The evolution of strategic influence

Keep an eye on that new AARO guy, OK?

“Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again” — Michael Corleone

Shortly after new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office director Jon Kosloski appeared before a Senate subcommittee, a meme popped up that referenced a scene from “The Godfather Part II.” It’s the one where Mafia capo Frank Pangateli is about to deliver damning testimony against crime boss Michael Corleone. Just before he drops the goods, however, Pangateli makes eye contact with his brother – an enforcer back in Sicily, and an unexpected guest at the hearing – sitting quietly, ominously, in the gallery. Pangateli suddenly recants his affidavit and the case against Corleone collapses into chaos.

Nothing nearly that theatrical happened last week on Capitol Hill, but with Defense Department PIO Susan Gough looming close enough to smack Kosloski upside the head should he stray into unsanctioned language, the imagery was laughably ham-fisted. And it’s fair to say that it became an instant classic only in retrospect, since most people monitoring the UFO-generated political tension likely had never seen Gough before.

Just a week earlier, in front of yet another congressional audience, Pentagon whistleblower Lue Elizondo called her out in his opening statement. “Most Americans would be shocked to learn that the Pentagon’s very own Public Affairs Office openly employs a professional psychological operations officer,” he said without mentioning Gough’s name, “as the singular point of contact for any UAP-related inquiries from citizens and the media. This is unacceptable.”

Pressed for more details by a House subcommittee member, the author of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs cited a “long history here of that individual providing misleading and false information . . . in order to discredit this topic. I have personally been victim to it . . . It turns out that that individual was also working with former leadership of AARO at the time as well.”

Propaganda hardballer

“Former leadership” means Kosloski’s predecessor at AARO, the credibility-impaired Sean Kirkpatrick, who stepped down last year. But clues into Gough’s current conduct can be found in a 2003 research paper she produced for the U.S. Army War College, when she was a lieutenant colonel in the Army.

She conceptualized “The Evolution of Strategic Influence” in the aftermath of 9/11, when policymakers were bewildered by the depth of “anti-American sentiment” around the world. Messaging upgrades in this new “war of ideas” were in order, not only internationally but for internal consumption as well.

“Strategic influence and its elements,” Gough wrote, “have been known by many names: foreign information program, international information activities, political warfare, propaganda, psychological warfare, psychological operations, public information, public affairs, public diplomacy, international military information, information operations, influence operations, and perception management, to name just a few.”

Gough’s history lesson on “influence operations” from WWII onward drilled in on inconsistent policies that “always seem to end up back where we started.” She suggested their failures were driven by naivete at the heart of American exceptionalism:

A ‘massive discrepancy’ in air defense

“This oscillating approach has been a result of a peculiarly American outlook that using persuasion and influence at the national level is somehow unethical and inconsistent with a democracy, that using ‘psychological tricks’ is ‘dirty’ and immoral, and that it’s completely unnecessary: there is no need to overtly persuade; the United States should just factually show the world who we are, and everyone will automatically recognize how wonderful we are and want to emulate us. The successful propaganda efforts of U.S. enemies also contributed to the American distaste in many circles for strategic influence. Anything that smacked of propaganda or psychological warfare became something that only the ‘bad guys’ did: first the Nazis, then the Soviets. Fortunately, despite this attitude and resistance, most U.S. administrations in the latter half of the 20th Century recognized both the value and need for strategic influence.”

Twenty years later, and especially since the NY Times ambushed the Pentagon in 2017 with an expose on its secret UFO research program, it's safe to assume there’s a high demand for those strategic influence skills. Shock waves from the Times’ reporting produced snafus from multiple Defense Department spokespersons who couldn’t get their stories straight about what Elizondo did or didn’t do on the AATIP desk. When Gough was dispatched to fix it, veteran defense-tech reporter Tyler Rogoway noticed the shift immediately in 2019.

Writing for The War Zone in March 2020, Rogoway was trying to iron out “a massive discrepancy in regards to the military branch’s ability to execute its homeland air defense mission.” He wanted to know why the Navy was being more transparent with its UFO material – for a brief moment, anyway – than the Air Force.

Initially, Rogoway noted, USAF press officers “seemed eager to look into it on our behalf.” But everything changed when he was informed that all UFO queries across all military branches should be strained through the Defense Secretary public affairs office.

“Simply put, my experience with Susan Gough has been the worst I have had with any of the Defense Department’s public affairs personnel, ever . . . Her behavior has been a clear example of everything the Pentagon’s media operations should not be and it certainly is not due to a lack of training or experience . . . The reason why so many journalists are interacting with her at all on this issue is that she now holds the entire media/public affairs portfolio on UFOs within the DoD.

I’d settle for ‘Made in Uranus’

“Sometime shortly before I submitted my questions, the decision was made to funnel every request regarding this issue to her and her alone. The services no longer had control of their own messaging on this matter. Why this decision was made has not been clear.”

Four years later, the real face of the DoD’s UFO transparency façade said nary a word while monitoring Kosloski’s testimony before a scant representation of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 19. She didn’t have to. Gough had likely set the rules with hearing-chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and unnamed others during the preceding closed-door session.

