Unidentified flying objects

Drone alerts from London to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Copenhagen and Oslo. Public opinion says these are Russian cyberattacks. However, a look back at Western intelligence agencies’ fake news stories of the past 80 years raises doubts.

“The Russians are really becoming omnipresent,” say Mr. and Mrs. Swiss, not noticing that a large drone is flying over their heads. A cartoon in the Zurich newspaper “Tages-Anzeiger” of 14 September shows a married couple in front of the TV screen. The latest news from Denmark is being shown, where Russian drones are said to have disrupted airport operations.
  Finally, a cartoon that pokes fun at the rampant drone scare, one might think at first glance. But the opposite is the case: This is not a satire; it is all meant seriously. Newspaper readers are being told what is in store for them: The Russians have their drones everywhere, but Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann have still not noticed. They only see the Russians in Copenhagen, but not the Russians in Heidiland, as the nickname for Switzerland has it.
  If you continue to leaf through the newspaper, you will learn how dire the situation (allegedly) is. “Satellite images expose Putin’s rearmament,” reads the Tages-Anzeiger headline, and we are informed: “Military experts consider it virtually certain that the Russians will attack Europe and NATO in the near future. According to Western intelligence agencies, Russia will be ready for a major war by 2029.”
  War against Russia is therefore considered inevitable. This is the slogan that has been repeated incessantly for months now,¹ to justify a gigantic rearmament, the scope of which is unprecedented in European history.
  What should make the military layman and the sober newspaper reader sceptical is the statement by the Danish defence minister, “We don’t know who is behind the flights.”² There is no evidence that Russia had anything to do with them. But it is clear, he says, that certain “countries or actors” have an interest in undermining Denmark’s support for Ukraine. Russia denies any responsibility for the unidentified flying objects.

There are justifiable doubts

More substantial doubts about the drone story arise when one considers that the ominous flying objects disappeared without being identified, captured, or shot down. It is hard to believe that, for example, the Danish police and a Danish Air Force equipped to NATO standards would not be able to bring these things down from the sky before they disappeared over the sea.
  You will remember Yuri Andropov, general secretary of the USSR from 1982 until his death two years later, who once laughingly told Finnish President Mauno Koivisto: “Bomb them. It’s fine with us.”³ He was referring to the “Soviet submarines” spotted off the Swedish coast in 1984. Andropov knew they were not Russian submarines, but a false flag operation by Western intelligence agencies. These mysterious boats were never captured. The “Soviet threat” proved to be a perfect way to sabotage Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s policy of détente.
  In 2023, a multitude of balloons were suddenly spotted in the sky of the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world, which the Biden administration immediately sought to identify as Chinese spy balloons. Biden announced that China was sending these balloons to spy on military facilities in the West. Beijing stated that these were weather balloons used for meteorological research. Some of them had been blown off course by wind conditions.
  In November 2024, mysterious drones were spotted on the US East Coast and eventually throughout the country. The Department of Defence was alarmed. Authorities had to investigate more than 3,000 reports, but no useful results emerged.
  So now drones are flying over Poland, Denmark, and Norway. Airports have to be temporarily closed. NATO is in crisis mode discussing “Putin’s airspace provocations,” and the US ambassador to the UN is reciting the well-known creed: “We will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
  Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski threatened before the UN Security Council he would have Russian aircraft shot down.⁴ In the port of Hamburg, military exercises are already rehearsing the arrival of NATO troops for deployment to the Eastern Front, and the German medical profession is being prepared for “patient care in an emergency.”⁵ In Switzerland, the Defence Department is sounding the alarm: Even the best Leopard 2 battle tank is useless against drones. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” as Shakespeare puts it.

Intelligence fakes
from 1945 to the present

It is undoubtedly possible that Moscow has military provocations in mind and is deliberately violating territorial sovereignty in the air. But the greed – one could almost call it lasciviousness – with which every new “intelligence finding” about Russian threats is being absorbed by the major Western media should sound a note of caution.
  Do the journalists who are writing their fingers to the bone about the Russian threat have no historical education, no knowledge of history? They were trained for their profession – have they not learned that it is their job to critically evaluate the intelligence services’ and NATO strategy experts’ “findings”? Or does Upton Sinclair’s nasty sentence apply: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it?” In his 2013 study, “Opinion Power,” communications researcher Uwe Krüger demonstrated that alpha journalists belonging to almost all major German media outlets are integrated into NATO-friendly networks.
  After the failed US attack on Cuba in 1961, the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, former US President Harry Truman wrote that the Central Intelligence Agency had completely gotten out of control: “When I founded the CIA [in 1947], I never imagined that in peacetime, it could be associated with dark assassination plots. It has become an operational arm of the government and occasionally even engages in politics. I would like to see its operational duties terminated.” This comment appeared in The Washington Post on 22 December 1963 under the headline, “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” Kennedy had been assassinated a month earlier to the day.
  Truman could never have imagined how many subsequent wars and military coups would be justified by “information gathered by Western intelligence agencies” and how the public would be misled.
  The “findings” that the United States would have to fend off communism or some other enemy somewhere in the world and bring freedom and democracy to an oppressed people were always disseminated with extreme effectiveness. At that, freedom and democracy were often saved by being abolished: in 1947 in Greece, 1948 in Venezuela, 1950 in Korea, 1953 in Iran, 1954 in Guatemala, 1955 in Vietnam, 1961 in Cuba, 1965 in Indonesia, 1973 in Chile, 1979 in Nicaragua, 1980 in El Salvador, 1979 in Afghanistan, 1999 in Yugoslavia, 2001 once again in Afghanistan, 2003 in Iraq, 2011 in Libya and subsequently in Syria, to note just a few of the military and intelligence interventions of the West.
  The military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower famously warned of  as he left office in January 1961, developed a PR machine during the Cold War, involving tens of thousands of diligent strategy experts, conflict researchers, human rights activists, and journalists to create enemy images. This approach has not changed to this day. In their classic book, Public Relations for War and Death, Jörg Becker and Mira Beham demonstrate how the manipulation of public opinion worked in the Balkan Wars.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
‘The Kremlin uses sabotage
as a strategic tool against Europe’

