UFOs and the White House’s ‘no evidence of extraterrestrials’ distraction
Tom Rogan
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With China’s spy balloon now a week in the past, the nation has moved on to the three unidentified flying objects that the United States shot down in recent days. The China espionage point bears greater attention: Beijing’s capabilities and ambitions in terms of drones, balloons, cyberspace, telecommunications, and human intelligence operations are vast and global.
Nevertheless, while the White House says it is ensuring the defense of U.S. airspace, it admits that these latest three objects are only now being detected because North American Aerospace Defense Command has altered its detection and intercept parameters. The White House needs to come under greater pressure to provide more timely information about what it has learned.
WHAT CAN WE INFER FROM THE ALASKA AERIAL OBJECT
First off, no debris of note is said to have been recovered yet, with bad weather being offered up as an excuse. If this excuse keeps being presented beyond next week, it will be a good sign that the government is hiding something. After all, the U.S. military’s weapons and debris recovery efforts are world-leading. These efforts are designed to succeed even in extreme weather and active combat scenarios (nuclear weapons recovery under fire, for example). Bad weather cannot be a sustaining excuse for all three shootdowns.
Prudent inquiry, rather than the pursuit of a grand conspiracy, is the key here.
That’s because most UFOs are actually weather phenomena, aircraft, balloons, surveillance drones, or fictions created for social media. Yet not all UFOs fall into that category. A small percentage of UFOs appear to have technical capabilities beyond that of any known actor. That the White House knows this but is now spinning this entire concern into a joke is problematic. It’s the same approach that then-Arizona Gov. Fife Symington took during a UFO mass sighting in 1997. At the time, Symington made a joke out of the incident by having his chief of staff enter a press conference dressed as an alien. After leaving office, however, Symington admitted he had witnessed a vast and extraordinary-looking craft.
Sadly, the media are again lapping up the silliness.
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that “there is no indication, again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.” Jean-Pierre then joked how she liked the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie ET. From the same podium, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby later (if less happily) observed, “I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft. Period.”
These statements serve a clear interest — one not in the public interest.
First, they are intended as a rebuke of the top U.S. military commander for North America, Gen. Glen VanHerck. On Sunday, VanHerck observed: “I’m not able to categorize how [the three recent UFOs that were shot down were able to] stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure, or it could be some type of a propulsion system.” Asked by a journalist whether he had ruled out that the UFOs were operated by extraterrestrials, VanHerck responded, “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.”
To be clear, there likely is no evidence of extraterrestrial involvement with these latest objects. In military analysis terms, that would require evidence such as a video of a little green thing waving from a cockpit. But that’s the White House’s whole purpose in using this “Sorry, folks, no ET except for ET, the movie” line. It wants to defray legitimate public scrutiny of all UFOs by playing to the abundant stigma involved with this subject. Sadly, many in the media are all too willing to play their part. In response to Jean-Pierre’s comments, many journalists simply laughed. I’ve had similar experiences with other journalists when I’ve asked UFO-related questions to government officials.
Yet there are legitimate points of concern here.
Both Kirby and VanHerck agree, for example, that the three most recent UFOs are best described as “objects” rather than “balloons.” VanHerck did suggest that the objects may have had undetected internal balloons, but he was unsure. While things may change, the government doesn’t yet know what it shot down. That’s notable. Regardless, the White House is patently wrong to ridicule the extraterrestrial hypothesis for some UFO events. In its own 2022 report on UFOs, the intelligence community noted obliquely that “some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”
Since World War II, hundreds if not thousands of U.S. military personnel and other credible U.S. witnesses, including police officers, have reported witnessing objects with unconventional and/or extraordinary performance characteristics. These characteristics include instantaneous hypersonic acceleration, active concealment, the ability to transition with ease between air and underwater, and doing these things without flight surfaces or obvious propulsion methods.
I have also been told by military sources that there is assessed to be a direct correlation between UFOs and nuclear forces and facilities. This would pose a clear vulnerability for U.S. strategic nuclear forces. Partly informed by classified briefings, recently enacted congressional legislation mandates specific reporting on incidents involving nuclear forces.
Again, these witnesses are not the average Joe and Jane. They include witnesses who are trusted to operate some of the most lethal weapons in the U.S. military inventory — those whom the military spends a great deal of time and money in ensuring are of stable mind. I’m just scratching the tip of the iceberg, but compelling events include those of Navy fighter pilot David Fravor in 2004, an Air Force B-52 bomber crew in 1968, Air Force fighter pilot Milton Torres in 1957, the so-called DC radar flap in 1952, and incidents at both U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons sites. Military and intelligence personnel have also told me that there have been sonar recordings of underwater objects moving at speeds in the hundreds-of-knots range. Soviet military records, though obviously harder to corroborate, indicate a litany of similar events, as do reports from Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Put simply, whatever the U.S. has just shot down, the public deserves direct information and fewer references to Steven Spielberg movies. Whether it involves these recent objects or not, something “extra” is going on with some UFOs.
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