The Year of the Great UFO Swindle
2023 was the year of the UFO, latterly UAP, in Washington, but the perplexing discussion got mired in the usual overpromises, misunderstandings, and quackery
Decades before Planet MAGA became obsessed with the supposed Deep State, conspiracists on the Left denounced the alleged Secret Team which was much the same thing: a lawless and sinister cabal of spies and security bosses that formed the real power in Washington, operating beyond norms and restraints.
This bears pointing out in the context of the burgeoning debate over the reality of Unidentified Flying Objects. That shadowy topic reappeared on public radar six years ago this month, when the New York Times broke the sensational story that, after decades of denials, in fact the Pentagon had been investigating UFOs in considerable detail, with the appearance of minimal Congressional oversight. Neither has the Department of Defense been particularly forthcoming over the last six years.
This was a major story since DoD plus the Intelligence Community for three-quarters of a century have hidden behind the classification wall regarding mysterious objects in the sky, now termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAP by Beltway cognoscenti, since this involves undersea sightings as well as the “traditional” flying saucers.
Since late 2017, this tenebrous saga has followed a familiar pattern, the same one that UFO aficionados have seen play out several times since this topic first jumped into public consciousness in the late 1940s. First, government insiders claim secret knowledge of spacecraft in the Pentagon’s possession, usually related to crashed UFOs (often with allegations of dead aliens in storage). These claims are seldom made by firsthand eyewitnesses. There are promises of a Big Reveal to come, followed by demands for disclosure of “the truth” about UFOs, accompanied by mounting media uproar. Activists and fans get very excited then…nothing happens. No reveal, big or otherwise, ever comes. Instead, DoD and the IC keep their secrets stashed away from public view behind that high classification wall. The story leaves the media until it reappears again, years or decades later when, like clockwork, more “whistleblowers” appear with sensational UFO claims and the cycle repeats.
This year saw that cycle enter its terminal phase, yet again. Open Congressional hearings in 2023 into the UAP issue produced more sensational claims but ultimately more heat than light. Star witness Dave Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer and National Reconnaissance Office staffer, excited UFO fans with vague claims of aliens and their recovered spacecraft, including assertions that Washington has been caught up in this shadowy matter since the 1930s. In a Dan Brown novel flourish, Grusch asserted that the Vatican clandestinely helped send a crashed spaceship from Fascist Italy to the United States.
I don’t seek to cast aspersions on Grusch, who seems like a sincere fellow. He appears to believe what he’s saying about UAP; whether his claims are true is another matter. Most of it sounds like hall gossip about UFOs of the kind that circulates in our spy agencies. I’ve heard some of it too. It’s salacious stuff, but none of it amounts to evidence. Grusch claims to want to tell all to Congress in a SCIF, where he can execute the classified Big Reveal, finally. That hasn’t happened yet, nor does it seem likely to anytime soon.
This month, after weeks of rare public debate on this issue, Congress ordered the National Archives to release some UFO-related files to the public, while granting our national security agencies wide leeway to keep their secrets secret. This slight policy shift, executed with the support of the Biden administration, frustrated UFO activists and fans, whose hopes for “the truth” to finally slip out of Washington after 75 years once again have been dashed.
However, this outcome was entirely predictable to those who are acquainted with how DoD, the IC, and the whole federal alphabet soup work in real life rather than movies or Reddit. What, then, have we learned over the last six years? The Pentagon admitted it’s interested in UAP but what it knows, at least in any details, remains secret. DoD’s release of some formerly classified footage of mysterious orbs and tic-tacs in the sky, recorded by U.S. military observers, is interesting but does little to settle debates about what UAP really are.
