From Moscow to Malmstrom: Russian-Style Disinformation Tactics Target U.S. UFO Transparency Efforts
Opinion, Written by Christopher Sharp - 29 June 2025
In 2016, RAND analysts Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews coined the term ‘firehose of falsehood’ for Russia’s modern propaganda style: bombard every channel with a torrent of messages - some true, many half-true, others outright fiction - until audiences stop trying to separate fact from noise.
Paul and Matthews found that Russia’s method has four tell-tale features:
High-volume, multichannel delivery
Rapid, continuous repetition
No commitment to objective reality, mixing truth, half-truth and fabrication at will
No commitment to internal consistency – mutually contradictory stories are launched simultaneously without embarrassment.
Nearly a decade on, that very playbook appears to be running again, not in Moscow’s backyard but in America’s escalating fight over Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) transparency.
Russian propaganda ranks among the world’s most formidable, especially within the murky battlespace of disinformation and psychological operations.
Russia’s truth-plus-fiction approach was evident after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014.
Russian outlets began with genuine uncertainties - conflicting radar tracks, chaotic eyewitness accounts, and an admitted lack of hard data in the first hours, which primed audiences to accept a flood of speculative narratives.
Within days, Russian-connected sources offered mutually exclusive theories: a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet, a CIA plot, a missile fired at President Putin’s aircraft, even pre-loaded corpses on board the Boeing 777.
By anchoring each false claim to the genuine early chaos, Russia made every theory sound plausible - and drowned the facts in noise.
Put simply, a single verifiable fact can clear the path for multiple Trojan horses of disinformation.
Russia has continued to refine that tactic; analysts note the same ‘truth-plus-fabrication’ bursts throughout its ongoing war in Ukraine, launched with the full-scale invasion of 2022.
Yet, Russian-style disinformation is hardly Moscow’s monopoly.
For decades, rising allegations have claimed that the U.S. government recovered advanced, possibly non-human craft, tried to reverse-engineer them, and that these vehicles have even interfered with America’s nuclear arsenal.
If true, it would expose a decades-long cover-up inside the Pentagon - perhaps even from sitting presidents.
In the article, the WSJ leaned on Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), to argue that the U.S. Air Force veterans were merely the targets of a “hazing” prank.
Kirkpatrick claims he uncovered a decades-old Air Force initiation ritual: newly appointed commanders were shown a fake ‘flying-saucer’ photo and told they were joining a top-secret antigravity project called ‘Yankee Blue.’
According to Kirkpatrick, “Yankee Blue” misled hundreds of people over several decades; officers deceived them and even compelled them to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Kirkpatrick claimed that many officers believed the hoax and quietly repeated it. The hoax, according to Kirkpatrick, snowballed into today’s claims of Pentagon reverse-engineering programs, until a 2023 memo finally ordered the practice to stop.
To lend credibility to Kirkpatrick’s allegations, Department of Defense (DoD) spokesperson Susan Gough backed them up, stating that ‘AARO had uncovered evidence of fake classified program materials relating to extraterrestrials, and had briefed lawmakers and intelligence officials.’
Although AARO intended to include this allegation in the upcoming second volume of its Historical Record Report, Gough jumped out in front of the release and publicly affirmed Kirkpatrick’s account.
This could have negative implications going forward, after journalist John Greenewald Jr. verified that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) said it had found no records of the alleged Yankee Blue hazing rituals, although this is by no means the end of the story.
The Pentagon’s endorsement of the hazing story gave the WSJ an official-looking stamp of credibility—one that may have emboldened the paper to publish even more damaging (and now disputed) allegations the DoD later refused to address when Liberation Times sought comment.
Chief among them was Kirkpatrick’s assertion that his investigation proved the March 1967 shutdown of ten Minuteman missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana - long a centrepiece for UAP researchers - had a ‘terrestrial’, non-anomalous cause.
According to the WSJ, it was the result of a classified Air Force test of an electromagnetic pulse device designed to mimic a nuclear blast without an actual detonation.
Within days, scrutiny of the very TRW Systems Group report cited by WSJ co-author Joel Schectman began to unravel his electromagnetic-device theory.
