The buzzkill king

Or, The Lonesome Business of Fact Checking

Last December, Douglas Dean Johnson was scanning Sen. Mike Rounds’ weekly newsletter when he noticed that the South Dakota senator had scheduled a meeting with octogenarian economist Harald Malmgren. Given Rounds’ co-sponsoring of sweeping but ultimately kneecapped legislation on UFO transparency in 2023, Johnson suspected he knew their agenda. In 2024, Malmgren had begun posting a series of startling revelations about his government service, starting with the JFK administration. They included his gobsmacking role in the Pentagon’s war room during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his expertise in missile-defense systems, and his off-the-record briefing from a top CIA official on the reality of UFOs.

“I tweeted a screenshot of Senator Rounds’ newsletter and said I would’ve liked to have been a bug on the wall,” Johnson says. “And Harald Malmgren actually ‘liked’ my tweet.”

Then he began hearing from people who said Malmgren was “being taken seriously because he was an ambassador and was verbally lucid” at 89. Given his long history of scouring public records – not to mention an abiding interest in UFOs dating back to the 1970s – Johnson decided on a full-court press. Something smelled fishy.

“You can take somebody at their word and leave it at that, or you can actually try to check it out. Malmgren was in government, so he left a real paper trail, which not every storyteller has,” Johnson says. “Some of the claims he made were weighty and, I thought, checkable.”

Following the paper

Malmgren died in February, but not before sitting for a long interview with podcaster Jesse Michels. Malmgren expanded his claims to include having been clued in on the downing of a UFO during an atmospheric nuclear test in 1962. Moreover, he said he had personally handled UFO debris during a visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Michels dropped the video in April, and it has received more than 750,000 views.

Johnson spent five months chasing the leads. The results confirmed his suspicions. That he could produce no corroboration of Malmgren’s encounter with alien hardware wasn’t surprising – no one has presented material evidence for confiscated UFO tech since the Roswell crash ignited the treasure hunt in 1947. What Johnson discovered instead – Malmgren’s solid career as a foreign trade ambassador, lobbyist and university lecturer notwithstanding – was a curious string of personal embellishments that appeared to grow more grandiose with each retelling, especially in the UFO arena.

An historian with the JFK Presidential Library described Malmgren’s assertions of being Robert McNamara’s handpicked liaison between the White House and the Joint Chiefs as “ludicrous.” FBI records indicated that, contrary to his allegations, Malmgren never held the top-secret “Q” clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission as he insisted. His claims of having been a trusted insider with the Kennedy clan via family brother-in-law Sargent Shriver were refuted by multiple sources, including Shriver’s son.

Plowing through civil service and academic records, books authored by JFK’s contemporaries, pushing FOIA requests through the National Archives, querying the histories of organizations like the Institute for Defense Analysis, the RAND Corp., the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the LBJ Presidential Library, Johnson’s 20,000-word report mostly uncovered gratuitous and granular misrepresentations totally unrelated to The Great Taboo. How to explain, for instance, Malmgren’s contention with Michels – and others – that he “started at the top” as a full professor at Cornell University while in his 20s?

Unforced errors

Although Cornell records indicate Malmgren joined the university as an entry-level assistant professor, Malmgren boasted he was awarded the Galen Stone Joint Chair in Mathematical Economics in the Department of Engineering/College of Arts and Sciences at the Ivy League school. Unfortunately, there is no such endowment post at Cornell. There is, however, the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade chair at Harvard, where Malmgren did not teach.

Malmgren’s threads also led Johnson to take a hard look at the alleged destruction of a UAP over the Pacific on October 26, 1962. In archived footage from an atmospheric test code-named Bluegill Triple Prime, a slender vertical object is seen dropping like a stone from the massive fireball as the rest of the world was preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Caribbean. Johnson suspects Malmgren glommed onto the downed-alien craft controversy stirred by Geoffrey Cruickshank last year when the Aussie UFO researcher revisited the imagery for anomalous signatures.

For Johnson, there was never a controversy to begin with. In a contemporaneous account of Optical Phenomenology – a series of technical papers on atmospheric nukes, declassified in 1985 – analysts identified the object as the spent single-stage Thor booster. Johnson also combed through the deck logs of recovery vessels, searching unsuccessfully for descriptions of “anomalous” objects retrieved from the splashdown zone. Nuclear-film analysts attributed aberrations in the footage – hypothesized as image-doctoring – to an artifact of the celluloid frame.

Johnson got plenty of pushback from critics who wanted Malmgren’s story to be true; hell’s bells, I wanted Malmgren’s story to be true.

Knowing where to dig

“I’ve been accused of a lot of things, like I’m the grandson of Kelly Johnson, who founded the Skunkworks and was one of the gatekeepers. Usually,” he says, “I just ignore that stuff.”

