In Brief: Harald Malmgren's History of Serial Fabrication Revealed

In a social media posting on X today, Lue Elizondo said that he did not attend a classified SCIF meeting with Congressional representatives last week because of a prior commitment to perform at an Oregon UFO festival, tacitly conceding that posing with UFO fans in alien costumes is more important than informing Congress about America's most important UFO secrets. Meanwhile, Douglas Dean Johnson published a definitive takedown of the claims made by the late Harald Malmgren, a former U.S. trade representative who spent the last months of his very long life pretending to have been a top presidential advisor privy to twentieth-century UFO secrets and a vast conspiracy to hide the truth.

Detailed FBI files declassified in May 2025 in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests contain incontrovertible evidence that Malmgren fabricated some of his principal 2024-25 claims about the jobs and authorities he held, and the activities he engaged in, during 1962-64. For example: the FBI files prove that Malmgren never held a security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, as he repeatedly claimed in posts on X and in interviews– a key component of his 2024-25 UFO-adventure tales.

Johnson's thorough research into the paper trail of Malmgren's career confirms something I suspected after I was unable to find significant references to him in databases of government records: He was not a terribly important official, and he spent a long time inflating his resume, eventually to cosmic proportions.

Be sure to read the complete report for a breakdown of his many fabrications and exaggerations, which ultimately undermine his claims about flying saucers--and also show how UFO journalism on outlets like NewsNation don't check the facts before running with wild stories.