The publicly available details on these objects don’t add up to a coherent story — and in the absence of such a story, speculation will only keep growing.
The publicly available details on these objects don’t add up to a coherent story — and in the absence of such a story, speculation will only keep growing.
B y the end of World War II, everyone had a name for the aluminum-foil-like substance that you could dump into the air as a means of preventing enemy radar from tracking your bombers and fighters. We Yanks called it “chaff.” The Brits called it “window.” The Germans called it “dupper.” The Japanese called it “giman-shi,” which roughly translates as “deceiving paper.” Some families even gathered it from the ground and used it as tinsel for their Christmas trees.
In war, advanced technology and equipment can often be neutralized by the cheapest, cleverest hacks, tactics and countermeasures more inventive than they are complicated. The Italian Navy got one over on the mighty British fleet with its “frogmen.” On December 19, 1941, these seamen — wearing oxygen rebreathers, riding on ungainly “slow-running torpedoes,” carrying limpet mines, and sporting waterproof watches with radium dials — sunk or stalled out most of the British fleet stationed in Alexandria, including the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant battleships, and the HMS Jervis destroyer. Because some of those British ships were only disabled and not completely destroyed, the success of the frogmen mission remained something of a secret for years afterward.
I thought of the frogmen this weekend as my phone kept updating me on the strange objects we’ve lately begun shooting down in our airspace. Had there really been three more UFOs downed since we obliterated that Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4? Apparently so: One was shot down over the Yukon, another over Alaska, and the last one over Lake Huron.
The publicly available details on these flying objects and their downing don’t add up to a coherent story. Some of the news stories make the objects seem extremely low-tech and low-grade — but according to CNN, some pilots had reported that the object shot down over Alaska “interfered with their sensors.” What’s more, the government has been clear that the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina was not really similar to the three subsequently downed objects.
“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” CNN quoted a National Security Council spokesperson as saying. Some of them have been called balloons. Another was described as a “cylindrical object.” And the last one was reported to be octagonal. We still haven’t recovered anything from the one shot down over Alaska on Friday.
A Washington Post report made the startling implication that the reason for the rash of sightings may be that, until recently, we’d set our radars and sensors to automatically filter out too much information:
“We basically opened the filters,” the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.
In other words, we’d been proceeding from a preconceived notion of what we should be seeing in the sky, and our systems therefore failed to see what was actually in the sky until someone in the Pacific Northwest saw it with their own eyes.
Speculation among informed observers hasn’t clarified the mysteries surrounding this story. Some aeronautics reporters must be feeling vindicated, having previously warned of evidence that China was developing exotic airships. But beyond that, it’s impossible to know much of anything. Perhaps these objects are just a form of low-tech surveillance taking advantage of our blindness, to take sub-satellite-level pictures and video. Perhaps they’re something more sinister, such as a test of a weapons-delivery system that has proven itself useful at evading detection until now, or a first-strike device designed to deliver an electromagnetic-pulse attack. Or perhaps they’re just an attempt to surveil our top-secret planes outside of the normal orbit schedule of satellites.
Without hard facts, we can only wonder. So, we need President Biden to do what he conspicuously avoided doing in his State of the Union address: We need him to give us a rough idea of what is really going on. We need him to tell us whether these flying objects are a scary new technology or merely a 21st-century version of “chaff” designed to neutralize our technological superiority. Because the longer he stays silent, the more speculation will grow — and the more it will seem like he doesn’t know what’s going on any more than we do.