Considering that the drone/UFO/UAP phenomenon does not appear to be subsiding any time soon, we would be remiss not to weigh in on the issue. We make no claims to be UFOlogists, amateur or professional, but a dash of common sense, open-mindedness, and healthy skepticism can go a long way.

Language in the public discourse around the recent uptick in drone/UFO/UAP activity has been mired in imprecise terminology, especially through misapplication of aforementioned terms and hasty conflation of every odd sighting in the sky into one of the aforementioned categories. Some of this is due to simple ignorance or looseness with facts; some of this is likely deliberate. 

Whatever the true nature of the issue, we must keep in mind that as early as the 1950s, the intelligence community recognized that UFO phenomena bear great importance for psychological warfare. In 1952, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith wrote the following to the CIA’s Psychology Strategy Board: 

“I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems associated with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations. I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive and defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.”

When we interviewed Charles Upton (author of The Alien Disclosure Deception) earlier this year, he shared many disturbing revelations about the close relationship between the UAP phenomenon and psychological operations. Among these revelations were reports that notorious Satanist Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, author of From PSYOP to MINDWAR and a key figure in the development of PSYOP doctrine, advocated for the development of a UFO-based religion.

Furthermore, there is reportedly an ongoing civil war raging in the deep state between the Collins Elite, a faction of mainly evangelical Christians in the intelligence community who actively oppose alien disclosure, motivated by fear that so-called extraterrestrials are actually demonic in nature and that disclosure will usher in an anti-Christian agenda. 

On a separate note, even Q, the poster of QAnon fame who presents as the face of a sort of white hat psyop, alluded to the appearance of drones over the United States in 2018 with a cryptic “drop” reading “DRONES over US. Tracking Only.” Some QAnon followers across the internet have since tried to correlate this dated post with recent events, theorizing that the drones are monitoring some sort of existential threat on the homeland on behalf of what they call the "patriot" faction.

And this past month, retired intelligence analyst Jeffrey Prather claimed that the drone phenomenon is a deep state psyop to perpetrate a false flag attack on the homeland involving the detonation of an atomic bomb on American soil.

This is by no means an exhaustive account of theories connecting UAP phenomena to psychological operations. But it is clear that even if these hypotheses vary wildly, speculation seems to converge on the relationship between UAPs, disclosure, and psychological operations.

We are unlikely to find a satisfactory answer for all the questions surrounding this issue in the near future, but the first order of things is to get our thinking on the matter straight. The sheer magnitude of reports of strange happenings in the sky within the past two months makes it nigh impossible to give the topic a comprehensive treatment, but it is obvious that recordings and other accounts of these phenomena often differ markedly in character. We are confronted not with a single mystery, but even more baffling, multiple categories of distinct but contemporaneous aerial phenomena, happening not only in the US but all around the world. 

The first category is drones or UAVs with conventional flight technology; the second and third categories are exotic flight technology of human and, speculatively, nonhuman origin; the fourth is anomalous phenomena which do not appear connected to anything readily identifiable as aircraft or spacecraft. Let’s break this down further.

Drones or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) can be taken to include amateur, commercial, and military unmanned aircraft of various shapes and sizes. The Department of Defense classifies drones into 5 different categories from small to largest, the take-off weight of which can range from 20 to over 1320 pounds, with ranges from less than five to 650 kilometers. For this purpose, the term drones – even those with unusual designs and cutting edge capabilities – should be understood to refer to craft using conventional flight technologies (differentiated from the apparently exotic, superphysical abilities of other craft).

The second and third categories include, respectively, exotic flight technology of human origin and (speculatively) non-human origin, or a theoretical combination of the two. Exotic flight technology can refer to craft that exhibit apparently superphysical abilities such as those described in Navy Commander David Fravor’s statement detailing the famous 2004 “Tic Tac” encounter to the House Oversight Committee, or to other objects such as the so-called Jellyfish UFO which appeared on surveillance footage flying – with no visible method of propulsion – over a US military base in Iraq in 2018. Common features include the ability to travel at extreme speeds, lack of visible methods of propulsion, lack of thermal signature, and the ability to make zero point turns and to rapidly change altitude. It is quite likely that many – if not all – of these exotic UFOs employ technology of strictly terrestrial origin, and it seems prudent to take this as the default explanation on most sightings until some extraordinary evidence demands an alternative. That is to say that, although we cannot by any means exclude the possibility of extraterrestrial origin for such phenomena, this hypothesis is only admissible when all other options are exhausted.

The fourth category must be a catch-all for other phenomena such as strange lights and shapes, sometimes changing form and size, sightings of which do not appear connected to physical aircraft/spacecraft. Recent sightings from Knoxville, Tennessee are illustrative of this category. From a distance, these may present as non-solid or holographic in appearance, for lack of a better descriptor. Even so, it must be considered that distance and video quality may obscure the actual nature of such sightings. This has given rise to some conspiracy theories that some UAPs are in fact the product of advanced holographic projection technologies developed by the US government for psychological warfare purposes. This remains a fringe theory, but some analysts, including CSETI founder Dr. Steven Greer, have claimed that many UAP sightings are in fact produced by top secret holographic technologies developed, ostensibly, under a top secret NASA program dubbed Project Bluebeam. (Greer recently discussed this on the Shawn Ryan podcast last year.) We defer judgment on this theory, but cannot dismiss outright the possibility that such technologies may exist.

