The Wall Street Journal Is Gaslighting You On UFOs

The Wall Street Journal just published a piece admitting past Pentagon deception about UFOs, while doubling down on dismissing real evidence. In this episode, I respond directly, breaking down why these media narratives mirror Cold War-era perception management and why Congress must demand transparency now. From Malmstrom to Byelokoroviche, the pattern is undeniable. The disinformation machine just changed suits. UAPDA petition - https://uapda.org/petition | Sponsors | Qualia: Take control of your cellular health today. Go to qualialife.com/jesse and save 15% to experience the science of feeling younger. -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Check Out Our New Store ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Patreon (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://www.patreon.com/c/JesseMichels Discord ➤https://discord.gg/crHc44m3kF Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Website ➤ https://www.jesse-michels.com/ Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] #JesseMichels #WSJ #MediaManipulation #UFOCoverup #PentagonDeception Chapters 00:00 Mainstream Media and UFO Disinformation 02:06 The Malmstrom Air Force Base Incident 05:57 Debunking the EMP Theory 09:46 Government Hazing and UFO Witnesses 13:59 The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Choices 18:13 Call for Transparency and Accountability Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

• 0:26Jesse Michels?

  When it comes to really, really stupid reporting by mainstream media publications, the well runs kinda deep. You've got the Pangolín wet market theory around COVID's origins. The whole Saddam Hussein had WMDs thing. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Calling ivermectin horse dewormer when hundreds of millions of people take it a year. I could go on for many days. But The Wall Street Journal just released an article called "The Pentagon Disinformation That Fuelled America's UFO Mythology That Truly Takes the Cake."

• 1:00Jesse Michels?

  I have to say, I agree with aspects of the headline. The Pentagon is running a UFO disinformation campaign. I think this article is part of that disinformation campaign.

• 1:14Jesse Michels?

  One of the article's primary sources is Susan Goff, whose own LinkedIn, along with independent sources, confirms her lead role in Booze Allen Hamilton's psychological operations consulting practice for the Department of Defense. Her self-professed skills include strategic communication and psychological operations.

• 1:39Jesse Michels?

  In summary, this article says that UFOs are entirely explained by two things. Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, that the American government secretly decided to use on our own nuclear missiles and Air Force hazing rituals.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Alright, you little freshman bitches!

• 1:56Jesse Michels?

  Let's tackle the first one.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Good afternoon. My name is Robert Salas.

• 2:05Jesse Michels?

  On March 24th, 1967, Robert Salas, a first lieutenant stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, said he received a call from topside guards saying that they had seen strange lights in the sky making odd maneuvers.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  The men are stationed in the missile launch bunker 60 feet below ground.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  He called back about five minutes later. This time he was screaming into the phone saying they're looking at an object, a red glowing object hovering just above our front gate. All 10 missiles were off alert, all 10. Whole flight was off alert, all red.

• 2:44Jesse Michels?

  Salas even had a colleague present named Bob Jamison, who backed up his testimony on record with Larry King. Is it possible they just malfunctioned?

• 2:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it doesn't happen. Very rarely does a missile malfunction. Much more rare would be two at the same time, but never 10.

• 3:00Jesse Michels?

  In fact, the guy who most thoroughly documents the Malmstrom case in 1967 is the author of the great book UFOs and Nukes. His name is Robert Hastings, and he is the authoritative chronicler of 167 Q-Cleared Nuclear Base employees that have all witnessed UFOs.

• 3:23Speaker 06

  Declassified US government documents and witness testimony from former or retired US military personnel confirm beyond any doubt the reality of ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites.

• 3:40Jesse Michels?

  In many cases, these UFOs have tampered with various nuclear sites across the country. Strangely enough, Bob Hastings figured out the connection between UFOs and nuclear weapons because his father was stationed at Malmstrom Nuclear Base in 1967. In high school, Hastings worked as a janitor there, and a radar operator who took young Hastings under his wing called the 16-year-old over to show him that the base was actually tracking what they called "unknowns" at the time.

