are of this secret decoy weapon system. With the videos made public, the counterintelligence planners realized an opportunity to confound Chinese military planners who are becoming more aggressive in the South China Sea.
In military history, the use of decoys is a common tactic.
Before the invasion of Normandy, the allies even staged an array of inflatable vehicles to fool German pilots about the location and strength of allied forces. A U.S. unit nicknamed the “Ghost Army” pulled off the caper.
As technology advanced post-war, the U.S. would have continued to develop decoy technologies and counterintelligence schemes to fool adversaries about the location and capability of U.S. military assets. Massive U.S. black budgets have provided plenty of resources over the decades to develop advanced technologies.
The technical nature, an alphabet soup of naming acronyms, and contractor-driven development of such programs help keep such technologies secret from the public and most civilian oversight. Most reporters and their audiences would fall asleep before starring a story on the “Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors” program.
Before the new era of sensor systems that started in the early 2000s, the decoy technology had been tested, field-deployed against soviet targets, and recognized by the uninitiated Naval staff as just random radar returns to be ignored or filtered out.
However, once the new sensor and radar systems rolled out, the cutting-edge decoy program had a problem.
How do you test how an adversary would respond to the decoys using the new sensors if they don’t have the new sensor systems yet?
The answer is to test it on your own military.
The first thing you have to do is retool the decoy system — the decoys appear to do more than simply ping on the radar. The decoys have to move fast and take on a shape when viewed through the various sensor systems.
If your decoy tech is good, you could simulate another jet, but that would be dangerous for the unwitting test subjects. An unknown jet violating US airspace would trigger pilots to scramble, set off investigations and potentially spark an international conflict.
If you simulate an unknown vehicle, you can observe how the pilots and radar operators respond and under which conditions the decoys best fool the sensor systems.
The tests happen near the U.S. coast during training operations so no one is on edge and you can deploy and recover your decoys from a submarine operating in secret from the rest of the fleet. It’s possible that the submarine crews didn’t even know what they were launching, or were simply told they were weather balloons. Perhaps this is why the crafts routinely emerge and return to the water?
From the description of the Nimitz witnesses, however, provoking the response proved challenging. The radar operators and pilots ignored the decoys for days on end because they assumed they were caused by feedback or interference.
Like any good government program, the testing on Naval carrier groups never ended. The technology kept developing, and the program’s directors kept having new decoy toys to test out on unwitting pilots and sailors. Hence, why we have ongoing encounters off U.S. shores.
However, a funny thing happened over the decades of decoy testing.
China rose and developed a strong nearshore Naval presence which enabled it to challenge the U.S. in the South China Sea. At the same time, former Senator Harry Reid had required the Pentagon to investigate the phenomena in what became the program headed by Elizondo and overseen by Mellon.
The strange videos and accounts cataloged were the decoy system in action, but they do look out of this world.
Allowing a few of the videos to leak out certainly would grab the attention of the Chinese military and confound their military planners. What are the Americans seeing? Do they have futuristic physics-defying technology? If they are aliens, do the Americans have a relationship with them? Is it all a big counterintelligence operation just to fool their adversaries?
The Chinese cannot afford to act too aggressively if there is a chance that the U.S. has that level of technology up its sleeve.
The most likely conclusion of the upcoming report will be that we don’t know what the pilots are seeing and that we should put more resources into investigating and maybe convene a panel. The goal is to prolong the confused state of Chinese military planners.
The Skinwalker Ranch Problem
TL;DR: The decoy technology does not explain everything. Naked eye sightings and encounters going back decades probably aren’t explained by the decoy theory. If the UAP are intelligence, we have no reason to believe they will ever allow themselves to be studied by us.
The decoy tech turned counterintelligence operation poses a few issues.
First, the question is whether it’s ethical or not for a small segment of the military to run a psych-op on its own soldiers and the American people in order to fool a foreign adversary.
Second, decoy tech that can fool the naked eye means we can no longer trust our own eyes anymore than we can trust a video. The technology essentially allows the military to deep fake real life.
Third, how are historical encounters and sightings explained? Is there a separate set of phenomena that we can’t explain or has the technology been kept secret the better portion of a century?
Assuming hypothetically that the UAP are extraterrestrial, intraterrestrial, or interdimensional, and intelligent poses the Skinwalker Ranch problem.
The Skinwalker Ranch is famous for the various kinds of high strangeness witnessed by natives, ranchers, and scientists over the years. In the 1990s, billionaire hotel magnate Robert Bigelow (The friend of Harry Reid, who encouraged him to fund the Pentagon’s UAP investigation program) purchased the Utah property and spent millions of dollars sending scientists to study the phenomena on the property.
One of those scientists, Dr. Colm Kelleher, wrote a book called “Hunt for the Skinwalker” describing the events on the ranch and the failed attempts at studying the phenomena. Many scientists have observed strange events on the property, but when the cameras and sensors turn on, the phenomena stops or takes place off-camera.
Dr. Kelleher concluded that what they were attempting to study demonstrated intelligence, awareness of their presence, and an aversion to being studied.
The Skinwalker Ranch problem is this — an advanced intelligence that does not want to be studied by humans, cannot be studied by humans. The intelligence can simply avoid us and our measurement tools.
As a result, even if the upcoming report concludes and discloses that the UAPs are an unknown intelligence, it remains unlikely we can make real headway in studying the phenomena until the phenomena are ready to be studied.
