WILD UFO conspiracy theories were deliberately cooked up and stoked by the Pentagon itself, a bombshell report has revealed.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense propagated rumors about extraterrestrials being held at Area 51 as a strategy to conceal its covert weapons projects.

During the 1980s, a colonel from the U.S. Air Force stopped by a bar close to Area 51 in Nevada, where he gave the bar owner altered images depicting flying saucers near the base.

These photos were displayed on the bar’s walls, and soon the local tale, which quickly spread worldwide, suggested that the U.S. military was clandestinely experimenting with captured alien technology.

This came to light in a shocking review of the 2024 Defense Department report published by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Friday.

The now-retired officer admitted to Pentagon investigators in 2023 that he was on an official mission to hide the site’s real purpose.

What was really happening at Area 51 was the secret testing and development of weapons programs and a stealth warplane – the F-117 Nighthawk – seen as vital to keeping an edge over the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

With conspiracy theories about Area 51 already running wild, the military figured that feeding those rumours would help hide their secret projects hidden from the Soviet Union’s watchful eye, investigators found.

But the Pentagon dismissed claims of a government UFO cover-up in their report last year.

The WSJ argues that not only did the government mislead the public but it actively fuelled UFO myths.

The report writes: “The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

It includes findings made by Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who was tasked by the government in 2022 to investigate UFO theories.

Kirkpatrick’s office discovered several conspiracies that traced back to the Pentagon itself.

In one shocking case, his team found out that the Air Force was initiating new recruits by giving them mock briefings about a fake unit called “Yankee Blue” – which supposedly investigated alien spacecraft.

Under strict orders to keep quiet, many people never discovered that this was a prank, Kirkpatrick’s team claimed.

The strange practice continued until 2023 when the Pentagon finally issued an order across the DoD to put an end to it.

Another finding by Kirkpatrick, reported by the WSJ, was that the government deliberately misled the public about secret military projects.

For instance, Robert Salas, a former Air Force captain, claims he saw a UFO hover over a nuclear missile site in Montana in 1967.

In reality, what he saw was a test of an early electromagnetic pulse (EMP) designed to see if American silos could survive atomic radiation and retaliate if the Soviet Union struck first.

The test failed and Salas was told to never discuss what he saw, the report tells.

A DoD spokesperson admitted to the WSJ that the government has not shared all of AARO’s findings, saying a new report due later this year will be clearer.

Sue Gough said: “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.”

It comes as a photo claiming to show a 1,000ft-wide silver UFO soaring over the US was released by a notorious Pentagon whistleblower.

The picture was allegedly snapped by an airline pilot in 2021 while flying 21,000ft above the Four Corners Monument – spanning New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Luis Elizondo revealed the photo during a UAP Disclosure Fund event.

But sceptics were quick to challenge the discovery – claiming the photo merely showed irrigation circles that are common in desert climates.