In a world where secrets are meant to stay secret, it’s always a bit awkward when someone at the end of their life suddenly starts talking. That’s what happened with Harald Malmgren, former advisor to U.S. presidents, who — shortly before his death — made some rather startling claims about UFO briefings, presidential-level clearances, and Cold War nuclear encounters with unknown technologies.

Douglas Dean Johnson, a meticulous researcher, recently published an article in the Washington Examiner methodically taking Malmgren’s story apart. He lays out a precise, forensic-style timeline, and by the end of it we’re left with what reads — not unlike a judge’s ruling — as a quiet but confident demolition of Malmgren’s credibility.

Except, if you’ll pardon the phrase, things aren’t quite so black and white in the world of secrets.

There is a problem with demanding evidence of secrets…

One of Johnson’s key moves is to imply that Malmgren simply couldn’t have been “in the know” because we can’t find the appropriate paperwork. In his words:

“Despite a diligent search of multiple official records, no documentation has emerged that supports Malmgren’s assertion that he held a Department of Energy Q clearance during the relevant years.”

That sounds solid. Except this isn’t an expense report gone missing. It’s a claim involving high-level, compartmentalised government knowledge in an era when presidents often operated through trusted whisper networks and secret backchannels. We are, after all, talking about the early 1960s — a time when “plausible deniability” wasn’t just policy; it was etiquette.

Is it possible Malmgren had some level of access or was read into briefings via proximity to power? Yes. Is it likely there’s a detailed, tidy paper trail available to the public 60 years later via FOIA? Unlikely.

The Q Clearance Question (Again)

Johnson returns to the lack of evidence for a Q clearance — the kind tied to nuclear secrets — as a lynchpin. And yes, if Malmgren’s access had been formal, long-term, and easily documented, it would probably show up somewhere. But clearance regimes in those days were inconsistent at best, and informal access was often just that: informal. Temporary “read-ins,” ad hoc briefings, cross-agency sharing — it’s how the machine worked. Especially if you were, as Malmgren was, one of the people in the room when the big decisions were made.

It’s worth asking: do we really trust the 1960s intelligence community’s note-keeping, during the era of MKUltra, Operation Northwoods, and COINTELPRO? Or as one might put it in a pub discussion: you’d be lucky if they remembered to log their parking.

Another point Johnson makes is that nobody else seems to have come forward to back Malmgren up. No corroborating colleagues. No whispers from presidential aides. Silence.

But of course they didn’t. That’s the nature of secrecy. Plus they’re almost all dead.

The absence of corroboration isn’t a damning gap — it’s exactly what one would expect if Malmgren was telling the truth about a deeply compartmentalised topic. If people had been writing this into biographies or memos at the time, it wouldn’t have been a secret worth revealing six decades later.

What makes Johnson’s article especially curious isn’t just the skepticism, but the tone — subtle, but unmistakably chiding. There’s an undercurrent of “how dare anyone share this.” It’s not just that Malmgren might be wrong, but that others were naive or irresponsible for giving him a platform.

This feels particularly odd in the current moment, where the conversation around UFOs and UAPs has taken a hard turn toward legitimacy. Congressional hearings, whistleblower protections, and official investigations have all chipped away at the old taboo. And yet, we’re still somehow being told: don’t talk about this unless you have a receipt.

#Malmgate and the Wikipedia Scrubbing

We saw this credibility-policing in real time during what some (me) now call #Malmgate — the Wikipedia page on Malmgren was edited and locked after users began citing his late-life disclosures. Within days, the mention of his UFO claims on the popular American Alchemy YouTube channel, had vanished, flagged as “non-notable” or lacking “reliable sources.” Not for being false, mind you — just too uncomfortable for the encyclopedic tone. His accomplishments disappeared. His credibility reduced to a an advisor who helped the Japanese whale hunt. And that was about it. Who’d trust that guy, right?

This isn’t scholarship. It’s narrative management. I wrote about #Malmgate here.

When institutions — whether encyclopedic or journalistic — move swiftly to quarantine a claim rather than investigate it, we’re no longer dealing with neutral inquiry. We’re gatekeeping belief itself.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with asking for evidence. That’s what we should do. But if we’re only willing to believe things that come stamped, filed, and publicly archived — then by definition, we’ll never believe the biggest secrets.

Many of the truths we now take for granted — CIA mind control programmes, NSA mass surveillance, the very existence of Area 51 — were once rumours dismissed with a tone not unlike Johnson’s. “Show us the proof,” they said. And then decades later, someone declassified it, or died with a confession.

So maybe the question isn’t whether Malmgren was telling the truth. Maybe it’s whether we’ve built a culture that’s even capable of listening when someone like him finally speaks.

RIP The Hon. Amb. Dr. Harald Malmgren, July 13, 1935 - February 13, 2025.