Due to the fact that we are most likely witnessing not just one but several distinct phenomena concurrently, the proliferation of theories around the topic has amounted to a jumbled and rather incoherent mess, and no one explanation can give a comprehensive account of what is happening.

In an official statement, Deputy Defense Press Secretary Sabrina Singh claimed that the craft in question originate neither from the US government nor from foreign entities, but also denied the existence of “any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology [or] verifiable information to substantiate claims that [...] any programs regarding possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial terrestrial materials have existed in the past or currently exist.” This leaves us with no viable alternatives, and is clear obfuscation – about what can be expected from a front-facing government official.

One theory which gained traction over the past month suggests that the huge spike in unexplained drone activity in American airspace is a military operation to detect a rogue nuclear weapon somewhere in the homeland. Saxon Aerospace CEO John Ferguson recently promoted this explanation in a series of Tik Tok videos from the account @john.ferguson88, suggesting that rather than being nefarious in intent, the drone swarms seen in New Jersey and elsewhere are actually military drones equipped with radiation “sniffing” technology deployed to search for a nuclear warhead which went missing from Ukraine after the Cold War. He argues that since at least some of these drones appear to be closely following FAA regulations for lighting and flight altitude, and are flying at limited ranges, they are most likely a government operation rather than a foreign or extraterrestrial incursion. At face value, this is plausible. 

However, other experts have brought Ferguson’s analysis into question. Ex-military specialist Ryan McBeth was highly critical of Ferguson’s claims in a Youtube video titled Are Drones Looking for Nuclear Weapons in New Jersey? First, McBeth cast doubt on Ferguson’s claim to have knowledge of the missing warhead, arguing that Ferguson’s security clearance would not give him access to such information, which he says would fall under “TS/SCI [Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information].” Second, McBeth claims that a nuclear weapon could not be detected via aerial radiation sniffers due to the inverse square law (by which, per Wikipedia, “the observed ‘intensity’ of a specified physical quantity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.”) According to McBeth, “the idea of a drone with some sort of geiger counter flying over New Jersey [...] keeping the inverse square law in mind [is] absolutely pants-on-head crazy.”

Jeffrey Prather, a retired Special Operations Soldier, former DIA Intelligence Collector, and ex-DEA Special Agent, also believes that recent drone sightings have a connection to rogue nuclear weapons, but articulates a very different theory on the matter. Speaking with Mike Adams on the Natural News podcast, Prather said that neither the US military nor any foreign actors are behind the drone activity, pointing instead to intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA. These deep state actors, Prather theorized, may be using the drones to perpetrate a false flag event through “some kind of bombing” involving SADOMs (Small Atomic Demolition Munitions). Prather said that “we can expect a bombing or a simulation of bombings, either at our embassy in Kiev, or across the country, to activate continuity of government [...] via NORTHCOM [...] to distract [...] the incoming DOJ from the crimes and sins of [the Biden administration].” Prather’s theory, although deeply troubling if true, is just as speculative as Ferguson’s. While there has been a clear history of deep state antagonism toward Trump, the idea of a purely partisan motive behind detonating an atomic weapon in the homeland is less than satisfactory barring exceptional evidence. 

Short of such speculation, we are left with few viable hypotheses. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, however, it is clear that we should be on high alert for UAP phenomena to be weaponized for psychological warfare purposes. 

Earlier this year, author Charles Upton discussed many aspects of the UFO phenomena and the disclosure agenda with Muckraker in a written interview (linked at the beginning of this article). Upton wrote that:

One of the most massive uses of unconscious contradiction in today’s social engineering is the contradiction between denial and affirmation on the part of the government of the reality and significance of the UFO phenomenon. This contradiction has been in use for decades, and has been composed of official denials of the reality of alien incursion coupled with the covert strategic placement of items of data (both true and false), and possibly of deliberately staged “false flag” manifestations, that suggest that it is entirely real. A few years ago the social engineers apparently decided that the cognitive dissonance of the American public had reached the threshold where a sudden “revelation of the method” could be sprung on them by abruptly admitting that the phenomenon is entirely real and of the greatest import. After this watershed moment the unconscious contradiction method largely gave way to the second mind-control method I noted in my book—that of “deferred closure,” where the UFO-interested public is teased to the point of desperation by the announcement that full “disclosure” is imminent, which is then withdrawn at the last minute. The engineers well know that a populace desperate for answers will finally accept any answer they are given, no matter how implausible, no matter how horrendous.

Considering the immense gravity and repercussions of the possibilities discussed above, we must approach any rumors, civilian sightings, or official statements on these happenings with great caution, and with great skepticism. The internet is awash with misinformation, deepfakes, misattributed footage, and shoddy analyses of drone/UFO/UAP phenomena, and this muddy state of discourse on the topic can be easily weaponized for deceptive ends by malicious players in positions of power.