If we are to believe the Zürich “Tages-Anzeiger” and the Western intelligence agencies, to which the above newspaper refers, Russian tanks will soon be stationed in front of NATO headquarters: “Putin kommt der Nato-Zerstörung immer näher” (“Putin is getting ever closer to destroying NATO”), the paper headlined on 22 September.
  There are words that spread like an epidemic. The new wording is “testing.” Apparently, the Russians want to test our defence capabilities. Whatever troubles occur, they can have no cause other than the one we already know: The Russians are testing us again. If a Russian plane flies over a Polish oil platform in the Baltic Sea, the Russians have once again “invaded airspace.” And if the plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, is delayed due to a technical problem, this is undoubtedly a Russian cyberattack. The media preferred not to broadcast the fact that this turned out to be nonsense.
  Also, the problems in rail traffic in Germany or France and the software crashes at European airports can only be caused by the Russians. “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, the influential Swiss daily, knows: “The Kremlin is using sabotage as a strategic tool.”⁶ For our leading media, the apocalypse seems to be inevitable. One is almost tempted to check whether the editorial offices have already begun digging their trenches on Zürich’s Werdstrasse or Falkenstrasse. Soon, we would no longer be surprised if the evening traffic jam on Zürich’s western bypass were the product of Russian cyber warfare and if the first Russian submarine appeared in Lake Constance.

Operation Mockingbird

Of course, one could argue that the war in Ukraine is real and not an invention of Western intelligence services. Russia has indeed invaded Ukraine and thereby violated international law. But that is only half the truth, and a half-truth that hides its rotten side is often a sophisticated form of lying.
  Because whether we like it or not, the advance of a hostile military alliance into Sevastopol, the most important Russian naval base on the Black Sea, which has moreover been Russia’s gateway to the world for centuries, was perceived as a threat in Moscow. And if the NATO brass and Washington had not thrown the Russian draft agreements for defusing the conflict in the trash in December 2021, this war would probably never have happened. But the major Western media outlets are making great efforts to prevent this reality from entering our perceptual framing.
  In the mid-1970s, it became known that the CIA was collaborating with major news outlets to manipulate public opinion.⁷ This was “Operation Mockingbird.” The CIA denied the operation and also denied any media interference. However, it is proven that media outlets – including The “New York Times,” ABC, NBC, CBS (the three major American broadcast networks), Newsweek, The Miami Herald, and many other media – were manipulated. The CIA supplied their journalists with texts, which the latter subsequently published or broadcast. Since it is common practice for media to absorb this kind of information, even unsuspecting journalists disseminated content originally written by the CIA.
  There are undoubtedly many journalists of integrity trying to find the truth. But, as political scientist Ulrich Teusch once wrote, these attempts are reminiscent of the race between the hare and the tortoise.
  The tortoise is always already there, saying: Ladies and gentlemen, because this happened, we will do that. And the investigative hare runs itself ragged trying to determine whether “this” actually happened and, consequently, whether “that” is justified. But no matter how much haste it makes, it always arrives too late. In lucky cases, the delay lasts only days, and then the truth comes to light. But usually it takes years, or we never learn the truth.
  When the poison gas sarin was used in a Damascus suburb in 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the US had reliable information that Syrian President Assad was responsible. “He said it on more than 30 occasions. We counted,” Ray McGovern, the highly decorated former CIA analyst told me a few years later. He added: “In the Syrian war, there were as many lies in Washington as there were in the Iraq war.” •

¹ https://globalbridge.ch/kriegsvorbereitung-als-neuer-way-of-life/
² https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/drohnen-ueber-daenemarks-flughaefen-wer-steckt-dahinter-735971117437
³ https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/europa/wer-hatte-angst-vor-olof-palme/
⁴ https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/polen-warnt-russland-sikorski-droht-mit-abschuss-931051048438
⁵ https://www.infosperber.ch/gesundheit/wie-sich-militaer-und-medizin-in-deutschland-verflechten/
⁶ https://www.nzz.ch/pro/brandanschlaege-und-explosionen-wie-der-kreml-mit-wegwerf-agenten-sabotageakte-veruebt-und-damit-europa-herausfordert-ld.1899289
⁷ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

First published in GlobalBridge on 29 September 2025.

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Helmut Scheben was a wire service reporter and news media correspondent in Mexico and Central America from 1980 to 1985. In 1986 he became editor of the weekly newspaper WoZ in Zürich; from 1993 to 2012 he was an editor and reporter for Swiss television, SRF, and for 16 of those years he was with Tagesschau.