Up, up, and away
Dominic Green
Even the future feels nostalgic these days. The Great Balloon Panic of 2023, still occurring as I write and await the descent of our alien overlords, is midcentury Americana. We are in the future predicted by 1950s comics. Members of the public report mysterious objects in the sky. The military says there’s nothing to see but scrambles the jets anyway. The media mention hush-hush special projects but can say no more. Much of the public don tinfoil helmets and brace for contact.
Last May, a House committee considered “unidentified aerial phenomena” for the first time in 50 years. In November, the administration shared military footage of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which had officially not existed for decades. In retrospect, which is the only way the future can be understood, that tells us something. Three things, really, depending on your perspective.
One, raised by popular demand, is that alien contact is imminent. It’s not. The rest of the world might enjoy E.T. and The X-Files, but only Americans worry about being abducted by little green men waving anal probes. The UFO folklore is authentic American folklore. It is a medley of minuteman paranoia, technological expertise, frontier legend, a secular apocalypse reminiscent of the more exuberant forms of Protestantism, and the deep-rooted suspicion that, whatever the aliens have in mind, it’s not as bad as the cover-up coming from Washington, D.C. Who would you rather be probed by, a spaceman or the man from the IRS?
Down on the ground, that leaves two other explanations. One is that other Cold War favorite, an arms race. Last August, exactly midway between May’s congressional hearing and November’s declassification, the Chinese military sent a hypersonic missile into orbit around the globe. In December, the Air Force announced the successful test of its own hypersonic missile. This might not be the final frontier in the U.S.-China arms race, but it’s a new one, and Space Force will not come cheap. The public needs to know on a need-to-know basis, and the federal agencies need money for research and weapons, so it’s time to let the public know.
The third possibility is that this news is not news at all. Balloons have been used to gather military intelligence since 1794, when the revolutionary French government sent the Corps d’Aerostiers to spy out the battlefield at Charleroi. Of course the Chinese military uses surveillance balloons. Of course the U.S. military uses them, too. Of course both parties update their balloons with AI, better cameras, and so on. What’s the point of having ballooning deficits if they don’t include budgets for out-ballooning China?
In 2019, the Guardian reported that U.S. Southern Command was “conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six Midwestern states using experimental high-altitude balloons.” At least 25 balloons were released, carrying “sensors and communications gear capable of detecting every vehicle in motion in a 25-mile range beneath the balloon.” This technology, Libby Skarin of the South Dakota ACLU said, had been developed to detect improvised explosive devices, IEDs, in Iraq and Afghanistan and was migrating into civilian use without any oversight, creating “a pervasive checkpoint over entire cities.” Welcome to Flyover Country.
Meanwhile, between 2011 and 2021, Google’s now-defunct Project Loon experimented with using high-altitude balloons as floating wireless routers. The plan was to connect remote areas to the internet by launching thousands of balloons into the stratosphere. The balloons crashed onto private property and power lines, but their onboard AI also learned to steer by “tacking” into the wind like sailing ships. In Puerto Rico in 2017, they turned up on flight-tracking websites. No wonder more random items showed up last week when NORAD reduced the filtering on its radars.
So the balloon story is not all hot air. If NORAD had what its commander, Gen. Glen VanHerck, called a “domain awareness gap,” it was deliberate. It was media attention that forced the military and the Biden administration to issue statements and shoot rockets. This flap, however, misleads the public, which already feels it is misled about what goes on upstairs. And the theatrical response needlessly raises tensions with China, which are already stratospheric.
The balloons are not the problem. The problem is media-driven panic, reflexive bellicosity, and performative overreaction. The nation that invented the UFO myth is already sensitized to violations of airspace. And no other nation gives so much head space to the skies. Space is the place, the jazz mystic Sun Ra said, and it’s a particularly American place. The 1960s race between Sputnik and Apollo was a gigantomachy, a mythological battle of giants, good versus evil. The moon landing was a metaphysical reenactment of the settling of America: crossing the great divide between Earth and heaven, getting a foot on the rock. No president wants to preside over losing America’s empire in space.
Now, the UFO fantasy is coming down to earth as a strategic reality. We are not alone out there. An alien civilization is working toward full-spectrum dominance and probing America’s frontiers, minds, and servers. America’s media and leaders should stay grounded. Focus on the reality, not the myth. Otherwise, the balloon, as the Brits say, really could go up.