In her opening public statements, Gillibrand wanted “to probe a series of specific issues,” such as “incidents at Langley and elsewhere” that “pose significant threats to our national security.” She was of course referring to those embarrassing security breaches at Langley Air Force Base in December 2023; overflights by “uncrewed aerial systems” were so persistent, and potentially hazardous, that a unit of F-22 Raptors was reportedly transferred to another base.

Like countless Pentagon officials before him, and under sharp institutional scrutiny, Kosloski dusted off, for Gillibrand, the timeless refrain about having detected no “verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.” And of course, Kosloski gave no examples of what might actually qualify as evidence for ET. If he’d said something, given us a baseline, an analogy, anything – We’re looking for hi-rez pix of a daylight disc with a ‘Made in Uranus’ bumper sticker, OK?” – that might’ve at least indicated that AARO had standards.

What normal looks like

Kosloski produced a bunch of new numbers and pie charts and managed to stretch the envelope of official knowledge by a whopping nanometer. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence conceded that “most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects” that “clearly pose a safety of flight issue.” That statement was hailed as a sea change back then. Last week, Kosloski had the glass-half-full types doing cartwheels. “To be clear,” he told Gillibrand, “AARO does not believe every object is a bird, a balloon, or a UAV. We do have some very anomalous objects.” No shit, really? Eeeeee!

After reminding his small audience that a lot of folks are mistaking Starlink satellites for UAP, Kosloski plucked three allegedly legitimate unexplained cases from AARO’s “active archive” file. A cop from somewhere “out west” watched a large hovering glowing orb take off at a 45-degree angle. A bunch of government contractors at “a U.S. facility” in the southeast saw a “large metallic cylinder about the size of a large commercial airplane” park in mid-air before suddenly vanishing. And something unknown flew between two aircraft traveling parallel to each other. There’s video. But you can’t see it today.

Well, that was an effective ploy, because it made me forget all about UFOs’ unimpeded access to our nuclear assets.

But wait, Sen. Gillibrand – about that Langley thing?

Rather than press Kosloski for evidence like video and sensor data – that stuff had likely been deemed off limits in the closed meeting – the senator from New York put on the kid gloves. She wanted to know more “about how AARO will be integrated into the review of these kinds of cases” in order to “more quickly analyze what’s knowable and what’s not knowable.”

Without even mentioning Langley, Kosloski stated that AARO would serve in “an advisory capacity.” Its goal will be “to conduct baseline experiments of the environment to see what normal looks like, whether it's balloons, birds, anomalous activity, or drones flying through an environment. We're going to gather a lot of data that will allow us to characterize an environment very well and then detect and follow those tracks, hopefully rather efficiently” yawn zzzzz blah-blah zzzzz blahblahblah kick the can blah-blah.

Solved: Aguadilla, GoFast

It was actually Kosloski’s response to Sen. Joni Ernst’s question about AARO’s collaborations with academia that cut to the chase. “Our partnership with universities, I would say, is lacking right now,” he replied. “We have some one-off associations with university professors. However, that's our fault. And it's largely because of the need to declassify data. We need to give the professors something to work on before we can really engage them.”

Yeah, it’s usually not a great idea to ask people to analyze data before you let them see it. Look, AARO’s been up and running for 2½ years and one might be inclined to ascribe its constipated growth to the Pentagon’s aversion to UFO/UAP transparency. But when Kosloski started getting into AARO’s newly resolved cases last week without releasing the full analyses, he crossed the line from umpire to “strategic influencer.”

He trotted out one case that no one had ever asked about or heard of. It had something to do with a dot flying through a plume of volcanic ash spewing from Mount Etna. It turned out not to be space aliens. But he likely pissed off at least a few airmen with AARO’s dismissal of the Navy’s famous “GoFast” video as an optical quirk called parallax, even though – according to the Defense Department – the sequence still remains officially “unidentified.”

Former F-18 pilot Ryan Graves, whose squadron was directly involved in UFO video acquisitions in 2015, was so concerned about near-misses during his military career that he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace in order to assess the magnitude of what’s happening upstairs. After Kosloski solved the GoFast, Graves pushed back in an interview with NBC.

And what did the pilots say?

“Specifically, the GoFast video itself was never really interesting because it was going fast,” Graves said. “The pilots certainly didn’t say that, nor did they name the video. If anything, the Pentagon simply debunked their own naming for that video. What is interesting, what’s anomalous, is that that video was captured within minutes of the ‘Gimbal’ video and it just goes to further show there were many more objects operating in that area than the first video shows . . .

“I think if the AARO office actually spoke with the pilots that were involved in that incident, they would know that the objects were part of a larger formation of objects and thus very anomalously operating 300 miles off the coast and within 50 miles of a U.S. aircraft carrier.”

No less bewildered were researchers with the nonprofit Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

Kosloski explained the Aguadilla UFO incident – filmed in infrared by a Customs and Border Protection plane patrolling coastal Puerto Rico in 2013 – as “likely a pair of balloons or sky lanterns” traveling above the ocean.* The objects only looked like they were flying low because of the parallax phenomenon, and it only looked like they entered and exited the sea because the targets and the water were the same temperature, and the camera couldn’t tell one from the other. “This video will be released and our report will be released later this year,” he promised.

