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Perhaps these are truly unidentified objects but you can’t ignore the sophistication of the scams associated with UFOs. There are elaborate hoaxes that require a serious amount of work, sometimes allegedly leaking classified information to mix into it.

For example, Project Serpo, some conspiracy theory about a secret space mission in the 1960-1970s. Somehow decades later this convinced a well known former CIA employee. Who later claimed he was naive to be associated with them.

This led to an unusual case of a current CIA employee leaking emails denying that the former DDI and Chairman of the NIC was involved with the Serpo hoax or the other CIA employee.

That employee quit the CIA in 1982 but was later affiliated with the DDI through medical research.

In the emails, described a meeting at CIA that occurred after the 1988 NBC broadcast of UFO: Cover-Up Live. Mentioned with two Colonels and the dubious AFOSI character who allegedly ran the original Serpo hoax for the Air Force. This person is the focus of the documentary Mirage Men. He also worked for Robert Bigelow and employed the chief scientist to Tom DeLonge’s company.

That scientist was introduced to DeLonge by the former CIA employee who fell for the later Serpo hoax.

The story is confusing but who would spend all this time on this? If you look closely, all the scientists involved even the Stanford guy, are kind of true believers. The rest are con-artists or deceived by a quest to uncover a great secret or technology.

Here is the 1988 broadcast, Falcon and Condor are around 1h10m. Falcon is the Serpo hoaxer AFOSI agent and Condor is a retired Air Force captain. There’s no covert conspiracy here, just a bunch of weird people who claims fantastic things. There’s no prime mover just human nature (ie disinformation, intelligence traps and scams)-

https://youtu.be/5CzZyrGolAg




Do you know of any good resources (documentaries, books, etc) on this sort of thing? (Particularly anything about government spending on pseudoscience.)

After those Navy UFO videos were released and I learned that the crank Harold Puthoff was involved, it became a much more interesting story. I'm surprised there isn't a book about the whole weird saga.


Definitely check out the documentary "Mirage Men" mentioned by the parent comment.


> Perhaps these are truly unidentified objects

If they’re not another nation’s tech, and not ours, my pet theory is the us government has no idea what they are beyond they exist and are spooky.

They cover it up / stigmatize for a banal reason: admitting there’s something they neither understand nor can control is not something governments like to do.




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