It’s time to put my cards on the table. I’m ultimately agnostic on the UFO issue, which doesn’t especially interest me. It’s evident that a high percentage of sightings are, and always have been, misunderstandings: clouds, stars, also secret, publicly unacknowledged air- or seacraft belonging to the United States or other advanced countries. To say nothing of commonplace frauds by attention-seekers. Decades ago, I witnessed something I would call a UFO in the sky – although I’ve been an aviation buff all my life I couldn’t identify it, and I remain unsure what it was. I do have insider knowledge, however. All I can say here is that some years ago I attended highly classified Pentagon briefings that depicted some flying craft that looked a lot like some of the things people are calling UAP now.
That said, a certain number of UFO sightings are genuinely mysterious, exhibiting performance that’s well beyond any known vehicles, sometimes surpassing the laws of physics as we understand them. It’s plausible that some of these unknown craft represent Non-Human Intelligence to employ the au courant phrase. That still doesn’t explain what these mysterious craft actually are, and NHI does not necessarily imply any extraterrestrial origin.
It’s obvious that DoD and the IC know much more about all this than they’re telling the public. Top Secret Umbra has reported on this, about highly classified intelligence regarding UAP from the National Security Agency that isn’t accessible to the public. It seems that DoD and the IC are investigating UAP with defense contractors who can evade Congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests more easily than federal outfits can. Moreover, all UAP secrets are stashed behind high classification walls and restricted Special Access Programs. The number of personnel with access to those SAPs may be quite small, perhaps only in the hundreds. It’s difficult for Uncle Sam to keep any secret forever, but it helps when few people are “read on” for the program.
I want to offer some intelligence-related caveats that seem to get missed by most people with an interest in UAP. First, DoD and the IC have a well-honed habit of employing the UFO issue to confuse our adversaries about our cutting-edge military technologies – that this also confuses flying saucer buffs isn’t the Pentagon’s concern. Indeed, during the Cold War, the U.S. military was perfectly content to let UFO fans think that unexplained craft spotted in the sky over, say, Nevada were alien spacecraft rather than the above Top Secret experimental Air Force aircraft which they were. Second, our counterspies sometimes employed UFO cover stories to confuse members of the public, to prevent them from inadvertently revealing highly classified Pentagon programs. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the late Cold War even seems to have run offensive counterintelligence operations against UFO buffs to protect USAF technology secrets, if the claims of former AFOSI agent Richard Doty are to be believed. (In the Wilderness of UFO Mirrors, Doty is either the ultimate whistleblower, or just a continuation of AFOSI’s deception programs against UFO buffs…or perhaps some of both.)
It needs to be understood that when it comes to protecting government secrets, counterspies aren’t required to tell the public the truth, particularly regarding severely classified programs. In SAP cases, maintaining cover, what normies would term “lying,” is in fact part of the job and legally required. Above all, it would be supremely naïve to think DoD and the IC stopped playing such deception games regarding UFOs and advanced military technology when the Cold War ended.
Which brings us to the problem of quackery, which has accompanied the UFO issue since its public appearance just after the Second World War. There have always been people who spin spaceship and alien fables – what normies would term “making shit up” – for fun, profit, and attention. Unfortunately, far-fetched claims about UAP, lacking anything resembling evidence, can always get an audience, at least for a while, especially online.
Along comes Daniel Sheehan, who entered the UAP controversy with spectacular flourish. In recent years, the attorney-activist has made numerous sensational claims about aliens, assertions based on secret knowledge from shadowy sources that Sheehan is cagey about revealing. The wildly tousled 78-year-old lawyer has proffered dramatic allegations of a vast, illegal U.S. Government cover-up stretching back many decades, reaching to the top levels of the Pentagon and related agencies. These follow the standard alien bogeyman storyline with sinister military and intelligence officials exploiting crashed alien craft for reverse engineering purposes.
In recent weeks, Sheehan has casually mentioned that there are a dozen different species of aliens that have come to earth and made contact with the Deep State. Danny likes what aficionados call the “woo” factor and he’s implied that those aliens of various shapes and sizes have given Uncle Sam teleportation and anti-gravity capabilities. How does he, never having had any affiliation with DoD or the IC, know all this obviously highly classified information? He just does, you see. He claims to have attended meetings where all this was revealed.
