Our long national balloon nightmare finally came to a close, where a Chinese spy balloon the size of 33 buses (or 2 Macy's day parade balloons, 2 Rockefeller Center Christmas trees, 12.5 stacked giraffes, or 400 or so Italian beef sandwiches for Chicagoans), traversed the country and was eventually shot down a few miles off the coast of South Carolina. But it wasn't long before more Americans started looking up and seeing more things floating in the sky.
Rendering of a UFO over a desert mountain. Via Envato.
Unexplainable things. Actual unidentified flying objects.
According to the New York Times, on February 10th, less than a week after the spy balloon was shot down, a US fighter jet brought down a UFO the size of a small car over Alaska. According to the DOD, the object was not a balloon and was allegedly headed towards the North Pole. The next day, an American fighter jet shot down another UFO, this time over the Yukon territory in Canada. The object was cylindrical in shape and smaller than the Chinese spy balloon. The day after that, a third unidentified object, this time allegedly octagonal in shape with strings hanging off of it, was shot down over Lake Huron, near Michigan.
According to John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, these objects were uncrewed, had limited capabilities, and posed no threat to people on the ground, but also lacked any obvious propulsion systems.
Is it aliens? While ancient alien experts will definitely say YES, the White House said no. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing on Monday that "There is no – again, no — indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns."
That said, other government officials first wouldn’t rule anything out. NORAD Commanding Officer General Glen VanHerck told reporters in a briefing on Sunday that he hadn't "ruled out anything. At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threats unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it." He added "we call these objects for a reason."
So far, no other concrete explanations have been given by officials, but that has not ruled out complete and total wild speculation from pretty much anyone who's ever seen 10 seconds of shaky, grainy video of something unexplainable or explainable in the sky, to a chorus of grifters and fascists trying to make both a buck and get another 15 seconds of attention.
More than a few have either hinted or outright said that the UFO stories are a "distraction" from one thing or another, including the horrific train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio, to the alleged release of a client list of Jeffery Epstein, to of course, Hunter Biden's laptop. Because despite the fact that the world is a dumpster fire of multiple cataclysms, apparently more than one news story can't unfold at a time.
In a Thursday press conference, President Joe Biden reiterated that the UFOs were both most likely not of extraterrestrial origin, yet still remain unexplained. He also added that they weren’t related to the Chinese spy balloon and said whatever these objects were, they were probably tied to something much more down to Earth.
"We don't yet know exactly what these three objects were," Biden said, according to CBS News. "But nothing right now suggests they were related to China's spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from...any other country. The intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were mostly balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research."
President Joe Biden speaks at an event in Chicago during his campaign in 2019. Photo by Aaron Cynic.
Biden also said that the reason more of these objects are being spotted is because the US military has allegedly increased the sensitivity of radars.
"We don't have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky," he said. "We're now just seeing more of them partially because [of] the steps we've taken to increase our radars, to narrow our radars. And we have to keep adapting our approach to dealing with these challenges."
A January report released by US Office of the Director of National Intelligence at least corroborates part of that explanation, in that it found the number of UFO sightings increased between March 2021 and August 2022. According to CNN, some 247 new sightings were reported, nearly double the amount of sightings reported between 2004 to 2021. Of about 500 “credible” sightings over the past couple decades, there were 171 that offered no explanation. The report said the rest were either balloons or other unmanned aircraft such as drones, or technical glitches or malfunctions.
It’s difficult to speculate if we’ll find out anytime soon, or ever, what exactly the recent objects shot down actually are. At present, debris recovery efforts have been suspended due to poor weather conditions. There are a few other things we can be more confident of, however. The recent spate of down unidentifiable craft aren’t a “psyop,” there are plenty of things in the sky that have yet to be explained, we may never get the full or true story from government officials, and the universe is infinite, which means there’s more than likely, life out there. Whether or not it’s shown up on Earth is still unexplained.
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