The truth is out there… but we may never know it, because we blew it up to smithereens.
According to reporting by The New York Times, officials in the United States and Canada have given up on their search for the wreckage of three unidentified flying objects that they resorted to shooting out of the sky with missiles earlier this month.
The objects were downed using U.S. military craft over Alaska, the Yukon, and Lake Huron on Feb. 10, 11, and 12, respectively. (Headline: “Inside the Hunt for U.F.O.s at the End of the World.” Is that what the NYT really thinks of Michigan and Ontario?) The incidents came during an extraordinary period of international tensions following the discovery of a large white surveillance balloon floating across the continental U.S. that officials called a spy device.
China maintains that object was a harmless civilian-owned weather balloon that drifted off course. The U.S. shot that balloon down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, and said it had successfully recovered the wreckage on Feb. 17. It is now being analyzed for clues of its true origin.
Despite the unprecedented nature of this use of military force over North American airspace, officials have left us in the dark as to what these subsequent objects were or whether they were even balloons. They have been described as the size of “Volkswagen Beetles” and “cylindrical,” while the Lake Huron object was described as “octagonal” with strings hanging off of it. The latter was downed with two $400,000 Sidewinder missiles fired by an F-16 fighter jet, one of which missed its target and landed in Lake Huron.
It now seems likely that the objects were basically just garden-variety balloons that escalated global paranoia, however — a stupid scenario accurately predicted by the German new wave band Nena’s 1983 hit “99 Luftballons.”
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” President Joe Biden said Thursday. Biden was criticized by Republicans for not shooting the Chinese balloon earlier, which may have prompted the itchy trigger fingers — another example of Democrats being pulled ever rightward by constantly negotiating with an opposition party that never returns the favor.
It appears that the sky is essentially littered with trash, including balloons released by scientific institutions and hobbyists, along with your typical helium party balloons — proving that humans will pollute everything we touch, even the heavens. (During this international balloon crisis, a train derailed near East Palestine, Ohio, spilling toxic chemicals, demonstrating our priorities.)
If that’s the case, the U.S. should probably use its vast military apparatus to come up with ways to extract these objects out of the sky that are perhaps a bit more elegant than simply firing missiles at them.
Then again, we do love our guns here, don’t we.
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