Yankee Blue

[natecull]

A Wall Street Journal article quoting Sean Kirkpatrick, formerly of AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), is making the Reddit UFO community unhappy (because Kirkpatrick is not their favourite person). However it's one particular claim that I want to highlight:

https://archive.ph/6TWJ1

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology
U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs

ByJoel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha
June 6, 2025 9:00 pm ET

The Pentagon omitted key facts in the public version of the 2024 report that could have helped put some UFO rumors to rest, both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment, the Journal investigation found. The Air Force in particular pushed to omit some details it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage careers.

But Kirkpatrick soon discovered that some of the obsession with secrecy verged on the farcical. A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick’s investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses.

It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual.

For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.

The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.

Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates, whether as some type of loyalty test, a more deliberate attempt to deceive or something else.

After that 2023 discovery, Kirkpatrick’s deputy briefed President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, who was stunned.

Could this be the basis for the persistent belief that the U.S. has an alien program that we’ve concealed from the American people? Haines wanted to know, according to people familiar with the matter. How extensive was it? she asked.

The official responded: “Ma’am, we know it went on for decades. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real.“

The finding could have been devastating to the Air Force. The service was particularly sensitive to the allegations of hazing and asked that AARO hold off on including the finding in the public report, even after Kirkpatrick had briefed lawmakers on the episode. Kirkpatrick retired before that report was finished and released.

In a statement, a Defense Department spokeswoman acknowledged that AARO had uncovered evidence of fake classified program materials relating to extraterrestrials, and had briefed lawmakers and intelligence officials. The spokeswoman, Sue Gough, said the department didn’t include that information in its report last year because the investigation wasn’t completed, but expects to provide it in another report scheduled for later this year.

“The department is committed to releasing a second volume of its Historical Record Report, to include AARO’s findings on reports of potential pranks and inauthentic materials,” Gough said.

So that's interesting. Apparently the USAF has been deliberately indoctrinating hundreds of officers with the belief that the USA has been reverse engineering UFOs. For what reason? Other than just laughs and because spreading lies about ET contact is totally cool and not at all destructive of trust and democray?

A "hazing ritual" doesn't entirely make sense. However, a security procedure does. Perhaps the idea was that each officer receives a customised fake Yankee Blue briefing and if anyone leaks theirs, it's obvious who is untrustworthy?

There is famously another "Yankee color" nickname which is also a security procedure: Yankee White, the background check for staff working in the White House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_White

At the very least, it seems like Yankee Blue has been burned as a security procedure, and now hundreds of people might be free to talk about it.

Regards, Nate

[natecull]

So more on this allegedly fake UFO briefing "Yankee Blue"... about which I hope we hear more from the Wall Street Journal, Sean Kirkpatrick, and/or the remaining straight (or broken) arrows at AARO...

Stephen Greer's 2017 book "Unacknowledged: An Expose Of The World's Greatest Secret" includes interview quotes from Richard Doty talking about a very strange briefing that he underwent in 1979 that sounds very similar. Doty however calls it "Yankee Black".

Of course, Stephen Greer and Richard Doty have a reputation as being two of the least reliable names in modern UFOlogy.

However:

My name is Richard Doty. I was assigned as a Special Agent with Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base from 1979 through 1986. I was a Counterintelligence Officer at the time I was briefed into a special access program involving the U.S. Government’s investigation and contact with extraterrestrials; the visitation of these extraterrestrials to Earth and the Air Force’s involvement with these extraterrestrials. During this time my primary mission—probably 60% of my time dealt with that. The Defense Intelligence Agency was intimately involved in it. Everything that we sent up to OSI Headquarters went to DIA and a guy by the name of Tom Mack. Tom Mack was the manager for DIA on this project.

I was read into the project in the summer of 1979. It was a Special Access Program and I had to have special security clearance to have access to it. I was briefed into it by an Air Force colonel from Washington — I want to leave his name out of it. The code name was Yankee Black — that was the program’s briefing. It wasn’t necessarily the UFO’s program; it was actually a security code for an access program. Yankee White was access to the White House. And Yankee Black was the access you'd have to have to get into this program or get read into this program.

The briefing started with a history of the U.S. involvement with extraterrestrials.

There were four types of crafts that they briefed us on and four types of extraterrestrials. They never explained where the photos of these extraterrestrials came from.

One ET species looked like an insect. It had huge eyes, a very large head, and a small body. It had two different appendages [hands] on their arms and several joints in their legs, and they had a bubble-type appendage in the front and a lump or something in the back. They were about the size of an average adult human; between five and six feet tall.

The second ET was a very tall, thin humanoid with long arms that reached down to its knees, or half way between their hips and their feet. They had regular hands. Their faces were very thin and almost human looking and they had no hair. Except for the cat-like irises you’d have to be up close to realize they weren’t human.

The third creature looked something like the EBEN, only it had a larger body. I found out later in a 1985 briefing that it was a genetically-engineered creature that the EBEN had made.

As for the craft, one was cigar-shaped approximately sixty to seventy feet long and twenty to thirty feet wide. Then there was a saucer shaped craft, only it was really wide, almost like one of those tops that the kids play with. I remember a colonel saying in the briefing that they still couldn’t figure out how this thing flew. They took pictures of it, observed it, but I don’t know if they ever actually downed one.

The third kind of vessel was oval-shaped, about the size of a Volkswagen. It was almost like an EBEN craft only a lot smaller. It was a one-seater, maybe an observation or reconnaissance craft.

The last ship looked exactly like the McMinville craft.

[See McMinville UFO in photo section.]

There were photos of these creatures and the crafts in the film. It didn’t have a date on it; it started out in the 1940s or 1950s, but as the briefing went on, it became more modern.

The concern was what were they after? Was it a reconnaissance flight before an invasion? Were they going to land and take over some particular facility for their own purpose? Were they short of minerals? Because a lot of what we were told toward the end of the film [briefing film into Yankee Black program] was that a lot of these crafts were later seen over uranium mines and other mining areas. And so the concern was what are they after? Are they after uranium to turn into plutonium? And so our job was to investigate and determine if there was a threat and report it up the chain of command.

So that's a whole interesting thing. Did Rick Doty see this story about aliens in the same "Yankee Blue" materials which are now being discussed in the WSJ? Or did Doty help create Yankee Black/Blue and now AARO and the WSJ are inhaling Doty's fumes? Is the correct codeword Blue or Black?

Doty correctly notes that "Yankee" is a type of access, not a Special Access Program itself.

Doty then goes on to say many other creative things, about which all I can comment is that Doty is a counterintelligence person, ie a trained and skilled liar, and is known to have lied about aliens before.

These quotes from an Archive.org copy of Greer's book, which you can find here: https://archive.org/details/unacknowled ... n-greer-md

Regards, Nate