Yankee Blue - The Hazing Ritual Responsible for Some Military Belief in UFOs?

[NorCal Dave]

What Mr. Philips told Mick West about Yankee Blue sounds different from that. 1:14:46 In the video:

EDIT: Cross posted with @Mendel above. YouTube offers auto transcripts for most content, so I used that.

Yes. Phillips described Yankee Blue as something that started as a training module or program used to train people on the ins and outs of SAPs and how to administer them:

1:14:51

according to the air force inspector general was actually established as a training tool because you know you have um management of uh department uh special access programs. So add an insulation (at an installation) as you have a need to know you're read into these programs and you're understood the measures protect the programs what you can discuss about the programs and we
1:15:23
read people off. So they needed a tool to train people you know how to minister and how to read people in. Um they had an amazing uh brief about um Yankee Blue and it's some type of anti-gravity motor that was developed and the the image on the brief was your classic 1960s flying
saucer. Um the triraph, the measures, everything about it was correct.

1:15:53

So you had these managers, these clerks, these people, administrative people who worked in the special access program, management offices, um, use this as a training tool.

So, he makes it sound like an SAP training program that used a completely false secret anti-gravity flying saucer as the topic and people learned how to administer an SAP using it. He then says it "went rogue" and was used out of context as a joke or hazing rituals, and AARO reported it up the chain:

1:16:06

However, it went rogue. It got out into the wild and for multiple decades, it was being briefed as a legitimate program of record, an actual SAP.
And we were told um by the Air Force that this was hazing. It was, you know, they just did it as a joke. Yeah. Um, when I briefed it, we became, you know, we were very concerned about incidents of hazing in the DoD and we thought this is something that we had to report and I was the acting director at the time and we did report it to Congress and we did report it to, you know, our command and control both depth and to the uh the DNI about what we had discovered.

But AARO was not the agency to do damage assessment about the hazing:

1:16:52

...the DNI had actually asked a very very good question uh because it was so realistic and she had asked if this could be the basis for this persistent urban myth that the government has recovered and reverse engineered alien technology because it was so well done and we knew had gone wild and had been out um in the services for decades. and she had asked had we completed a damage assessment and how many people you know were exposed to this and we were not the be the office that would do that investigation and come back with an assessment. We did request that it be done.

Philips estimated there COULD be as many as thousands of people that were exposed to this fake program:

1:17:33

However, we assessed just due to the turnover, the typical tour of the service members about 2 to 3 years max that there would be potentially um you know thousands of people who had been read into this program and believe it to be true

I had forgotten about this part of the interview. Philips doesn't give a time frame for any of this, but he says the photo was a "classic '60s flying saucer". IF that indicates the training program was around in the '60s before becoming a hazing topic later, could some of Stringfield's claimed military officers that were supposedly passing him information about a crash retrieval programs been influenced by Yankee Blue? Stringield helped popularize the notion of crashed and retrieved UFOs, but he always claimed he was being told about these programs from military personal.

It's also possible the Yankee Blue training program could have been form the '80s, with the hazing element emerging in the '90s. And like Grusch and others today, Stringfield's sources could have been less than what he claimed. I think Grusch seems to believe what he was told, but it's likely people like Eric Davis were his source, and Davis was never in a position to know about the things he claimed.

The plot thickens!