Pentagon and US military faked aliens and UFOs

Space crab shock: Did the legendary NASA photo feed a UFO conspiracy decades in the making? Maybe, according to a bombshell new report by the WSJ.

When a blurry rock formation on Mars was declared a “space crab” by excitable Facebook users, most scientists had a good chuckle and moved on. But now, a far more serious story has landed back on Earth—with the United States Pentagon itself at the centre of what appears to be a decades-long conspiracy plot to make Americans believe in UFOs. Not because there are aliens apparently… but because the government wanted to hide its own high-tech secrets.

• Has the public’s obsession with UFOs been deliberately engineered to keep us looking in the wrong direction?

• What else have we mistaken for aliens that was really just classified tech?

• If your own army, navy and air force believe the lie, doesn’t that make the secret even safer?

Let’s piece together the tale—starting with the ‘space crab’ on Mars and ending in a bunker of misinformation back on Earth.

From Mars crabs to Martian madness

In 2015, a NASA image of a rocky outcrop on Mars went viral. The photo, snapped by the Curiosity rover, showed a crab-shaped ‘thing’ clinging to a rock face. It was objectively horrifying to look at, and the internet went wild. Well, that image has recently resurfaced, and people are going mad again. But, wait, what is it?

To many, it looked suspiciously like a giant alien spider-crab ready to pounce out of the screen. Facebook groups and Reddit users swore it was evidence that NASA was hiding the truth about extraterrestrial life. Was it too horrifying to share with the public? You decide.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, called it a textbook case of pareidolia—the human brain’s tendency to spot patterns where there are none. ‘Recognising a crab in a landscape filled with wind-weathered rocks is no more surprising—nor more significant—than seeing a winking face in a semi-colon followed by a parenthesis,’ he said, as reported by the Mirror at the time. 😉

That might have been the end of it—another case of people seeing monsters in the Martian clouds. But while amateur conspiracy theorists were staring at rocks, something far stranger was going on inside the US government.

Pentagon plots and flying saucer smokescreens

Fast-forward to 2025, and a Wall Street Journal investigation has confirmed what many sceptics suspected: the US Defence Department has deliberately planted UFO stories for years—not to convince people of aliens, but to keep prying eyes away from classified weapons programmes.

Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the WSJ that the military had even gone as far as to fabricate evidence of alien technology. Why? To create a convenient distraction. It’s a very easy get out jail free card when top-secret tech is spotted, particularly abroad.

“Certain exotic weapons systems were so secret that pretending they were alien tech was easier than explaining the truth,” said Kirkpatrick. And it worked. Misinformation campaigns led both the public—and even US military officers themselves—down the wrong rabbit holes.

Glowing orbs and disabled nukes – Too many mysteries

One incident detailed in the report takes us back to 1967, when former Air Force captain Robert Salas was on duty at a nuclear missile facility. A “glowing reddish-orange oval” appeared above the base. Moments later, the missiles were mysteriously deactivated.

For decades, UFO believers cited the incident as proof that otherworldly forces were trying to mess with us. Like an intergalactic prank?

The truth is out there?

The truth, however, may have been far less interstellar—and even more shocking. According to the AARO’s investigation, the Air Force had been testing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear blast—without the actual explosion. When the device charged up, it glowed. Brightly. Orange.

When the test was activated, it disrupted the launch systems—as intended. But the people inside the base had no idea it was just a drill.

Hazing rituals… or disinformation by design?

It didn’t end there. Kirkpatrick also discovered that newly appointed officers in top-secret programmes were shown a photo of what looked like a flying saucer and told they were part of a mission to reverse-engineer it. The project was codenamed Yankee Blue. It sounds beyond bonkers, but it appears to be true.

What they weren’t told? The image was fake. The saucer was part of a bizarre in-house hoax—a kind of ‘hazing ritual’—designed to keep everyone guessing. Some officials believed the deception helped maintain secrecy even within secret programmes.

As Kirkpatrick noted, the practice ran for decades until a 2023 memo from the Defence Secretary ordered it to stop. But by then, the damage—and confusion—was done.

Martian crabs, military cover-ups, and the power of suggestion

So, what connects a grainy rock formation on Mars with a nuclear base in Montana? It’s not aliens. It’s us.

Whether it’s the human mind inventing crabs from shadows or governments pushing alien stories to shield secrets, the thread is clear: we’re wired to see what we want—or need—to believe. And those in power have always known how to use that to their advantage.

Next time you see a UFO headline

Next time you see a UFO headline, take a closer look. It might not be a flying saucer or a face-hugging space crab. It might just be another brick in a carefully constructed wall of misdirection—painted orange, glowing faintly, and sitting quietly at 60 feet above your head.

Or maybe this is all just a double bluff? You decide.

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