• 4:08Speaker 06

  That's the formal term for unidentified objects. I saw five blips in the sort of northeast quadrant of his radar scope.

• 4:20Jesse Michels?

  A local truck driver in Montana and police officer are also on record having seen the UFO in the area. In 1993, a missile technician named John Mills stationed at Malmstrom also saw UFOs on his way back to the base. When he returned, officers there said the base had been swarmed. There are tons of sightings in and around Malmstrom.

• 4:42Speaker 07

  On the UFO thing, I was working for the Forest Service not too far from Malmstrom Air Force Base. One day, I was up there in a Forest Service pickup truck at a certain campground. And I was there, and suddenly, I look up, and I say suddenly, it was just in the sky. I became aware that it was up there, and I looked up. It was this huge, spheroidal, you know, but elliptical, not a perfect spheroid, like a saucer that was turned partially on its side.

• 5:11Jesse Michels?

  These occur to this day. So anyways, this Wall Street Journal reporter named Joel Scheckman writes that this was all a secret EMP or electromagnetic pulse experiment, seeing if the US could shut down our own nukes with people present, as if that's not incredibly dangerous and reckless and has any precedent. I think that Scheckman, or one of his sources, is making this up. There's even documentation from Malmstrom Strategic Air Command itself, saying that they were extremely puzzled around the event and that they had no idea what was going on. They were so puzzled that they paid Boeing to come out and investigate what had happened. Boeing was also puzzled.

• 5:55Jesse Michels?

  So again, back to this idea that this was a super-secret EMP that no one knew about, and it was an EMP tested on our own nuclear weapons with people present. Bob Salas responded to this claim. Quote-unquote, "It would have been irresponsible and unthinkable for the US Air Force to jeopardize the operational status of these weapons. The EMP generator equipment would have involved a prolonged installation process in plain sight of our security team." Again, this is the same security team that expressed extreme fear to Robert Salas due to the fact that a glowing red object was hovering around the base and making right angle turns. For whatever reason, none of this testimony made it into this article.

• 6:38Jesse Michels?

  But perhaps most damningly, I mean, the real nail in the coffin for this is that EMPs weren't even a thing until the 70s, and no documents have ever suggested that the US has ever used them against our own active nuclear weapons with people in the vicinity. As my friend and journalist Merrick Von Rennenkamp eloquently points out, as Merrick tweeted, "The Wall Street Journal is suggesting that technicians somehow moved a 60-foot science experiment up to the front gate of an alert missile facility undetected, and then they fried the active nukes." This is a joke, right? And then you have the fact that EMPs don't usually do reversible damage. They take out all electronics in their vicinity.

• 7:22Jesse Michels?

  These missiles came back online. Maybe you could argue that EMPs can at times cause temporary downtime, but we definitely didn't have the ability to use EMPs this precisely before they were even operational. That's an insane claim that I don't even think The Wall Street Journal would pretend to defend. There are literally no logs or records anywhere from Malmstrom or any employees of that base saying these missiles didn't come back online. So they didn't just take out 10 missiles with an EMP and then turn them back on. That's extremely basic physics that Sean Kirkpatrick, a supposed physicist and the head of Arrow, the All Domain Anomalies Resolution Office, who clearly spoon-fed all of this

• 8:03Jesse Michels?

  bad information to Joel Scheckman, a man who needs to up his fact-checking game, should know.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Get up, you lazy little bitches, get up! Get up! Get up!

• 8:13Jesse Michels?

  Okay, and then you have this second claim that the article makes, that Air Force hazing rituals explain widespread UFO mythology. Can someone please, for the love of God, explain documents from the Air Force dating back to 1949 discussing an emergency meeting around UFOs and nukes taking place at killing base camps with the Army CIC, FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence, and CIA present? This FBI document discussing the same UFO and nuclear connection? Or, in 1947, General Nathan Twining, responsible for all aircraft development in the Air Force at the time, saying that UFOs are not visionary or fictitious?

• 8:55Jesse Michels?

