Drive 140 miles north from Las Vegas and you hit a barren, featureless stretch of Nevada desert that’s become one of the world’s most mysterious locations.

Here, bordered by a vast salt flat, lies the highly-classified US Air Force base known simply as Area 51 – an installation so secretive the CIA only grudgingly admitted its existence in 2013, nearly 60 years after it opened.

Travellers who make the long, dusty trip out here along a road now officially named the Extraterrestrial Highway occasionally claim to glimpse strange craft darting across the skies.

But it is what might be inside the base that fuels endless speculation: crashed ‘alien spacecraft’ and, preserved for decades, the remains of the extraordinary life forms that flew them.

Area 51 has gripped US imaginations for decades, and, for those obsessed with UFOs, Area 51 is America’s ultimate secret.

But now, a bombshell report suggests that while Area 51 does hide secrets, they may be far more earthbound than believers hoped.

A Pentagon probe – ordered by Congress to investigate claims that the US government is covering up secret tests on extraterrestrial technology – has instead uncovered something even more shocking: officials have allegedly been fanning the flames of UFO paranoia for decades to protect their own covert weapons programmes.

Area 51 has gripped US imaginations for decades. And for those obsessed with UFOs, Area 51 is America’s ultimate secret

 Sean Kirkpatrick, the senior government scientist who led the inquiry at the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told The Wall Street Journal he’d found evidence that the US government ‘fabricated evidence of alien technology’ in an effort to distract from secret military tests.

Washington has officially dismissed UFO sightings and alien encounters as nonsense for years. But according to the Journal, senior officials have surreptitiously been doing the opposite: deliberately encouraging the belief in alien visitors – even among colleagues – to keep America’s ‘black projects’ hidden from adversaries.

The Journal’s report, based on interviews with two dozen current and former US officials, scientists and contractors – and analysis of thousands of internal documents – described the revelations as a ‘stunning new twist in the story of America’s cultural obsession with UFOs’.

It said: ‘At times, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smoke screen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security – for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations.’

Faked photos were planted and military personnel briefed on phony missions as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign, it is claimed. Convincing people that the experimental US stealth jet they’d seen flying overhead was actually an extraterrestrial spaceship had the added advantage that the incident would likely be dismissed as the imaginings of a lunatic.

These fake stories ‘tended to take on a life of their own’, such as a claim started by a US intelligence officer that a piece of metal from a crashed spaceship had been discovered. It took 30 years for that particular bit of hokum to be exposed (despite claims that the fragment displayed properties previously unknown on Earth, it was found to have been part of a missile casing from a 1950s military plane).

Area 51 was ground zero for this elaborate charade. In the 1980s, an Air Force colonel reportedly wandered into a bar near the base and handed the owner photos of flying saucers. They were doctored images, but were pinned up in the bar and, it’s claimed, first seeded the idea that the site was hosting secret tests on alien technology.

The Mail has established that there’s only one bar for miles in this region – the Rachel Bar and Grill, renamed the Little A’le’Inn in 1988, which now hosts a kitschy shrine to UFO lore.

Bob Lazar, an American who went on TV claiming he had worked at Area 51 ‘reverse-engineering’ alien spacecraft

In 1989, the legend of Area 51 only grew thanks to Bob Lazar, an American who went on TV claiming he had worked at Area 51 ‘reverse-engineering’ one of nine alien spacecraft, taking it apart to understand its technology.

He said the craft was made of a previously unknown metallic substance similar in appearance and touch to liquid titanium. It was propelled by an ‘anti-matter reactor’ that allowed the craft to produce its own gravity and ‘bend space-time’. Lazar claimed he saw the saucer fly, though never higher than 40ft off the ground.

Lazar, who once built a jet-powered bicycle, was later vindicated on at least one detail: the element he claimed powered the craft – Element 115 – was discovered years later by scientists. The Pentagon refused to comment on any of his outlandish assertions, maintaining a silence which now seems to have been designed to encourage people to think Lazar was telling the truth.

According to the Journal, the odd-looking objects people saw over Area 51 in the 1980s were actually Lockheed F-117 Nighthawks, the first operational stealth aircraft, which were being tested there. The bizarre-looking plane would certainly have looked otherworldly in the 1980s, when few knew about how stealth technology and design could be used to cloak a craft’s presence to radar and infrared sensors.

The CIA finally admitted the existence of Area 51 in 2013, revealing that the 23 by 25-mile rectangular area, which is restricted airspace, had been set up in 1955 to test top-secret aircraft, including the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, and B-2 Stealth bomber – many of which looked as if they’d come straight out of a sci-fi film.

Lockheed F-117 NighthawkF-117 flying over mountains in Nevada

Still, the revelations did little to stop conspiracy theorists, who insist it houses wreckage from the alleged 1947 Roswell spaceship crash, along with bodies of the large-eyed, silver extra-terrestrials found in them.