SCU researchers can’t wait to see what AARO comes up with by Dec. 31. They published their results in a 162-page report in 2015 following nearly two years and at least 1,000 man-hours of effort. Copious metadata led SCU to conclude that Border Patrol agents had acquired proof of UFO transmedium capabilities. The target they captured appeared to enter the water at high speed, submerge, break the surface, and take off as not one, but two entirely separate objects.

“We’re choosing not to formally address (Kosloski’s claims) until we’ve seen their publication,” says SCU co-founder Rich Hoffman. “What I will say is that we have 100 percent confidence in the accuracy of our findings, based on the fact that we put so much work into it.

Cruising at 7 knots or hauling ass?

“We looked into the camera, we confirmed it wasn’t something faked by Homeland Security. We looked at transponder data to confirm it was that (Border Patrol) plane, we went and got radar data,” he says. Contrary to Kosloski’s assertion that the balloons were traveling at a leisurely 7 knots, Hoffman says the target was zipping along at more than 80 mph as it crossed over a road below. An SCU technician used an identical Wescam to film known balloons and sky lanterns to compare their signatures with the Aguadilla UFO.

“It’s not just us who looked at it and determined the speeds that we saw,” Hoffman goes on. “We also sent our analysis to France for the folks at Sigma2 (the French UFO research organization) so they could look at it – they didn’t see any problems. Travis Taylor (lead field investigator of History’s “Skinwalker Ranch” series) said he reviewed it when he was the chief scientist with the UAP Task Force, and he said the speed was about 74, 75 mph, which matched pretty closely with what we had.”

Taylor could not be reached for comment. Former UAPTF director Jay Stratton urged caution. “I understand why SCU's attention is piqued by the assertion about sky lanterns,” he stated in an email. “I’d recommend focusing on the broader methodology and waiting to see how AARO supports their conclusions once the scientific paper is released. That should provide a clearer picture for everyone involved.”

Meanwhile, during the joint subcommittee hearing on the House floor two weeks ago, a small but vocal bipartisan core of lawmakers listening to testimony from Elizondo, retired Navy admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger and former NASA official Mike Gold appeared to be getting fed up with the bureaucratic foot-dragging and obfuscation. And what about all that money – how much were these secret programs costing, and who was getting it? Pugnacious hearing chair and budget hawk Rep. Nancy Mace even hinted at being threatened by “certain individuals who didn't want this hearing to happen because they feared what might be disclosed. But we stood firm, no amount of outside pressure would ever keep me from pursuing this subject, come hell or high water.”

Come at me, bro’

But Mace’s confrontational certitude got a little puzzling shortly after the hearing ended, when disclosure activist Stephen Bassett and former SAC launch control officer Bob Salas scored an on-camera invitation to her office. Salas told her he’d been contacted by AARO in 2023, and that he’d shared his eyewitness account of watching all 10 Minuteman missiles under his command going offline in 1967 at Malmstrom AFB while security guards reported UFO activity overhead. In other words, his story had been sitting in the AARO files for nearly two years. As an insurance measure, he’d even audiotaped his interview with AARO.

Mace asked if AARO had included his experience in the agency’s annual report in June. Salas said no. But he’d been sharing his story since 1994. “So it’s a big thing that they left out,” she mused. “So if it’s true, then that report can be totally discounted.” Salas agreed, then told her about fellow USAF veteran Bob Jacobs and a UFO shootdown of an Atlas test missile off Big Sur in 1964. And that the incident had been filmed. “Really?” Mace wondered. “And we’ve got video of this?” Obviously this was all news to her. “And is this public?” Salas said no, the CIA confiscated the film.

Nancy Mace has some catching up to do. Given the situational flexibility of her politics, one might keep an eye on her commitment to UFO transparency. Just last year, for instance, she announced her support for LGBTQ rights. Last week, she proposed a bill to ban transgender women from using Capitol Hill restrooms.

In Mace’s hearing, Elizondo confirmed that he’d learned how defense giant Lockheed Martin, years ago, had attempted to divest itself of UFO material “that was collected in the 1950s” in hopes of transferring it to Bigelow Aerospace. But Elizondo said the CIA had blocked that transaction.

Mace struck a defiant pose as she circulated documentation of an alleged unacknowledged special access program, code-named Immaculate Constellation, among committee members. Among other things, the 12-page synopsis of this bombshell uSAP suggests the U.S. is in a race with adversaries to exploit UAP technology.

“Representative Luna just told me if I say ‘Immaculate Constellation,’ I’ll be on some list,” Mace said, “maybe a FISA warrant. So come at me, bro, I guess.”

But what if Trump’s new best friend Elon Musk digs into the program, and the man determined to “Occupy Mars” decides he wants a cut of the classified tech for himself? What if Trump authorizes the transaction? Who’s going to stop that from happening?

Maybe a perception manager will teach Nancy Mace the facts of life and make her an offer she can’t refuse.

* Originally stated the Aguadilla object was said to be at 13,000 feet. That altitude was actually a surmised altitude for the GoFast object.