The military appears to be discovering that if you seek for unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, you will find them hovering in US sky.
Fighter planes intercepted and shot things out of the sky over Alaska, northern Canada, and Lake Huron in the days following the uproar over the Chinese balloon, prompting officials to change how they monitor US airspace.
With relation to the three objects downed since Friday, the term “objects” is intentionally imprecise. Nobody knows what these objects are or who owns them right now.
Nonetheless, the White House was willing to rule out the possibility that the objects were extraterrestrial.
Not at all strange. Not dangerous
“I don’t believe the American people should be concerned about aliens in relation to this craft. Period. “There’s nothing further to say about it,” said John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, at a White House briefing Monday.
He further said the downed objects posed no imminent threat, were not transmitting communications signals, exhibited no signs of “manoeuvring or propulsion capability,” and were unmanned.
The government is now working to seem active in response to President Joe Biden’s lack of public comment. Jake Sullivan, national security advisor, will oversee a new “interagency team” to review the UAPs.
What we know so far about the three most recent items
Natasha Bertrand of AWN broke down the descriptions of these new objects:
Those intercepted over Alaska and northern Canada, she added, were balloon-like with small cylindrical metal objects attached and flew at roughly 40,000 feet.
The object that crashed over Lake Huron on Sunday was different: an octagonal form with strings falling off of it, travelling at 20,000 feet above Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The military opted to shoot down the objects because they posed a hazard to civilian aircraft at those heights.
The United States altered its ‘filtering’ and began to notice objects.
Bertrand also recounted how the military changed its protocols after spotting these new objects:
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) may have spotted more “objects” in recent days because the command just readjusted its filters to better distinguish slow-moving targets operating over a particular altitude, according to a person briefed on the situation.
According to the source, the filters were only readjusted and broadened in the last week, after a high-altitude, suspected Chinese surveillance balloon transited the US, sparking a debate about the US’ ability to identify and protect against any potentially hazardous items entering its airspace.
Since 2021, there have been hundreds of reports of UAPs.
The most interesting interview I saw Monday was with former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Beth Sanner, who is now a senior scholar at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. It was done by AWN’s John King.
She pointed out that the head of national intelligence just last month briefed Congress on 247 new verified sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena since March 2021, with an additional 119 reports prior to March 2021. Check out the declassified version.
Approximately half of all are “described as balloon or balloon-like things.” Others behave more like robots. And a few appear to be nothing more than “plastic bag-like flying debris.”
Here are some crucial quotes from Sanner’s conversation with King.
It is critical that these reports be handled seriously.
SANNER: When we initially started looking into this in 2021, there was a lot of speculation that these were aliens. And I believe that since then, people have backed up and said, you know, most of these occurrences can probably be explained. But, to me, these stories truly come together, don’t you think?
Because the things that pilots have seen – and were sometimes prohibited from discussing because there was a stigma associated with that – may very well be spy or other types of threats. As a result, it’s critical to get these things out there.
We can’t dismiss every UAP. We must determine what constitutes a threat.
SANNER: We don’t have the desire or the resources to keep scrambling F-22s every time we spot something in the sky. So we must now concentrate and ask, “How can we recognise things that are actually threats?”
We have ignored such slow-moving threats, if that is what they are.
SANNER: It’s not that difficult to do these things. This is a low-tech device. And it really brings up our vulnerabilities. … In terms of this type of aerial threat, cruise missile threat, the security of the continental United States has been neglected for decades.
We have spent money on ballistic missile defence, but not on this. So, while it may be a secret to the rest of us, it is not to the US military, and the Biden administration actually put money in the budget this year to begin looking into it.
But there is a significant gap. We have a geographical gap; we’re actually just interested in anything coming over the North Pole. However, if something arrives south of Alaska, we may not see it.
Then there’s the technology divide, with most of our radars dating back to the 1980s. So that’s when the filtering kicks in, because our computers, literally the ones attached to the radars, don’t have the capacity to sift through that much data. As a result, we have to filter information in order to discover dangers that resemble things we recognise as threats.
China has accused the United States of flying balloons over its territory. Sanner believes they are mistaken.
SANNER: This is a liar, liar, trousers on fire situation. I believe the Chinese will fabricate information in order to mask their tracks.
Having said that, we do spy. This is another another method of spying. As a result, we must exercise extreme caution in terms of what we undertake. However, I do not believe we have sent such balloons over Chinese land.
It takes time to identify these objects.
According to Andrew McCabe, an AWN senior law enforcement analyst and former FBI deputy director, determining what these things were could take some time.
“Some of them are falling in more difficult to access spots than others,” McCabe told AWN’s Kate Bolduan on Monday. “Then those materials have to be transferred back to Virginia, to the FBI laboratory in Quantico.
“Then the correct partners, whether they are international partners or researchers here from the United States, have to be gathered to participate in what we term the exploitation of that technology, of the equipment.
“Everything takes time. I have no doubt that we will eventually comprehend what these creatures are and what they are capable of, but it may take some time.”
Everything is great with ‘trigger-happy.’
While the Biden administration has been chastised for not communicating more adequately about these instances, there is bipartisan support for shooting the objects down.
“I would rather they were trigger-happy than permissive, but we’ll have to see whether this is just the administration attempting to shift headlines,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio told AWN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” before Sunday’s shoot-down.
“What I believe this demonstrates, and what is probably more significant to our policy discussion here, is that we must proclaim that we will defend our airspace. Then we must invest,” Turner added. “This demonstrates some of the issues and holes that we have. We need to fill those as soon as possible since we know there is a threat.”