The Cold War Decision to Gaslight America About UFOs

In January 1953, the CIA convened five distinguished scientists for what would become known as the Robertson Panel, tasked with addressing America’s growing UFO problem. But they weren’t there to investigate what people were seeing in the skies. They were there to figure out how to make Americans stop reporting it. Through declassified documents now available in the CIA’s online reading room, we can trace how these scientists, including future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, spent five days reviewing the Air Force’s best UFO evidence, including gun camera footage and radar reports, only to recommend a systematic campaign of ridicule against witnesses.

Their solution was elegantly sinister: use mass media to “educate” the public that only unstable people see UFOs, monitor civilian UFO organizations as potential subversives, and make military personnel afraid to report sightings by criminalizing disclosure under the Espionage Act. The panel’s recommendations were immediately implemented, transforming Project Blue Book from an investigation unit into a debunking operation, approaching Disney about propaganda films, and beginning FBI surveillance of American citizens interested in UFOs.

For seventy years, this policy worked exactly as intended, creating a cultural reflex where UFO witnesses faced automatic mockery while classified programs continued investigating in secret, a hypocrisy only revealed with recent Pentagon admissions about studying the very phenomena they taught us to laugh at.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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