Jun 29, 2025
Written By [Christopher Sharp](https://www.liberationtimes.com/?author=610434e320e3e945538177b1)
Opinion, Written by [Christopher Sharp](https://twitter.com/ChrisUKSharp) \- 29 June 2025
In 2016, RAND analysts Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews [coined the term](https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html) ‘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](https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/flight-mh17-shot-down-by-a-russian-supplied-buk-missile-most-convincing-scenario-by-far-says-pace), a [CIA plot](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mh17-recording-of-cia-agents-conspiring-to-bring-down-flight-ridiculed-after-errors-expose-it-as-russian-propaganda-10455957.html), a [missile fired at President Putin’s aircraft](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/07/malaysia-airlines-conspiracy-aiming-for-putin.html), even [pre-loaded corpses on board the Boeing 777](https://globalnews.ca/news/1459910/plane-victims-long-dead-not-fresh-says-pro-russia-rebel-commander/).
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.
[On 6 June 2025, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran a piece attacking advocates for greater transparency on UAP.](https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinformation-45376f7e)
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](https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Nukes-Extraordinary-Encounters-Nuclear/dp/1544822197) 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](https://x.com/blackvaultcom/status/1938303655259840594), 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](https://x.com/joel_schectman/status/1931205218680668636) 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](https://docs.google.com/file/d/10ss62AXbWjdC05E_wOC3iBe1GCDEyp0x/edit?filetype=msword) 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](https://x.com/MickWest/status/1935073344019382321), 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](https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/ufos/malmstromufo.pdf) indicate the transformer short happened after the missile shutdown, and technicians were [unable](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GujHe7JWMAAlfkL?format=jpg&name=medium) to reproduce the effect in subsequent tests.
The official documentation appears to [refute](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GtrOZVxbUAADNmy?format=jpg&name=medium) Phillips’s ‘explanation’ in [several other ways](https://x.com/MvonRen/status/1935360438142976397), including a [report](https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/ufos/malmstromufo.pdf#page=77) from nearly a full year after the incident stating that ‘all test\[s\] conducted’ to investigate whether an ‘adverse po
*[Read full article at Liberation Times]*