In other words: Trust me, bro. Danny Sheehan may be telling the unvarnished truth here and someday all his outlandish claims will be verified. But I don’t recommend holding your breath, dear reader.
One of the stranger things about life in our very online age is that many things are knowable with just a few clicks, but people can’t be bothered to do even basic research. If you’ve heard the name Danny Sheehan before the current UFO wave, you know that it’s advisable to take anything he says with whole bags, not merely grains, of salt.
Sheehan bills himself as a “federal civil rights attorney” and his new UFO fans seem to take his claims to be a champion of truth-telling at face value, but it’s remarkable how much of Danny’s essential self-promotion shtick remains unchanged over the decades. He’s been chasing the evil shadow government for nearly a half-century now and one of these days he’ll get the job done.
Four decades ago, Sheehan got DC-famous by inserting himself in Beltway debates about Central America in a sensational fashion. As a left-wing activist, Sheehan promoted Nicaragua’s Communist-adjacent Sandinista regime, which took power in 1979 and promptly made Central America a Cold War proxy battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the Sandinistas cozied up to the Soviets and Cubans, the Reagan administration pushed back by bolstering the so-called Contras, who were fighting the Sandinistas. In that wake came numerous controversies and scandals which buffeted Washington through the 1980s.
Sheehan managed to jump right in the middle of that wrangle on the heels of a tragedy. A terrible crime occurred on May 30, 1984, at a Nicaraguan guerrilla outpost called La Penca, on the border with Costa Rica. That day, the charismatic rebel leader Edén Pastora, nicknamed “Comandante Zero,” was holding a press conference, attracting a platoon of journalists. A former Sandinista, Pastora was the most polished of the Contras. However, the media event was blown apart by a bomb that inflicted 22 casualties, Pastora included, who suffered serious wounds. The victims, mostly journalists, came from seven countries.
Seven succumbed to their injuries, including Linda Frazier, an American journalist whose legs were blown off by the bomb, which was hidden in a camera case. The La Penca bombing became an instant cause célèbre for Sandinista fans, who assumed the atrocity was the handiwork of the CIA. A private investigation was led by a witness to the crime, Tony Avirgan, an American journalist who was wounded by the bomb. With the help of his wife, Martha Honey, plus financial backing from mainstream media outlets, Avirgan investigated and discovered who the culprit was: a Danish photographer named Per Anker Hansen, who was at La Penca the day of the bombing, jealously keeping watch over his camera case, which contained the bomb. “Hansen” walked out of the jungle hut just before the bomb detonated, then disappeared.
Avirgan and Honey noted that “Hansen” didn’t speak Danish very well, and they uncovered that his passport was purloined. They alleged that “Hansen” was in fact a “right-wing Libyan” named Amac Galil who was hired by Pinochet’s Chile to work for the CIA – and assassinate Edén Pastora. This complex murder scheme, engineered with the assistance of other U.S. agencies including the State Department, was a False Flag spy operation: “a right-wing plot which was intended to be blamed on the Sandinistas.”
Now enter Sheehan, whose Christic Institute stepped up to take Avirgan and Honey’s case. The left-wing Washington law firm was just Sheehan, his wife, and a friend, but they took self-promotion seriously and got the media’s ear. Before long, Sheehan had concocted an intricate theory of the La Penca bombing, pinning it not merely on the CIA, but on the Secret Team of spies and military types who were the real power in Washington. Sheehan’s PR campaign started with his trademark over-the-top claims:
There is a Secret Team that has been operating in this country for 25 years. Their objective: to fight their definition of communism. Their method: trafficking in drugs, assassinating people, stealing from the government, and subverting the will of Congress and the American public. With billions of dollars of drug money, they are making foreign policy and acting as a shadow government … this group got its beginnings when Vice President Nixon was made chairperson of Operation Forty, a secret group within the National Security Council charged with prosecuting a covert war against Castro’s Cuba.
