More on Yankee Blue

Yankee Blue, a purported Air Force disinformation program aimed at its own officers to convince them that the military was working on captured alien technology (or was it a hazing ritual that went too far?) was revealed to the public in a June 2025 Wall Street Journal article and had been reportedly discovered by AARO in its investigations. It has set off a debate about how much of the UFO mythos from the 1980s onwards has been down to a government deception.

An important caveat is warranted: the label "Yankee Blue" was possibly not of the program itself but of the fake UFO narrative and fiction with which the servicepeople were tricked. Thus, there's an issue of conflation here. The underlying program which produced "Yankee Blue" did not necessarily have the same name. Thus, for example, if I were part of the deception and had told an officer, "Sir, you'll be inducted into a program called 'Yankee Blue', in which we'll be working on captured alien technology," I would be referring to the fictional item that I was trying to deceive him with, but the deception program itself, to which the deception was attached, might have had a completely different name. Assuming that they had the same name, however, I'll continue and make some observations and suggestions.

Perhaps of significance is that Yankee Blue and Kona Blue (the latter was purportedly an evolution/continuation of AATIP and which was billed to, and rejected by, the Department of Homeland Security after program insiders tried to move it from the DIA to an agency they felt would be more amenable to their aims) both have "Blue" in their names. "Have Blue" and "Tacit Blue" were programs to develop stealth aircraft in the late 1970s and the 1980s (the former program leading to the F-117 "fighter", actually a bomber, developed at the now famous Groom Lake or Area 51 facility of UFO fame, no less). These were not, properly speaking, codenames but actually nicknames assigned under the NICKA naming system used by the DoD since 1975 (see this article in The War Zone). An interesting piece of information to know would be Yankee Blue's assigned NICKA codename. According to the War Zone article:

When it comes to code words. Many real-world military operations and programs, for example, “HAVE BLUE,“ “ACID GAMBIT,” “AUTUMN RETURN,” “SENIOR TREND,” or the infamous “YELLOW FRUIT,” are often reported as being the “code word” for a classified operation or program. However, per DoD and the Joint Chiefs NICKA policy, a code word always consist of just a single word. By NICKA, the above named examples would be “nicknames” and not code words.

"Yankee Blue" may thus refer to a nickname assigned for use by one of the agencies within the DoD or have been a codename carried over from another parent agency (such as the CIA, which uses a naming scheme different to NICKA), with the project taken over by the DoD but retaining its two-word nickname. Especially if the latter is the case, it could speak to any number of possibilities regarding the program's true function. The "block" number assigned to the USAF for the first word of is program nicknames, according to FOIA'ed NICKA reference tables (see below), are 11, 29, 47, 61, 70 and 73. This is consistent with "Have Blue" (with block number 29 pertaining to the letters HA through HF, which permits words containing 'H' and additional letters from A through F for the first word), while the second word is left to the discretion of the relevant agency or its local commanders, barring a few restrictions such as the term being derogatory or counter to American values). Incidentally, "Tacit Blue" is inconsistent as an Air Force nickname, and places that program as having originated under the umbrella of "USPACOM" (US Pacific Command, now US Indo-Pacific Command). The aircraft developed (but not put into serial production) under that designation was a stealth platform designed to surveille armored ground formations with high resolution radar. Why "Blue" was chosen as the second word in its nickname, I have no idea. It could well have simply been a randomly assigned word with no intrinsic connection to the aims of the program. Or, since it was also used in Have Blue and Tacit Blue, it might have had an aerospace connotation (perhaps to signify the blue sky, since these were both aircraft programs?).

"Block assignments" and their designated letter ranges under the NICKA rules for program, operation, exercise etc. nicknames used by the DoD and its agencies. Image credit: The War Zone; US Government.

Returning to our main focus, however, it is notable that according to the NICKA block number/letter lookup tables, "Yankee" is not a designation that would be generated by any of the numbers reserved for the Air Force, but instead for a sister agency within the DoD: the Defense Investigative Service ("DIS" in the table, and allowed by the block number 93), renamed and reorganized as the Defense Security Service in 1999 and then to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency in 2019. The agency is tasked with background verification, security and counterintelligence functions for the US Government.

In the context of a self-directed disinformation operation or hazing ritual, the term "Blue" would be especially fitting as it is often used to designate the team members in a training exercise who simulate the readiness or aptitude of one's own forces in a real-world confrontation (as opposed to the "red team", which simulates an adversary and its known tactics and capabilities). This would suggest Yankee Blue was an internally focused effort rather than an explicitly anti-Soviet measure. As we do not yet have any concrete indication of its true scope in terms of the number of officers affected, it could have constituted anything from a spot check to a large scale campaign, or it might have started on one end of that spectrum and ballooned (one might say "derailed" or "spun out of control") to the other. The latter is consistent with the DoD's order in 2023 to put a stop to the practice.

