“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”
You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-wetting prostitutes.
While General VanHerck simultaneously up-played and down-played extra-terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-foot-tall balloon episode.
“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”
I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?
Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.
VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-like and rocket-like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-fighter-like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.
This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/floating/darting-about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.
Especially in time of war.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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8 replies on “Why the Balloon Story Ballooned”
Given the associations that people make with the term “U[nidentified] F[lying] O[bject]”, I take it that the use of the term in this context is to distract from the issue of slow-flying aircraft coming into American airspace after being dispatched by foreign states.
Because the US could monitor all the signals coming to and from the infamous Chinese balloon, and because the NSA has significant ability to monitor more general communications within, from, and to China, our federal state probably has a very good idea what the actual purpose was of that balloon and of the other craft that have come into or near American airspace.
If we knew that the US working on behalf of the American people, then we’d be able to infer from the silence that these craft were malignant, but that declaring such openly would reduce diplomatic room-to-manuoevre. As things stand, the US might conceal a benign truth for its own malignant reasons.
If the NSA (or any other agency) has significant ability to monitor this craft and signals it was sending or receiving, they likely knew it was on its way here before it ever crossed into Alaska. It suggests they knew what if was for and sat back and watched as important military bases were surveyed by this craft in a clear breach of American airspace. Of course the same data can be obtained from satellites, but there was no way to know this craft didn’t also have a deadly payload that could have posed a threat to Americans as it floated cross country. Are we really supposed to accept the fact that it was not a big deal?
Pat, you and I don’t even know that the package of the balloon was still operating when it was moving over American airspace. For example, this device may have been meant to survey the Arctic (with an eye towards mining if-and-as the ice recedes), gone off course, and shut down.
I’m not saying that the flight was no big deal; I’m not saying that it was a big deal. I’m saying that we cannot trust our own deep state enough to know what to make of the situation. They don’t work for us; they don’t even like us.
“The supposed “pee tape” never emerged. But the claim may be the public’s most enduring symbol of Steele’s work — particularly after it became a favorite of late-night comics.
Steele told ABC News he believes the alleged tape “probably does” exist — but that he “wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asked him to explain why the tape, if it does exist, has not been made public, Steele replied that “it hasn’t needed to be released.”
“Because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.,” Steele said.“
It explains Trump’s relationship with Putin. Putin has the tapes! Covert blackmail.
Someone could likewise present some very sordid stories about your sexual practices, Pam, and then someone here could insist that, until they were proven false, they might be true. (“That would explain a lot!” someone could declare.)
People who concocted the Steele Dossier have since admitted to the method of its creation, and Trump’s actual whereabouts at the time of some of the supposèd sordid events were elsewhere, as a matter of public record.
Sensor ship at work here!
Good one!
“Judge throws out Trump’s sprawling lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, ex-FBI officials over Russia probe
By Kara Scannell, Marshall Cohen and Chandelis Duster, CNN
Updated 10:55 AM EDT, Fri September 09, 2022
(CNN) A federal judge has dismissed former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, several ex-FBI officials and more than two dozen other people and entities that he claims conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by trying to vilify him with fabricated information tying him to Russia.
US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed the lawsuit Thursday, saying “most of Plaintiff’s claims are not only unsupported by any legal authority but plainly foreclosed by binding precedent.”
“What (Trump’s lawsuit) lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances,” Middlebrooks, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote.”