The planning document - contract F04694-67-C-0134 - was commissioned on 1 June 1967, nearly three months after the Malmstrom shutdown, and it outlined a device that would not exist for years, not weeks, thereafter.
Robert Salas - a retired Air Force captain who witnessed the 1967 incident - issued a 14-point rebuttal detailing Schectman’s errors after apparently being led astray by Kirkpatrick.
Only days after the WSJ story appeared, Timothy Phillips, who was Kirkpatrick’s former deputy at AARO, offered a different explanation: the shutdown, he said, was caused by a failed transformer, not an EMP test. The abrupt shift deepened confusion among observers.
Phillips—like Kirkpatrick—puts forward an explanation that Air Force records appear to contradict: post-incident documents indicate the transformer short happened after the missile shutdown, and technicians were unable to reproduce the effect in subsequent tests.
The official documentation appears to refute Phillips’s ‘explanation’ in several other ways, including a report from nearly a full year after the incident stating that ‘all test[s] conducted’ to investigate whether an ‘adverse power effect’ caused the missiles to shut down ‘proved negative results.’
Schectman and co-author Aruna Viswanatha later published a follow-up article introducing additional disputed claims, again quoting Kirkpatrick.
The shifting accounts blur the line between fact and speculation, leaving observers unsure where evidence ends and conjecture begins.
Taken together, the DoD press statement, Kirkpatrick’s hazing tale, the conflicting electromagnetic device -versus-transformer theories, and Phillips’ late “failed transformer” add-on check every box in RAND’s typology:
High-volume, multichannel, mainstream press, and other sympathetic channels all pushed the story within 48 hours
Rapid, continuous update of story lines - rather than repeating the hazing claim, sources introduced fresh, incompatible explanations (electromagnetic device, then faulty transformer) in quick succession, preventing any single version from being fully vetted before the next arrived
No commitment to objective reality - each new theory mixed a genuine, uncontroversial fact (the 1967 missile-shutdown event did happen and remains unexplained) with unverified elements presented as definitive
No commitment to consistency - electromagnetic device, faulty transformer: mutually exclusive, yet presented with equal certainty.
The DoD’s brief press statement to the WSJ functions as the very “peripheral cue” RAND describes - its mere aura of official expertise leads audiences to accept the hazing narrative with little reflection.
Equally telling is what the WSJ chose to debunk - and what it ignored. By dismantling the long-running myth that Area 51 itself harbours crashed saucers, the article directs public scepticism at the wrong desert landmark.
Serious whistleblower allegations, from sources who have spoken to Liberation Times, place the real exploitation of non-human technology several miles away, inside two little-discussed compounds: North Range Site 2 and Papoose Lake Site 4.
Even the best-known UAP whistleblower, Bob Lazar, has insisted since 1989 that the non-human craft he worked on were stored at an S-4 facility near Papoose Lake - effectively Site 4 - rather than Area 51.
Those facilities never appear in the WSJ’s coverage, allowing the most sensitive programmes to stay hidden in plain sight
Questions have emerged regarding Dr. Kirkpatrick’s past statements.
Brandon Fugal, owner of Skinwalker Ranch - a site long linked to UAP activity - has claimed that Dr. Kirkpatrick led a Senate Armed Services Committee briefing in 2018 focused on the ranch.
According to Fugal, before he began his presentation, Dr. Kirkpatrick said:
“Before we proceed any further, I want to establish and understand, all the gentlemen here, Mr Fugal, that you’re presenting to, are all very well aware of the reality of the UFO phenomena.
“So please dispense with any part of your presentation that would seek to convince us of the reality, because we already know.”
In a 2024 interview with Steven Greenstreet, Dr. Kirkpatrick asserted that he had no prior interest in UAP before becoming AARO director in 2022 and denied attending any briefings related to Skinwalker Ranch or meeting Brandon Fugal.
Fugal then hit back, releasing a photograph purportedly from the 2018 briefing, showing Dr. Kirkpatrick in attendance while Fugal is presenting, severely undermining previous statements made to Greenstreet.