However, it is claimed that the Pentagon’s disinformation campaign wasn’t limited to the public.

Sean Kirkpatrick’s UFO investigation discovered how, for decades, commanders of the US Air Force’s most classified projects would, as part of their induction briefings, be given a ‘piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer’, described to them as an ‘antigravity maneuvering vehicle’.

The officers were told that they were joining a project dubbed Yankee Blue that was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft.

They were ordered never to speak of it again and many never realised it was fake. One former Air Force officer was ‘visibly terrified’ in recounting to the investigators what he’d been told because he’d been warned that if he ever revealed the secret he could be jailed or even face execution.

Investigators have yet to discover whether it was some sort of eccentric initiation exercise or a genuine attempt to mislead them about UFOs.

A warning sign marks the boundary of Area 51

The practice only ended in 2023, reportedly banned by the US defence secretary – in the same year US intelligence whistleblower David Grusch claimed his government was hiding alien spacecraft from even Congress.

Grusch said he hadn’t seen the evidence himself – but he had spoken to plenty of former intelligence officials who insisted they had.

He said: ‘I have plenty of senior former intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided they were part of a programme.’ It sounds suspiciously like those Yankee Blue briefings.

Grusch was among a string of government insiders whose claims about a UFO cover-up spurred Congress to demand Kirkpatrick’s investigation.

Kirkpatrick’s team also examined a chilling 1967 incident in which US servicemen manning a nuclear missile bunker in Montana saw a ‘glowing, reddish-orange oval’ hovering over the front gate. They pointed their weapons at it as panicking superiors raised the alarm. What they didn’t know was that the ‘UFO’ was actually a Pentagon test device – an electromagnetic generator.

It had been placed on a portable platform 60ft above the bunker and released a burst of energy that looked like a lightning bolt. It was designed to test whether the facility could survive the ‘intense storm of electromagnetic waves’ likely to be generated by a Russian nuclear missile hitting the base.

The blast knocked out the base’s offensive systems entirely, but the terrified bunker occupants were never told the truth, for fear of letting the Soviets know that they could disable the US nuclear arsenal in a first strike. Those still alive continue to be ‘haunted’ by the belief that they were the victims of an overwhelming extra-terrestrial strike. So where do these revelations about Pentagon trickery leave UFO ‘believers’, as they call themselves? Certainly not unbelieving. From the furious chatter online this week, it’s clear that many dismiss the report as just more Pentagon lies, in this case designed to hide the truth – that UAPs (or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as the cognoscenti prefer to call UFOs nowadays) really have visited Earth.

Veteran UFO investigator Dr David Clarke told the Mail that evidence had been accumulating for 30 years that US government insiders had been faking documents and handing them to people in the UFO community they believed would spread them.

‘It’s about the cheapest intelligence programme in existence, as there are these thousands of people out there who want to believe this stuff,’ he said.

‘They’re [the government insiders] just sitting back and watching the fun from a distance.’

He added that passing phony information about UFOs to underlings was also a useful way for senior officials to discover, without risk, which of them were leakers.

Documentary maker Mark Pilkington said he’d discovered while making his acclaimed UFO film, Mirage Men, that many officers in the US Air Force and other parts of the military genuinely believed in the existence of aliens and UFOs, and passed their conviction down to their subordinates.

Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for Britain’s Ministry of Defence, said the Journal report was ‘entirely credible’ and a ‘setback’ for UFO believers – but he added that it didn’t discredit all the evidence. ‘Even if these false narratives explain some of it, they don’t explain all of it,’ he told the Mail. ‘You can’t fake the sightings that people are having.’

He noted that many recent observations of UFOs cited by US government reports come not from human witnesses – but from advanced systems such as radar, infrared, and satellite sensors.

It’s one thing to fool a Nevada bar owner with a photo, he said. But it’s quite another to hoodwink Navy pilots – like those who encountered Tic Tac-shaped craft zipping through the skies with impossible speed and agility. In 2020, the Pentagon confirmed that videos of these encounters were genuine and depicted ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’.

The Journal didn’t tackle that incident directly, although it said investigators were ‘still examining whether some unexplained events could be foreign technology, such as Chinese aircraft using next-

generation cloaking methods that distort their appearance’. And some of the floating orbs pilots claim to have seen, investigators found, were sunlight glinting off Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.

Given the US government has spent tens of millions of dollars investigating UFOs, many officials may be furious to learn that their colleagues were secretly stoking the craze all along.

Meanwhile, said Dr Clarke, the ‘true believers’ in UFOs and alien visitors have never believed anything the US government tells them and will be undeterred by the latest development.

For them, to borrow the famous X Files catchphrase, the truth is still out there.

Just maybe not in Area 51.