Given all these sparse tidbits, it seems most likely that Yankee Blue was initially a DIS program or brainchild, to be conducted on a relatively small scale, that was eventually handed over to the USAF, whether opportunistically or as part of an agreed upon long-term plan, and that might have evolved beyond its original intent. This is merely guesswork, of course, but I welcome any commentary and leads that could resolve this riddle. Also, according to the War Zone piece:

Still, especially at lower levels of command and for short-duration operations, one still often sees nicknames that do not comply with NICKA, including ones with single words.

However, if this applies to Yankee Blue, and it was actually a USAF billet from the start, it would still imply that it was initially a small-scale effort that persisted for far longer than originally intended.

Or: the program actually started before 1975 (when NICKA kicked in) and it does represent a codename or nickname consistent with the USAF, but one that reflected the conventions at that time and which simply carried over into the rest of the 1970s and beyond. However, I have taken Yankee Blue as having started circa the 1980s, as hinted at by the WSJ article, though the article also makes allusions to government deception and fanning of the UFO mythos since the 1950s. I'm somewhat skeptical of that, and am very skeptical of the claim that the Robert Salas ICBM case was due to an electromagnetic burst used against an operational nuclear missile silo (and no, I don't mean to imply that Salas' claims are credible. His retelling of the incident has many shortcomings without us even needing to go to implausible claims about electromagnetic bursts from secret government tests). Assuming, however, that Yankee Blue did start in the 1980s, the above analysis is my best current reconstruction of what it might have entailed.

Returning to the possibility that the fictional UFO narrative sold as "Yankee Blue" did not have the same name as the underlying deception program of which it was a part, perhaps it was a way to test the acumen of new recruits by seeing whether they would check that the name comported with the Air Force NICKA block assignments (though I don't know to what extent the NICKA rules would have been made available to these cadres at the time). Those who passed the test might be commended on doing their due diligence or given opportunities to be inducted into actual sensitive programs, while those who didn't both digging deeper might be passed over for other assignments or get panned out or hazed. Thus, in this scenario, Yankee Blue was, or was part of, a training program, test or wargame of sorts.

Yet another possibility is that it was indeed primarily aimed at the Soviets (or had its attention directed to that pursuit at some point), but was conducted in such a way as to misdirect them - not by first tricking the USAF cadres but by making the Soviets think that this was the aim (perhaps with the existence of the program, but not its actual scope, being deliberately leaked to the USSR's intelligence services), a far cheaper and probably more efficient scheme than introducing the logistical complication of a full-fledged deception operation aimed at American officers. Either way, the GRU and KGB might thereby have been led to expend some resources on a wild goose chase, or at least have some level of confusion sowed in their ranks regarding the program's purport. Confirmation of this from the Soviet archives (opened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 but subsequently severely restricted by Vladimir Putin) would likely go a long way to answering these questions. My request to the Ukrainians, if they ever get to sack and pillage Moscow, is to make the archives fully available to Western scholarship so that we might get some further insights not only into Soviet operations but to things that have fallen through the cracks within the American defense establishment.

Writer and researcher Isaac Koi alerted me to a claim made by former AFOSI agent and disinformation specialist and perpetual yarn spinner Richard Doty (a central figure in the Paul Bennewitz affair) about "Yankee Black" in an appearance with Disclosure activist Stephen Greer (Yankee Black is mentioned 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the video) some six years ago. He described the purpose of the special access program it was related to as being to investigate UFOs and any threats to Air Force personnel or property posed by the extraterrestrials ("The code name was Yankee Black — that was the program’s briefing. It wasn’t necessarily the UFO program; it was actually a security code for an access program."):

"Yankee White" is also a thing. The Wikipedia entry describes it as:

...an administrative nickname for a background check undertaken in the United States of America for Department of Defense personnel and contractor employees working with the president and vice president. Most personnel assigned to Presidential Support duties requiring Yankee White investigations must undergo a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

Note the involvement of DCSA (formerly named the DIS, as mentioned) again. Needless to say, Doty's story about Yankee Black is mere UFO fabulism, but there could still be a legitimate connection here due to his role in AFOSI. I presume that their personnel work closely with DCSA and would likely be read into some of the latter's operations or programs; this page describes how the DIS/DSS consolidated certain security functions that had previously been undertaken by the independent investigative agencies of each service branch, such as AFOSI for the USAF. Thus, his encountering of "Yankee" as part of joint operations with DCSA might have inspired his own use of the term, similar to how Bob Lazar used "S4" after learning about an actual "Site 4" at Tonopah Test Range, or how any number of other UFO grifters and carnival barkers have assimilated elements of real things into their fables. Yankee Blue, of course, might itself just be a complete fabrication in its entirety, and one shouldn't discount the possibility that it was a brainchild of Doty's.

"'Sack Moscow'?! I can't believe Luis just said that!"