In the latest calculations, the Sidewinder missile blew up both a capricious Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” hovering over the United States and Canada. These alleged spies have brought an unexpected spotlight to an important national security issue. Balloons and drones are gathering intelligence on foreign powers.
But they also provide a likely explanation for some of the highly publicized sightings of unidentified flying objects by military pilots over the past decade. At least, a more plausible explanation than extraterrestrial life. And the Pentagon’s past practice of punting such observations to outlandish and inadequate investigative teams from obscure task forces was an institutional failure.
While the first balloon burst, a 200-foot-tall white sphere, was the opposite of stealth or unidentified, recent airborne objects shot down over Lake Huron, Alaska, Canada, and unidentified Dropped headlong into an area of anomalous phenomena (UAP). The latest name for the UFO decided by the Pentagon last year.
Birds, balloons, weather balloons, and garbage that we might call UAPs fill the skies, along with drones, consumers, and more. According to the White House, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in the United States and Canada is known to have dimmed its radar to prevent such airborne debris from cluttering the screen. High-speed aircraft and missiles were priority targets. Small and slow objects like balloons were filtered out and ignored.
So I didn’t know about balloons that likely accounted for the “GoFast” UFO sightings made by US Navy pilots in 2015. This makes it look like it was encountered at high speed over the ocean, but is actually drawn to make a much slower object appear to be at high speed. A parallax effect where high speeds are only associated with naval planes, like trees “flying” past train windows.Balloons May Explain Some Aspects of His 2004 USS Nimitz “tic tac” incident.
Now radars are looking for such objects. So the pilot sees her UAP and shoots it down. Descriptions of UAPs encountered by some Navy pilots are also consistent with aspects of the newly revealed Chinese balloon invasion during the Trump administration. Politico Intelligence analysts have assessed several small objects detected off Virginia to be Chinese radar jammers. This may be correlated with multiple reports of irregular radar his returns by pilots training in the area. One of his visual sightings, which the pilot describes as a “cube within a sphere,” looks a lot like his inflatable radar decoy.
After observing the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force and closely analyzing some of the cases they struggled with, I have good reason to doubt their ability to crack this kind of UAP case. According to the popular UFO podcast series, a Congressional briefing slide reportedly prepared by task force chief John Stratton shows “three UAPs” hovering over Navy ships. claimed. These UAPs are the stars and I demonstrated them last year. Those strange triangles are camera artifacts, a conclusion later confirmed in congressional testimony. My analysis of other Task Force cases involving obscure gun camera footage is also supported by DoD sources cited by the Department of Defense. new york times.
Past mistakes matter not only because the Task Force’s first attempt at identification failed, but also because of its small office size, shady background in paranormal investigations (really), and case-solving. He was notorious for his poor record of not only failing to but sometimes solving cases. Completely wrong. This makes us wonder how many other foreign surveillance incidents have been covered up as UAPs.
How many other Chinese (or Russian, etc.) drones have military and intelligence officials sidelined as UFOs rather than threats on the ground? UAP Task June 2021 The first public report produced by the Force listed 144 cases, of which only one could be resolved with a high degree of confidence that it was a large deflating balloon (with no nationality specified). was identified as The remaining 143 are believed to include a handful later identified as violating Chinese airspace.
The second report was released in January after the Department of Defense reorganized its task force last year and placed new personnel in a new organization called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Agency. The report added 366 new cases to 143, but the seemingly explanatory number jumped from 1 to 195, and oddly most of them were thought to be balloons. This was likely achieved by a new method of reviewing archived raw radar footage, from which slow-moving balloons (and some drones) had previously been ruled out as ‘clutter’.
While most of it is likely mundane airspace clutter such as Mylar party balloons and consumer drones, some of them may represent Chinese intelligence gathering platforms. . It is unlikely that past cases can be resolved as-is, but if a new balloon is detected, it may be determined by intercepting it, shooting it down, and examining the wreckage.
some UFO enthusiasts Initially, it jumped on a large Chinese balloon as an example of how easily a foreign spy attempt can be detected. It concluded that other reports of more obscure UFOs were evidence that they were not conventional human technology.
However, subsequent developments point to the opposite conclusion. The big balloon was big and obvious. Small balloons and other aerial platforms have been hidden under the radar for years, both literally and figuratively. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York described the latest downed object as part of a global “balloon crew.”
The Pentagon’s New Solutions Bureau is doing better. But its establishment was still loosely rooted in the history of those who wanted UFOs to be alien visitors. Their declaration caused a misdirected public uproar, despite decades of lack of clear supporting evidence. The reality of China’s constant attempts to infiltrate and monitor its airspace should lead the Pentagon to focus on the very real task at hand.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily Scientific American.
