UFO’s Look A Lot More Like Spying Than Extraterrestrials

At latest count, Sidewinder missiles have burst both a wayward Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” floating over the U.S. and Canada. These suspected spies cast an unexpected spotlight on a significant national security issue: balloons and drones gathering intelligence for foreign powers.

But they also provide a likely explanation for some of the last decade’s highly publicized sightings of unidentified flying objects by military pilots. At least a more plausible explanation than extraterrestrials. And the Pentagon’s past habit of punting such observations to a quirky and inadequate team of investigators from an obscure task force was an institutional failure.

Although the first balloon burst, a 200-foot-high white sphere, was the opposite of stealthy or unidentified, the more recent aerial objects downed over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron, fell squarely in the realm of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the latest name for UFO’s that the Pentagon settled on last year.

Birds, party balloons, weather balloons and trash that might be labeled UAP fill the sky, along with drones, consumer and otherwise. We now know that the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command had blunted its radars to prevent such aerial flotsam from cluttering its screens, according to the White House. Until now, the priority targets were aircraft and missiles, which are large and fast. Small, slow objects, like balloons, were filtered out and ignored.

That’s why we didn’t know about the balloons that likely explain the “GoFast” UFO sighting made by U.S. Navy pilots in 2015, a seeming high speed encounter over the ocean that, in truth, depicts a much slower object made to look fast by the parallax effect, where the high speed is only relative to the Navy plane, like a tree “flying” past the window of a train. Balloons might even explain some aspects of the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” incidents.

Now radars are looking for such objects. That’s why pilots are seeing—and shooting down—UAP. Descriptions of the UAP encountered by some Navy pilots also tally with aspects of newly revealed incursions of Chinese balloons during the Trump administration. Politico reported that intelligence analysts assessed that some small objects detected off the coast of Virginia were Chinese radar-jamming devices. This could correlate with multiple reports of erratic radar returns by pilots training in that area. One visual sighting described…