The Chinese balloon/UFO saga has continued into another week, so I felt it would be appropriate to address the situation from my point of view in a longer format. I have some thoughts I’d like to share that requires a bit more nuance than Twitter provides.
I’m not going to go into the details of the timeline, as it’s been exhaustively communicated in mainstream media. This is a great thing, and the Reddit megathread on r/UFOs is more than enough to bring anyone up to speed on this in the context of what it means for UAP transparency.
First and foremost, I see this all as a positive development when it comes to transparency from the government on UFOs. The amount of attention given to the subject by major cable news channels and print media has been extraordinary and it may even be the longest the subject has stayed front and center in the public consciousness throughout multiple news cycles.
Also, with some exceptions, UAP seem to be taken seriously across the board. In our current era of access journalism and clickbait-driven headlines, this is no small feat when considering the ridicule this issue has received over the past 75 years.
Granted, there are sarcastic op-eds and snide comments from the usual suspects hellbent on keeping their hubris-fueled status as celebrity scientists. However, it appears their disingenuous tantrums over “UFO enthusiasts” and “conspiracy theorists” are now being drowned out by genuine public and Congressional interest in what these objects are and where they originate.
For many of us who have seen weird shit in the sky, that is the exact same question we’ve been asking for decades. In my experience, the individuals most engaged in the advocacy for UAP transparency are not saying it’s aliens, as so many debunkers accuse us of on a literal daily basis.
Though some vocal proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis insist they know the origin of these craft, that is not the conversation most serious people in the UFO community are trying to have in the public sphere. At least not yet.
The Chinese balloon shot down last week, after floating for days over US airspace, is hopefully a catalyst for something much bigger. Due to this incursion, the Pentagon “removed the filters” on our radar that normally suppress any information from slower-moving objects to reduce clutter.
Unsurprisingly it turned out these “filters” were inhibiting the tracking of numerous UAP in America’s skies. The result of this discovery culminated in three objects, all still unidentified to this day, getting shot down over Alaska and Canada in quick succession.
The ramifications of these events have started to reveal themselves in the days since. Congress — who recently required the Pentagon to set up its own comprehensive UAP research department named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — has not let up in their demands for greater transparency on these shootdowns, even after a classified all-Senate briefing this week.
There are a few aspects of how this played out on Capitol Hill that I believe deserve a more detailed exploration.
The first thing I noticed was the surprising lack of partisan attacks.
Beyond calling for greater transparency, the criticism of the administration has been rather muted by the Republican party in comparison to almost any other issue. Sure, some of these members on the other side of the aisle than the President are occasionally lobbing bombs on Fox News, but the general tone of political discourse has seemed much more nuanced.
This kind of atmosphere is reminiscent of the bipartisan cooperation we saw when it came to the passage of the UAP office in the 2023 NDAA as well as the first public Congressional hearings on UFOs in 50 years back in May 2022. I’m not so sure that’s a coincidence.
For example, Senator John Kennedy was given multiple chances by reporters to go after the Biden administration on national security after the Senate briefing on the shootdowns. They asked leading questions about whether the delay was “intentional fear-mongering” and “a wagging of the dog to improve approval ratings.”
Kennedy refused to take the bait, replying forcefully that he didn’t “care to speculate on that.” His acknowledgment that UFOs had been an issue during the previous Trump administration was another surprising admission, at least to me.
Beyond the lack of political infighting, Kennedy made clear that this is an important subject to be transparent about.
I just know we need some more transparency. I understand the need for national security secrets, but now that this cow is out of the barn the President and the Director of National Intelligence need to address it.
They need to explain to the American people if they know — and I’m not sure they know, if they know then they’re not telling us — what these things are, who put them up there, and do they pose a threat to the American people. And if the answer is no, how do they know that?
Luis Elizondo, who ran the Pentagon’s previous UFO program, has stated for years that the DoD has yet to definitively understand the origin of these craft. Regardless, the idea that the government doesn’t actually know what these objects are has been dismissed by many in the UFO community. The assumption is that since the government has more data, it must have all the answers. Kennedy’s comments here appear to support Elizondo’s claim, at least in the context of this Senate briefing.
Senator Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter after the briefing if the Biden administration was hiding information from Congress on the shootdowns of these objects. In another display of unusual non-partisanship, Rubio refused to play along, saying “hiding is a strong word.” From what I’ve seen over the past few years, this press conference would’ve most likely been about where to place blame if this was any other issue.
Rubio’s call for transparency was even more direct.
95% of what was said in that room today could be made public without compromising the national security of the country. I reiterate that we know what the spy balloon was, so put that one aside. The other three instances, as they are described both publicly and in there, are not new. I mean, we’ve heard the exact same description in hundreds of cases — dozens this year alone…That’s why an agency [AARO] was created, an interagency task force was created, to study all of this from a scientific perspective.
Throughout all of this confusion and demands by Congress for more information, most questions are still unanswered as of this writing. The President has yet to give an address, but it is being reported that Biden is planning to do so. NSC Press Secretary John Kirby has announced that the White House will be setting up a new interagency task force to look into this, and Biden will most likely communicate the details of that office during his speech.
However, something was brought to light yesterday by Australian journalist Ross Coulthart that could make the details of this interagency UAP task force very intriguing. Ross’s sources have told him a schism is occurring within the Department of Defense.
It’s rather common knowledge, at least within the UFO community, that the Air Force has always been tight-lipped and even hostile to the UFO issue for decades. Pilots have been reprimanded for reporting encounters and the initial UAP Task Force was completely stonewalled by the department when compiling their original 2021 preliminary report.
The Navy, however, has been relatively more forthcoming. The three official DoD-confirmed videos in the public sphere were from Navy aircraft, and range fouler reports regarding UFOs — though heavily redacted — are available in the Navy FOIA reading room. Most pilots who have come forward with their stories in recent years were also from this service.
Ross reports on a serious conflict between these two branches of the military. There are allegedly issues regarding the concealing of certain information, presumably about the UFO phenomenon, from the White House by the Air Force. And apparently, high-ranking Navy officials know this.
Things are starting to crack. There’s been unanimity presented publicly from the Pentagon that both the US Air Force and the US Navy are in lockstep on this issue.
But what if you are a senior US Navy commander and you become aware of things that the US Air Force is concealing criminally, illegally?
I’ll say that again. What if you become aware, as a senior commander in the US Navy, of crimes that are being committed?
Now I personally think that anybody responsible for such crimes should be publicly excoriated, named, and shamed. But maybe the political arm of your government might take a little more cautious view.
Maybe they might announce an interagency task force to review what is known about this issue. A political body, because they no longer trust the Pentagon to do the research and investigations that they think are necessary.
Looking back on the events of the past two weeks, this revelation from Ross could prove helpful in answering a few questions.
- If the Air Force was withholding information, what did it pertain to?
- Did they already know these objects lay outside the range of these radar “filters?”
- Did the leaders who directed these shootdowns lack that information, and did they stop shooting things out of the sky when they received it?
- Is this withholding of information the reason Congress, and therefore the public, have so little to go on?
- Is the lack of partisan attacks due to the recent understanding that this is a systemic problem inside the Air Force, and not the result of the Biden administration’s incompetence?
Clearly, there is still a lot to be learned. Viewing how this plays out within the context of Ross’s reporting could prove very helpful in the coming days and weeks.
From the outside, it’s already clear there is a battle within the Pentagon over the UFO issue. The question now is how deep it goes.
I’ll leave you all with this from Senator Blumenthal. I tend to agree.
