President John F. Kennedy took many actions which upset his war-hungry generals and other top business and mafia leaders. One of the least-known of these was his putting a stop to plans of the Pentagon's top generals to provoke war with Cuba. The plans were detailed in documents under the title of Operation Northwoods. A declassified document could help clear up some urban legends at one of Mexico's most bizarre tourist traps. The so-called Mapimí Silent Zone is a small stretch of desert in Durango, Mexico, where, according to local legend, radio waves cannot be transmitted. Often compared to the Bermuda Triangle, Mapimí is frequented by tourists looking for a paranormal adventure. In the spring of 1962, a few months after the launch of Operation Mongoose with General Edward Lansdale at its head, an incredible proposal was put forth by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Operations Northwoods called for faked and actual terrorist actions against the U.S. to be conducted by the U.S., but done in such a way that they could be blamed on Cuba. This would provide a pretext for launching a full-scale military invasion of the island nation, and the removal of Fidel Castro. Numerous Congressional hearings followed the video leak, and in June 2021 The Pentagon released an unclassified report detailing more than 140 encounters between military personnel and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), another name for UFOs. While only one of the incidents could be explained with high confidence, the report in no way suggested that aliens have anything to do with UAP; most UAP incidents can likely be explained as foreign surveillance drones or airborne clutter, such as weather balloons, Pentagon officials said in Nov. 2022.

Other ideas included simulating a shootdown of a US civilian airliner in a convincing way, and contriving "Cuban" subversion of neighboring countries.While Area 51 was not a top-secret base designed to study extraterrestrials, the U.S. Air Force did study the existence of UFOs. Project Grudge was a short-lived program launched in 1949 to study unidentified flying objects. The mission followed an earlier program, known as Project Sign, which published a report in early 1949 stating that while some UFOs seemed to be actual aircraft, there was not enough data to determine their origins. [ Top 10 States for UFO Sightings] Declassified designs show the U.S. Air Force's attempts to build a flying saucer capable of both hovering and going supersonic. (Image credit: National Archives) Before the civilian space organization NASA put the first astronaut on the moon in 1969, at least two U.S. military organizations drew up plans for establishing strategic lunar military outposts. In 1959, the U.S. Army drew up a proposal for a "manned military" base on the moon. That proposal, which was submitted by the Army's chief of research and development, was dubbed Project Horizon and would "develop and protect potential United States interest on the moon," according to declassified documents.

Secret armies also existed in the United States during the Cold War. In 2014, declassified documents from the U.S. Air Force and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed a plan dreamed up in 1950 for a "covert intelligence and evasion and escape operation in Alaska."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/19/military-had-plan-to-blame-cuba-if-glenns-space-mission-failed/24eb451e-bdb2-441a-9b83-c4e8aecd6aa1/ We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.”