UFOs, Argentina's CIA, logos, and the "forces from the sky"

Let me invite you down this rabbit hole: I found out that the Argentine Air Force has a subdivision called CIA, that its logo is suspiciously similar to NASA's, and that both bear a striking resemblance to the ones from Star Trek. But it all starts with looking into the Space Force that the United States has. Along the way, we'll run into stolen designs, evangelical churches, and UFOs.

The alien is the other

It was 2019, and the world was a completely different place -- we didn't yet know what a global pandemic meant -- Donald J. Trump was halfway through his first presidency, packed with protectionism, Mexican children trapped in cages, and promises to declassify official intelligence files. On December 20, Trump announced at an official event the inauguration of the Space Force, a branch of the U.S. government dedicated exclusively to protecting the USA from any threat found in outer space and continuing the UN's guidelines on strengthening security to prevent armed conflicts in that domain.

Although a military division of the Department of Defense dedicated to these matters had existed since 1982, the main difference is that starting in 2019, it became an independent force: the sixth branch of the Armed Forces. With its own budget, specific weaponry, custom uniforms, cutting-edge technology, individual patches, and even this 41-second song that is absolutely priceless.

While the pitch sounds very Will Smith in Independence Day, the tasks assigned to this team have much more to do with providing intelligence on enemy nations' capabilities regarding satellites and space assets, and very little to do with fighting foul-smelling aliens. A bit disappointing, to be honest, for the "I Want to Believe" crowd who were in shock over the news.

Despite the fact that their guidelines emphasize tracking the capabilities of enemy targets and destroying them, no official task is related to investigating UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) or USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), or to exploring the famous interstellar object Oumuamua, discovered in 2017.

For those who didn't know, Justin is a Pisces, and Oumuamua is an unsolved mystery for scientists who study the galaxy, because it's a massive reddish object, cigar-shaped with a rocky texture, detected by a telescope in Hawaii as it traveled through our solar system. We know it's not a comet, nor an asteroid, and that it comes from another galaxy because its speed and gravitational behavior are completely different from objects in our orbit. It could be anything, including an alien mothership, as proposed by astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor.

One more mystery that confirms none of this has anything to do with what they were hinting at in the recruitment video released in March 2020 on Twitter (still called that at the time), where it seemed like within five years we'd be living on Mars and vacationing on the Moon.

Logos, cosmos, thieves?

Speaking of Twitter, how could we forget the good old days when Elon Musk was just a futuristic engineer who wanted to change the world by colonizing other planets (SpaceX), championing renewable energy (Tesla), bringing satellite internet to the most remote corners of the earth (Starlink), implanting chips in people's brains (Neuralink), and naming the child he had with artist Grimes like a password. Who would have guessed that years later he would buy Twitter -- coincidentally the place where he and the singer met -- and ruin it forever in every possible way, becoming one of the people responsible for the rise of the global far right and bulldozing everything in his path, including his own reputation while serving as a Trump official. We really didn't see that coming.

But before the tragedy -- Elon acquiring Twitter and turning it into X -- the platform was a great place to find certain information. The important thing is that when this video started going viral at the beginning of the pandemic, many netizens with time on their hands began noticing rather suspicious similarities between the Space Force logos and those of Star Trek. Sometimes I wonder what would become of us without conspiracy theorists and nerds, because of course someone took the time to make comparison charts between various government agencies and the Starfleet from the 1966 series.

In one of these charts, the first three logos belong to official U.S. space agencies (the middle one being the Space Force's from 1982) and the rest to the Star Trek franchise, with dates corresponding to their lore:

In the 2019 rebrand, the logo was modified to look even more like the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets. The resemblance even made the news at the BBC:

There are also excerpts from a sticker book published in 1999 with logos that resemble those of the UN.

Conspiracy theorists will say it's because everything related to outer space is a sham, that there was never a moon landing, and that the entire space race was a Hollywood production devised by Stanley Kubrick (hence the similarity). The boldest ufologists who talk about contactees will explain that Star Trek is actually based on real events from the Galactic Confederation. And the nerds will argue it's only logical that the designs look alike because they're inspired by decades of aerospace graphic design. The door is wide open to consider any of these possibilities; what is concrete, however, is that these are aesthetically deliberate designs of the highest quality.

Unfortunately, we can't say the same about Argentina's CIA. Not even the most tacky, default logo created in Canva would dare to exist at such pitiful resolution in cyberspace. Yes, you heard right: not only did they decide to name an official branch of the Argentine Air Force CIA (Centro de Investigaciones Aplicadas), but the logo looks like NASA's... except awful. Only God and the Hubble telescope know what it says around its circumference:

The "Invasion of God's Love"

The biggest surprise is how I stumbled into this rabbit hole in the first place, and it's because last July 5th, Javier Milei attended the inauguration of a mega evangelical church in Chaco province, called Portal del Cielo. Its pastor, Jorge Ledesma, claimed two days later in a radio interview that he was the protagonist of a financial miracle when he achieved the conversion of 100,000 pesos into 100,000 dollars after storing them in a safe deposit box.

This church has a presence in more than 40 countries through its program "Invasión del Amor de Dios" (Invasion of God's Love). And I, as a devoted reader of declassified files, immediately started searching for the Santa Fe Documents, because in this life everything is connected, and when I say everything, I really mean intelligence operations -- in this case from the CIA, which we've known about for over 50 years in Latin America.

The Santa Fe I, II, III, and IV documents are plans that Ronald Reagan (the 40th president) launched with a group of people in 1980 to prevent any expansion of the "left" that could weaken the United States and its foreign policy. One of the guidelines is to increase American influence and customs by encouraging the expansion of fundamentalist American evangelical churches with state subsidies, especially in Latin America. Essentially, a continuation of the work of Nelson Rockefeller (Nixon's vice president) and the Central Intelligence Agency, which began in 1969 over the "threat" that Liberation Theology posed to them in South America (the fear that the Catholic Church would empower the poor).

Apparently, the algorithm knows me very well, because while I was researching Argentine evangelical churches and their relationship with the CIA (the original one), it slipped me this other juicy piece of data about the Argentine Armed Forces.

Centro de Investigaciones Aplicadas, Argentina's CIA

Looking for more information about Argentina's CIA, I found that the current administration had also named CIA the Centro de Investigación de Agroindustria, created when they downsized government branches in 2024, and it has nothing to do with airplanes. Why not? After all, naming everything the same isn't confusing at all, right? That's one of the reasons why online there is no reliable data on who's in charge of each department or who is responsible for defending our aerospace sovereignty.

What we do know about the CIA of the Argentine Air Force is that it's located in the province of Córdoba and mainly works on Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), with several projects in development including unmanned aircraft and a radar.

According to the government's website, the CIA (yes, really) "conducts research, development, testing, and evaluations related to aeronautical, space, defense, and other science and technology activities, in order to fulfill the proposed objectives and serve as an advisor on scientific and technological matters associated with Research and Development areas. It also promotes partnerships with universities and scientific-technological organizations that contribute to staff development and/or ongoing projects."

All those jokes like "Don't worry, I have a cousin who's a graphic designer and he'll do it cheaper" go out the window when you become aware not only of the colonial mentality and the lack of professionalism in doing their job, but that they do it with appalling aesthetics and imitation skills, like the Sun of May looking like Marra. Basically, experts at copying things poorly.

According to what was announced in 2019, by 2025 we were supposed to be living in the new space age and humanity would have evolved, beginning to understand what lies beyond planet Earth. It seems like in the end we are dealing with the forces from the sky, but not the intergalactic kind.