One thing that did stick was a 2011 article from Mother Jones. It spotlighted Johnson’s work as the legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, and National Review described him as “the most effective lobbyist in Washington.” He held the position from 1981-2016, and performed related consulting work until hanging it up for good in 2023.

Lately, Johnson is better known for breaking news on proposed UAP-specific legislation. Two years ago, however, his fact-checking of Jacques Vallee’s Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret alienated a sizeable segment of the UFO subculture. Co-authored by Paola Harris and published in 2021, Trinity maintained that a UFO crashed in August 1945 near ground zero of the world’s first atomic bomb detonation, two years before the Roswell incident. It said two local youngsters, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, had not only found the damaged craft and its occupants before the arrival of military authorities, but they had gone inside and swiped some material.

Johnson’s massive critique of Trinity in 2023 was tough medicine for readers like me, who had followed Vallee’s work for ages. As the field’s elder statesman, Vallee’s contributions to critical thinking on High Strangeness have been indispensable. But the evidence he presented in Trinity wilted quickly in the heat of Johnson’s forensic work with public records, leaving Padilla and Baca exposed as hoaxers, and not very clever ones. A substantive counterattack on Johnson’s prosecution never materialized, but Trinity nevertheless published its third (and unchastened) edition last year.

‘It doesn’t work that way’

For having challenged the veracity of not only Malmgren and Vallee but the likes of celebrated whistleblowers Bob Lazar and David Grusch, Johnson has been labeled a deep-state debunker by their defenders. He shrugs it off. Johnson insists the UFO issue never once came up over his decades of advocating for anti-abortion policies on the Hill. In fact, he adds, he pretty much abandoned the field altogether during that span: “I don’t think I read about the subject of UFOs for 35 years. There just wasn’t much new going on.”

That all changed in 2017 when the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret UAP research program at the Pentagon. The expose reinvigorated the UFO debate, prompted Congress to press for accountability, and inspired a new generation of podcasters to wrestle with the mystery. And along with the new momentum came a dramatic shift in narrative as well.

“In recent years, more and more of the discourse has been overtaken by these stories of the government having captured alien technology and covering it up, and that’s a whole different game,” Johnson says. “Yet, with these stories, where you get something you can actually wrap your hands around and run down, so far they’ve all fallen apart.”

UFO crash-retrieval stories have been around for 78 years, but for all the recent attention, material evidence has yet to surface. Public congressional testimony makes compelling viewing but has, so far, produced no hands-on witnesses. UFOs continue to exert their unfettered mastery of Earth’s atmosphere – “I’m convinced that the flying discs of the 1940s and ‘50s were not Chinese drones,” Johnson says – but he argues the resources needed to sustain a multi-generational sequestering of UFO machinery, and without a single leak of the hardware, strains credulity.

“With every year that goes by, in my mind, it becomes less plausible. We’ve had a lot of authoritative denials, so what you’d have to be talking about is a conspiracy on a scale that points to a secret government,” he says. “Who could authorize that kind of lie? Are we really saying the Secretary of Defense doesn’t know about it, it’s that secret? No – it doesn’t work that way. There are not executive orders that bind future presidents, there is no such thing.

Emptying the garbage

“There’s a great number of people who are putting stories out there without any serious vetting – YouTube, podcasts, X, Twitter, whatever, there’s no shortage of people who’ll take anything that comes along and put it out there without doing any research. But I think there’s still a place for people who actually do deep dives into some of these stories.

“I’d be delighted to discover there’s a captured alien craft at the end of the rainbow. But I also think there’s value in clearing out some of the garbage, the overgrowth, the grifters and the hoaxers and getting all of that out of the way. I know my way around (Washington), I know how some stuff works and I think I can shed some light on some of the processes. Yeah, I talk to some people, but I certainly don’t represent any group on UAP matters.”

I wondered if faith might play a role in how Johnson views the issue. Johnson wasn’t sure what I meant. I said I assumed he was a Christian based on his abortion activism.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t believe we’re just meat. I believe there is a ghost in the machine and the mind exists independently of the brain, and lots of things that don’t fit into the current orthodox paradigms. I do think we’re accountable for how we live our lives, in some way.

“If you want to consider that religious, then I’m religious, but I’m not an adherent to any doctrinal body. I have been at times in the past, but not anymore. If you want to get into metaphysical stuff, you’d probably find some of my views woo-woo. I find it all rather baffling.”

But politicizing the UFO topic, Johnson said, doesn’t serve the truth very well. “I’ve always seen you as more on the liberal side of things.” Guilty. “And I’m sure there are plenty of things we can disagree about. But,” he said, “I don’t see that as pertinent to this issue, not the way I’ve tried to deal with it.”

If only facts mattered the way they used to . . .