  Tell me how debunking one nuclear UFO-related case in 1967 explains a town in Japan? Next to their nuclear civilian grid in Fukushima, where the residents have frequent sightings and are obsessed with UFOs, or at Bariloche, Argentina, next to their civilian grid, where a commercial pilot in 1995 literally couldn't land the plane due to an outage and a UFO chasing his plane. What about Bob Jacobs sighting in 1964 at Vandenberg, where he was removed as a government employee despite having managed over 130 people? They denied that he ever worked there, until later, his superior, Major Mansman, admitted that he did work there a couple decades later.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  My officer, efficiency reports are in there.

• 9:37Jesse Michels?

  By the way, I've seen Bob Jacobs' DD-214. He definitely worked at Vandenberg. So Jacobs and all these other nuclear base employees, Mario Woods, all of these people that I've interviewed, have been hazed for 70 years by our own government. For what? They faked UFOs, harassed these people. In Jacobs' case, they blew up his mailbox and fucked with him endlessly.

• 10:01Speaker 06

  He gets a phone call one night, he and his wife, the voice says, "Your mailbox alight. What a beautiful sight you're going down, motherfucker."

• 10:12Jesse Michels?

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• 10:55Jesse Michels?

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• 11:37Jesse Michels?

  That's Q-U-A-L-I-A-L-I-F-E.com/Jesse, J-E-S-S-E, for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks so much to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. This is all sort of beautiful, though. The Wall Street Journal has really backed themselves into a corner. I suggest they either prove the existence of these hazing programs in a follow-up article because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, or at the very least, they support what I'm about to propose. A class-action lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Every UFO witness whose career has been significantly disrupted for their speaking out about this issue

• 12:20Jesse Michels?

  or mental health has been disrupted by optical illusions in the sky or whatever hazing rituals this article is proposing should be granted millions of dollars for being hazed by our own government. David Grush, who experienced serious reprisals while in government and was dragged through the mud at the National Geospatial Agency, should receive a large check in the mail. Surely, we should have some church-committee-style hearings about these egregious acts committed by our own government. And I'm certain Joel Scheckman and everybody else involved in the writing of this article would support that.

• 12:58Jesse Michels?

  I'm not so sure they would. See, perhaps this personal story is most telling and indicative of where the Wall Street Journal is really coming from. Last year, my friend Carl Nell, Army Representative of the UAP Task Force and founder of Army Futures Command, who helped spearhead many of the Army's most important tech-modernization efforts, wrote an op-ed intended for the Wall Street Journal. The opinion piece was co-authored by a former cabinet member. You heard me, right? Like presidential cabinet member. The essay expressed a deep frustration at the lack of transparency and civilian oversight with UFO-related programs in government. Again, a cabinet member co-authored this.

• 13:41Jesse Michels?

  Unless you think I'm making this up, I'm not the only person aware of this article besides Nell. Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Kirk McConnell, whose politics I don't always agree with, is also fully clued in about this opinion piece. And we also have emails between Carl Nell and The Wall Street Journal about it. It is a fact that this article was written and it was proposed for publication, but the op-ed section refused to publish this article for no apparent reason. Serendipitously, I had just met a very friendly vice president at News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal. So I offered to help advocate for the publication of this op-ed by getting an introduction to one of the managing editors of The Wall Street Journal's opinion section. This woman was named Lena Bell.

• 14:25Jesse Michels?

  She was very nice and earnest, and I have no reason to believe she cares about anything but the truth. We had a great exchange. I even met her in person at The Wall Street Journal headquarters. I told her about my own interest in the subject. I suggested that it would be great if more mainstream credentialed journalists were interested. I even said that she should read UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings if she wanted to learn more about the government's history with UFOs. We

• 14:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18+

• 15:15Jesse Michels?

  Followed up, but it seemed like she was powerless in helping getting this opinion piece published. There was some undetectable dark matter at play, stopping this opinion piece from getting published.

• 15:28Jesse Michels?

