Right now, swarms of drones on the eastern seaboard are captivating Americans each night.  Spotted in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Maryland, the flying pests often appear near military installations and other national security hotspots.  While everyday Americans share videos of the crafts on social media, they are not being dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” or “kooks.”  The interlopers hovering in America’s skies have equally intrigued politicians, law enforcement officers, and news reporters.

What is most interesting about this event (barring the emergence of little green men from the aerial vehicles before this essay’s publication) is the public’s general disregard for the federal government’s “official” explanation.  National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has dismissed thousands of sightings as overreactions to “manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully.”  Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists, “We haven’t seen anything unusual.  We know of no threat.”  Meanwhile, millions of Americans who have either witnessed the drones firsthand or watched recordings of their flights online are spurning the government’s response as horse manure–laden propaganda.  

Who can blame them?  Something’s going on.  Maybe amateur pilots are pulling a prank.  Maybe Russia, Iran, or China wants us chasing our tails.  Perhaps Putin is reminding war hawks in D.C. that expanded missile strikes into mainland Russia come with a price.  Or maybe Joe Biden and his Deep State handlers are keeping Americans distracted from the nauseating stench of White House pardons, unchecked inflation, and the growing prospect of WWIII.  While disparaging the drone sightings as a form of public hysteria, Mayorkas took the opportunity to push for greater government authority over drone operations in the United States.  So perhaps the whole thing is just another Intelligence Community psy-op meant to scare Americans sufficiently (à la COVID) to justify new government powers.

A similarly revealing public reaction has come over the last few years with regard to Congress’s increased interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — unexplained sightings including crafts formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  After spending most of the last century dismissing UAP as hoaxes, meteorological events, classified military programs, or mass delusions, members of Congress are now openly investigating whether some faction of the U.S. government (think Deep State) has long covered up evidence of — or even contact with — extraterrestrial beings.  

One might think that public statements from former members of the military and broader Intelligence Community attesting to extraterrestrial visitation, contact, and even decades-long black budget appropriations dedicated to reverse-engineering alien technology would herald the most important news story of the twenty-first century.  Instead, the American people have largely given the bombshell reports a collective shrug.  Why aren’t they transfixed by the paradigm-shattering revelations before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence?  Why aren’t they demanding answers from the White House?  Why aren’t they at least busting out their old X-Files paraphernalia and screaming on social media, “I want to believe”?

I think the answer is that nobody trusts what the highest-ranking members of the U.S. government have to say.  As the public’s horrified reaction to Orson Welles’s “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 suggests, had President Franklin D. Roosevelt used one of his “fireside chats” to tell Americans that extraterrestrial entities are among us, the American people would have surely believed him.  If the U.S. Army had told Americans in 1947 that it had recovered alien remains and technology near Roswell, New Mexico, most people would have accepted the announcement as astonishingly true.  Eighty years later, neither the White House nor the Pentagon is seen as trustworthy.

A lot has happened over the last century.  Historical researchers have collected enough documentary evidence to suggest that Roosevelt and others had advanced knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  A majority of Americans believe that the CIA likely played some role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Costly wars in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, and much of the Middle East have caused Americans to doubt the U.S. government’s official reasons for war, its prosecution of ongoing conflicts, and its capacity for truthfully reporting international events.  

For half a century, Congress and successive presidents have promised to secure America’s borders and end the dangers and financial costs associated with illegal immigration.  Nevertheless, during Joe Biden’s presidency, illegal immigration has reached unprecedented levels.  If you’re a lifelong Democrat, you most likely believe that President Nixon deserved not only removal from office, but also imprisonment for his alleged crimes.  If you’re a lifelong Republican who has watched how Democrats use lawfare to take down political opponents, President Nixon’s resignation probably looks, in hindsight, a lot like a Deep State plot to remove a man who had just won a landslide political mandate to curtail congressional spending and shackle parts of the administrative state.  

In the background of all these sordid events (and many others) that chipped away at Americans’ trust in government are the exponential growth of the unelected bureaucracy, the unchecked authority of the private Federal Reserve System to print dollars and manipulate markets, and the increasingly obvious collusion between the corporate news media and the Deep State.  If Americans no longer believe what the U.S. government has to say, that’s because the federal government has spent the last century lying to, undermining, endangering, and betraying American citizens.

It’s important to pause and consider this appalling fact: in most cases, it is a crime for Americans to lie to government officials, but government officials may generally lie to the public with impunity.  Anyone who has seen a criminal interrogation or any kind of negotiation involving agents of the United States is familiar with the government’s loose relationship with the truth.  Anyone who watched James Comey and John Brennan substantiate Hillary Clinton’s Russia collusion hoax knows that the FBI and CIA have no problem lying to the American people.  Anyone who witnessed fifty-one “Intelligence experts” falsely labeling Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop “Russian disinformation” knows that the Deep State has no qualms about defrauding the public and subverting democratic elections.  If regular Americans lied to the American government the way government agents regularly lie to the American people, they would be serving decades in prison.  Instead, liars such as Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Strzok, Weissmann, McCord, and other co-conspirators get book deals and lifetime sinecures from taxpayer-subsidized think-tanks.

It’s equally important to recognize that the U.S. military defines the American mind as part of the “cognitive battlespace.”  In its Information Operations against the American people, the Pentagon is not interested in “winning hearts and minds” through reasoned argument and persuasion.  It is interested in using propaganda and psychological warfare to manipulate brains and dominate public opinion.  For decades, information warfare specialists perfected these techniques abroad; now they have unleashed them here at home.  

The military’s civilian counterparts in the U.S. government have been happy to add these weapons to their domestic arsenal.  As one researcher assessing the federal government’s growing censorship complex concluded, the Biden administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to “develop Orwellian surveillance and propaganda strategies” and “create methods and tools to restrict speech online.”  Just as the British Foreign Office set up a propaganda unit in 2014 to paint Putin and Russia as evil, U.S. non-governmental organizations (often CIA fronts) have been pushing the same narratives in an attempt to justify economic hardship and future war.  It is far easier to convince citizens to embrace government censorship if they are first psychologically conditioned to believe that COVID “misinformation” and Russian “disinformation” are existential threats.

How spectacularly have government-sanctioned lies damaged the nation?  Americans see strange lights in the sky and don’t know what (or whom) to believe.  Who can blame them?

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).