Joel Schectman is an American investigative reporter who covers espionage, covert action and national security. In the UAP field he is best known as co-author, with Aruna Viswanatha, of the 2025 Wall Street Journal stories reporting that the U.S. military had fabricated evidence of alien technology and let rumors spread to protect real secret-weapons programs. He studied film at Emerson College and earned a master's degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Schectman first worked at the Journal covering white-collar criminal investigations and corporate technology, then spent more than eight years at Reuters as an investigative reporter. His 2017 story on technology companies allowing Russia to examine software sold to the Pentagon won Reuters' Scoop of the Year award and led to a federal law curbing the practice. With Christopher Bing he wrote the 2019 Project Raven investigation into a secret United Arab Emirates hacking team staffed by former U.S. intelligence operatives, and with Bozorgmehr Sharafedin he reported on the CIA's failure to protect its agents in Iran. He is a five-time winner of National Press Club awards for national-security stories, and he later returned to the Journal in Washington.

The first UFO story, "The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology," appeared on June 7, 2025. Drawing on an investigation by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office under Sean Kirkpatrick, it reported that some Air Force personnel had for decades been briefed into a fictitious alien-technology program called "Yankee Blue," and that an Air Force colonel in the 1980s gave fake flying-saucer photographs to a bar owner near Area 51. A June 22 follow-up examined how the Army asked a defense laboratory whether a piece of material was scrap metal or alien debris. In February 2026 Schectman followed with "What Trump's UFO Deep Dive Might Reveal to Americans." The National Press Club gave him and Viswanatha its 2026 Michael A. Dornheim Award for aerospace, defense and aviation reporting, calling the work a yearlong investigation of seven decades of UFO reports.

The stories also drew sustained objections. On June 26, 2025, former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon sent the Journal a formal correction request challenging its treatment of statements by Eric Davis, its account of the 1967 Malmstrom incident and its omission of statements by the Pentagon UAP office's then-director. Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, whose 2020 New York Times story the Journal cited on Davis, said in a statement relayed by researcher Joe Murgia that the paper had mischaracterized their reporting and that they had told Schectman a correction was warranted; they added that Davis disputes Schectman's account. In September 2026 the Disclosure Foundation published Mellon's letter, urged the Journal to correct the errors it identified and asked the press club to rescind the award.

By late September 2026 the Journal's website listed Schectman as a former national security reporter, and he has since joined ProPublica as a reporter. His UFO series remains the most prominent mainstream argument that parts of modern UFO lore grew out of U.S. military deception, and the dispute over its sourcing runs through the 2025 and 2026 debate over the government's historical UAP record.