  Just think about it. Even if you can't fully verify that there's a hidden UFO program, obviously that's a tall order, shouldn't a former cabinet member saying anything about unidentified flying objects immediately be worthy of publication? Even if you then run a story saying that that former cabinet member is crazy? When I politely expressed my confusion around this, I was told something very telling. Lena told me that a guy named David Spiegel is their de facto advisor on UFOs. And he says that UFOs are all space trash, light reflections, and temperature inversions. This is almost exactly what past UFO debunkers like Don Menzel would say in the 50s.

• 16:08Speaker 08

  First of all, the objects are not unidentified. We know what they are.

• 16:13Jesse Michels?

  Menzel happened to hold extremely high clearances at the NSA, CIA, and Navy. He was also caught destroying astronomical records by fellow astronomer Dorit Hofleit as she documents in her biography.

• 16:25Speaker 09

  In 1953, Don Menzel also stopped the astronomers at Harvard to carry out their very famous sky survey where they were monitoring the entire sky. He also had apparently some more later episodes of plate destruction, I've heard.

• 16:41Jesse Michels?

  But I digress. Who is this David Spiegel?

• 16:43Speaker 10

  The head of the Simons Foundation, a guy named Dr. David Spiegel. He was tapped to be the chair of the NASA UAP Working Group.

• 16:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, a working group that sort of says, you know, "Nothing to see here." Like, "We'll keep an open mind, but there's probably nothing here," which I find interesting.

• 17:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I have no smoking gun. It just seems quite a curious set of coincidences. And you look at what else Jim Simons was really engaged in, right? He set up the Simons Foundation, which is probably like one of the leading private sector sources of philanthropic funding for fundamental science research. And his, you know... Guy running his, his private research foundation and fundamental physics gets tapped to run the UAP working group for NASA.

• 17:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Weinstein is, is on Rogan actively speculating that this is housing a sort of secret physics program involving all the top differential geometers in the US. What do you think, Matthew?

• 17:38Speaker 10

  I mean, if such a thing were to exist, that's exactly where it would exist.

• 17:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And who knows, maybe Spurgill has nothing to do with UFOs. Maybe the Wall Street Journal genuinely believes the bullshit about EMPs they're promoting. But it's just so weird to me that they've been working on a UFO-related story for months and neglected to mention that a cabinet member was involved in a UFO-related op-ed proposal that they received last year.

• 18:09Jesse Michels?

  So, bad faith acting, incompetence, I'll let you decide. I'll just end on this note. If UFOs are all just some fake, multi-decade-long hazing ritual, then nobody should have any issue with the impending UAP Disclosure Act. Who cares if we have civilian oversight over programs that don't exist? And hopefully, when the UAP Disclosure Act goes up for vote again, Sean Kirkpatrick won't lobby against it like he did last time. So on that note, I'm linking a petition below that you will hopefully all sign in support of the UAP Disclosure Act. This will ensure civilian congressional oversight over UFOs and elect an elite presidential board to help push disclosure.

• 18:52Jesse Michels?

  This Wall Street Journal article is truly so bad that I am almost inclined to believe it is a pro-UFO conspiracy. So please, Wall Street Journal, do better next time. We need better debunkers. I'm not anti-debunking. There's plenty of bullshit in UFO world, a lot of which I cover. I'm just anti-bad, lazy debunking. And if Joel Scheckman, or Sean Kirkpatrick, or Susan Goff, or any of these people want to come on my show, or debate me, in any context, and discuss any of this in a civil way, I'd be happy to host them. Surely, it would help promote this article. And if the article's contents are true, they can back all this stuff up. I suspect I won't hear back about that invitation. And that's probably the most frustrating thing about these people.

• 19:35Jesse Michels?

  They only hit you with these cheap shots from afar. They never actually show up and meet you face-to-face. So again, open invite. I've also messaged Lena Bell, expressing a desire to write an op-ed rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal. If she says yes, I'll let Robert Hastings, Carl Nell, David Grush, Merrick Von Rennenkamp, Michael Schellenberger, and anyone else contribute and co-author this paper with me. Because surely, the Wall Street Journal wants that, in the name of having an open and honest Socratic debate. Until next time, for hopefully, a more aspirational and positive episode, I'm Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy.