America’s New Fear of UFOs

Does Joe Biden look like a decisive commander in chief? Not if Washington can’t confirm soon why it found the downed airborne objects to be threatening.

Republicans called President Joe Biden a weakling because he did not shoot down China’s espionage balloon until a week after it was first sighted. However, there are few indications that the two subsequent downings of objects over the weekend were a demonstration of power motivated purely by domestic politics, ordered by a Democrat who wants to announce another run for the White House soon.

Launching a missile is not something that a responsible commander in chief orders casually. This is especially true because in the second case, it was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who decided and announced the decision.

Silent Administration

In Washington and Ottawa, there was presumably a reason to be worried even if it was “only” about air traffic. If both administrations knew where the airborne objects were from and what they were doing there, they have been strikingly silent about it. That may refute the idea that these incidents are just continuations of the Chinese espionage saga, because in that case, the U.S. instead sought transparency. It used the crisis to demonstrate to the world how brazen China is.

It is very possible that the Pentagon really couldn’t identify the other airborne objects, just like the 143 “aerial phenomena” that have been sighted since 2004, which intelligence services described (vaguely) in a 2021 report. Maybe the wreckage will soon provide insight. In any case, the balloon episode taught us one thing at least: UFOs do not necessarily come from another planet.