Sometimes it just takes a while...

I was greatly amused to see a new article on UFOs (or UAPs, or whatever the latest euphemism is) making the rounds. Apparently the US military is now admitting that a great many of the supposedly unidentified objects in the air in the 1950s and 1960s were in fact the US military testing then-secret aircraft -- high-altitude balloons, U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes, early reconnaissance satellites, the first generation of stealth planes, and the list goes on -- and allowing people to mistake them for flying saucers.

This is probably still news to some people. As regular readers of this journal know, Asia Times, which is well worth reading even aside from its UFO-related content, reported it late last year, while the Pentagon was busy trying to drum up more interest in UFOs using a set of photographs that looked as though they'd been made on a Kodak Brownie camera in 1925 or so. That didn't go over so well, not least because most people know the US has cameras that can read license plates from orbit. Of course my longtime readers have been hip to the game since 2009, when my book The UFO Phenomenon (now updated and expanded as The UFO Chronicles) made a case that one of the main factors in the rise of the UFO myth was a deliberate campaign of disinformation carried out by the US military to conceal secret aircraft tests.

What fascinates me is that they're admitting even this much now. (Nobody in officialdom seems to have breathed a word yet of the role of US military intelligence in fabricating the UFO myth.) Are they throwing in the towel, since so few people believed the latest attempts to whip up a frenzy over UAPs? Or are they attempting a limited hangout, as intelligence professionals call it -- getting some of the facts into circulation in advance of a damaging leak, to take some of the shock value away from it? It'll be interesting to watch what happens from here on.