In 1986, the Christic Institute filed a $24 million civil suit on behalf of Avirgan and Honey over the La Penca bombing, based on the Secret Team allegations, naming as defendants some 30 individuals including senior Pentagon officials, CIA bosses, various Contras, even Pablo Escobar. As for evidence, Sheehan did his “trust me, bro” routine and it didn’t go well in an actual court. A journalist who knew Nicaragua much better than Sheehan explained what happened next:
The institute's lawsuit was a fraud from the start. At its heart was an affidavit supposedly based on testimony of 79 secret witnesses whose identity could not be revealed because their lives were in danger. When the judge finally warned Christic to either reveal the names or withdraw the affidavit, it turned out that several were listed twice. Others were newspaper reporters who knew nothing more about the case than they had been told by Christic officials. One of the most important was someone known merely as "David" from Costa Rica, whom no one from Christic had ever met or spoken with; he was a supposed barroom acquaintance of another witness, who didn't know his last name or address, and hadn't seen him in years. And some witnesses obviously couldn't have feared for their lives if their names were disclosed because they were already dead. (Christic's lead attorney, Daniel Sheehan, must have been taking a good many depositions with his Ouija board. When he submitted his list of 2,176 trial witnesses–that number is not a typo–at least 12 percent of them turned out to be dead.)
In 1988, a federal judge threw out the Christic Institute’s case, noting scathingly, “The plaintiffs have made no showing of existence of genuine issues of material fact with respect to either the bombing at La Penca, the threats made to their news sources or threats made to themselves.” Subsequently the judge ordered Christic to pay over $1 million in attorney’s fees and court costs incurred by their nonsense lawsuit, effectively bankrupting Sheehan’s outfit. Despite the aid of Hollywood types – Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Brown even did a benefit concert for the Christic Institute – it ended badly on appeal. As a last blow, in 1992 the IRS took away the institute’s non-profit status over the “frivolous lawsuit” which had been executed for political purposes.
Neither were Sheehan’s clients happy. Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey eventually realized that their attorney was more interested in self-promotion and exposing the supposed Secret Team than getting any compensation for their injuries incurred at La Penca. Noticing that the Christic Institute’s case really didn’t exist, and the entire enterprise was a smoke-and-mirrors con, they attempted to get Sheehan disbarred in 1993.
It turns out that the La Penca bombing really was a False Flag – but not by the CIA or the Secret Team, rather by the Sandinistas. “Per Anker Hansen” was an alias and the bomber was a fake Dane, but he was no Libyan, rather an Argentinian leftist named Roberto Gaguine who was killed in 1989 while executing a terrorist attack on an army base in his home country. Fingerprints from La Penca left no doubt that Hansen and Gaguine were one and the same.
Gaguine blew up La Penca on behalf of the Sandinistas. The Argentine was acting on the orders of Nicaraguan intelligence, and this was known even at the time. In 2009, Peter Torbiörnsson, a Swedish journalist who was at La Penca and injured by the bomb, admitted that he had known all along who “Hansen” really was. He had no idea he was a terrorist, Torbiörnsson insisted, but he was aware that Gaguine was a Sandinista spy. The Swedish leftist stated that he had helped “Hansen” gain access to La Penca, at the request of top Sandinista officials. Haunted by guilt over his quarter-century of silence about the truth of the crime, Torbiörnsson made a documentary exposing the unpleasant reality of what happened at La Penca.
In other words, the Christic Institute got the story exactly backwards. That hasn’t deterred Sheehan, who has shifted to UFOs. It seems the Secret Team has moved on from drug-running and assassinations to hosting a dozen alien life forms while reverse engineering their spaceships. Or something. Tony Avirgan eventually moved on too and became a chef and caterer, which seems like a much worthier pursuit than anything Danny Sheehan’s up to.