Fugal later posted on X:
‘Lying, saying he never attended a detailed formal briefing specifically on Skinwalker Ranch on April 19, 2018 to government officials.
‘Lying, saying he has never met me.
‘Lying, saying he had no interest in the UFO topic prior to 2022.’
Speaking about his own experiences with Kirkpatrick, who has appeared in countless media in a bid to debunk UAP allegations, The Hill opinion contributor Marik von Rennenkampff told Liberation Times:
“AARO under Kirkpatrick, and Kirkpatrick himself, appear to be disingenuous actors. For example, I know via a former senior Special Access Program Central Office (SAPCO) official that claims of widespread ‘alien’ hazing rituals in the Air Force - one of the core allegations of the recent Journal article - are simply untrue. Despite this person’s senior position, they had never heard of such activities, nor had other senior SAP officials at various commands. I hope that this individual speaks publicly soon and, more importantly, that current AARO leadership clarifies in short order the scale and scope of any ‘alien’ hazing.
“The Pentagon also can’t keep its story straight. We were told for years - including by Kirkpatrick himself - that allegations of secret UAP retrieval and reverse-engineering programs are the product of ‘circular reporting’ from a ‘small group’ of alien believers. Yet now, supposedly, ‘thousands’ of personnel were led to believe such programs exist. Which one is it?
“At the same time, Kirkpatrick told me twice - including once on-camera - that the well-known ‘Gimbal’ footage, which is arguably the best-known UAP video in the public domain, is simply a balloon reflecting the sun.
“This, like the various ‘explanations’ for the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base event, is absurd on many levels. The ‘Gimbal’ incident, for starters, occurred at night. At the same time, the Navy aircrew state clearly in the video that the UAP are moving against hurricane-force winds - hardly ‘balloon-like’ behavior. Even noted UAP skeptic Mick West does not buy Kirkpatrick’s ‘balloon’ theory. Moreover, multiple independent geometric recreations confirm that the ‘Gimbal’ UAP exhibited highly anomalous flight characteristics. I challenge any scientist to review the data.
“In another remarkable analytic failure, AARO did not interview the aircrew that recorded the ‘GoFast’ video. Nor does AARO acknowledge that the incident occurred just minutes before the ‘Gimbal’ encounter. Had AARO investigated the ‘GoFast’ incident fully - as it is congressionally mandated to do - its analysts would know that the object in the video was one of four flying in formation. The office’s inability to conduct even a basic investigation pours cold water on its case ‘resolution’ report.
“Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The list of AARO’s remarkable analytic failures goes on and on. After the Pentagon spent decades slapping absurd, unscientific explanations on highly credible UAP incidents, Congress - and the American taxpayer - must demand far more analytic rigor and objectivity from AARO. Hopefully, the office’s new director, Jon Kosloski, will right the ship, but he appears to be fighting an uphill battle.”
The WSJ’s first piece on 6 June, and the follow-up on 21 June, landed at a pivotal moment: Congress is possibly lining up new UAP hearings and finalising transparency language for the next National Defense Authorization Act.
The 6 June article went live just minutes before Jay Stratton - former director of the UAP Task Force (AARO’s precursor) and an outspoken champion of UAP transparency - was set to deliver a speech already cleared by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review.
Seen through Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews’s ‘firehose of falsehood’ lens, the current push to debunk UAP claims arguably mirrors Russian-style disinformation tactics almost point for point.
Every contradictory explanation saturates the discourse with doubt; the aim isn’t to win the debate but to mire Congress and the public in uncertainty, stalling the very transparency reforms advocates are fighting to secure.
The Pentagon has enabled the faulty UAP narrative.
With the WSJ article, the DoD supported Kirkpatrick’s hazing allegations, providing instant credibility to a mainstream publication.
Separately, because AARO’s UAP Historical Report Volume 1, released in 2024, left the DoD with a stamp of approval - a report critics say is riddled with errors, yet was echoed by mainstream outlets with no evident independent fact-checking.
Speaking to Liberation Times, one disillusioned DoD-connected source said:
“When a government uses the media against the interests of its people and to drive a false narrative, it’s called lying. It was true in 1947, and it’s still true today.”
