Cultural Blinders May Explain Recent UFO Sightings
Or Worse, It's So Classified We Won't Be Told
I really hate to say this, but Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Nutcase, Georgia) is largely correct in her denunciation of the military’s excuses for the ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (or UFOs as they are popularly known) appearing over North America.
She melted down during a congressional briefing on the subject, repeatedly calling out official excuses as “bullshit”. Her behavior lately isn’t going to put her on any A-List invitations for Georgetown cocktails parties, and that’s a good thing, ‘cause she is not the kind of person one would expect to engage in polite chit chat.
Even a stopped clock is right twice daily, and her paranoia in this instance happens to overlap with what’s likely some truth. And, no, it’s not Biden’s fault.
North American defense forces have shot down four objects of unknown origin in February, and I suspect we’ll hear about more. Object #1 was a high altitude balloon, bigger than a couple of school buses, and likely part of the fleet of Chinese aerial surveillance balloons that have been observed over more than 40 countries, stretching back at least into the Trump administration.
Objects 2-4 were much smaller in size, different in appearance, and flew at lower altitudes. Unofficial Washington sources are saying these UAP’s were not consistent with previously observed phenomena.
From the New York Times:
“However, nearly all of the incidents remain officially unexplained, according to a report that was made public in 2021. Intelligence agencies are set to deliver a classified document to Congress by Monday updating that report. The original document looked at 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021 that were reported by U.S. government sources, mostly American military personnel.”
Why hadn’t these objects been seen before? The short answer is that we weren’t looking for them.
North American defensive radar systems have been set to screen out slower moving objects, because past experiences turned out to be flocks of birds or weather phenomena.
From the Washington Post:
“The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday, partly addressing a key question of why so many objects have recently surfaced.
“The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.
“‘We basically opened the filters,’ the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.”
Attributing Object # 1 to China was possible because of warnings issued to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The Chinese, not surprisingly, claim we shot down a weather balloon.
Via Vox:
US officials only discovered China’s air balloon surveillance program within the past year, though the program dates at least as far back as the administration of former President Donald Trump. “We did not detect those threats and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint operation with Canada, told reporters Monday. The US intelligence community reportedly told NORAD that the balloons were a threat, but VanHerck didn’t specify at the time what US intelligence knows about the balloon program, or how it discovered the information.
Aviation reporter Tyler Rogoway has a lot to say about these objects, and it should surprise nobody that they exist as part of a system designed to collect signals intelligence. The following excerpts are from an article published at The Drive/War Zone published in April, 2021.
… I must state that just because I believe the evidence is compelling that many of the bizarre encounters with mysterious objects in the sky as of late, and especially those that the U.S. military is experiencing, emanate from peer-state competitors, not another dimension or another solar system, there are certainly well-documented cases of seemingly unexplainable events that have nothing to do with this type of capability. In other words, our conclusions do not come even close to answering the question of UAPs or UFOs as a whole, especially in terms of the many unexplained incidents in decades past. What they do is highlight an alarming new capability set and tactics that seem to have been allowed to be exploited with little response for years while the Pentagon scratched its head and shrugged, or even worse, turned largely a blind eye toward it. …
With that in mind, I also believe America's prevailing cultural issues and the general stigma surrounding UFOs was successfully targeted and leveraged by our adversaries, which helped these activities to persist far longer than they should have. In fact, I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.
…
We are talking about everything from common operating frequencies to highly-sensitive low-probability of intercept emissions tactics, to datalink encryption, to distinct radar modes and employment procedures here. In other words, this is among the most critical intelligence a peer-state enemy can obtain and there aren't many easy ways of doing it. Even in a war zone, where aircraft and their systems are operating potentially in the same general area as adversary intelligence-collection systems, using their full combat capabilities may be restricted to maintain the secrets of those critical capabilities. Proximity to the emitters in question and how long their emissions are exposed to an intelligence-gathering system is a major limitation, as well. Traditional espionage is another way adversaries look to gain information on these critical systems, as well, but nothing beats going out and actually sucking up the electronic signatures as best you can. Actually becoming the target of their interest takes the quality of intelligence collected to a whole other level.
Rogoway and his colleagues have documented similar efforts coming from the US side, starting with PALLADIUM, where the CIA launched radar reflectors on balloons off Cuba's coastline via U.S. Navy submarine and employed an electronic warfare system tricking Soviet radar systems into showing enemy aircraft were rushing toward Cuban shores.
Current systems include the Navy’s Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS, which uses swarms of low cost networked drones that seek to convince an adversary they are seeing ghost fleets and aerial armadas that aren't really there.
Back to Rogoway (Do read the entire article if you have the time):
With this in mind, making things appear stranger and less threatening than they actually are is likely one tactic the enemy has used for these operations, and this can often come at a very cheap price. We have discussed how sometimes the simplest measures can make the most impactful illusions, and how even similar tricks that Disney uses to skew theme park goers' perceptions could be employed in a guileful manner to confuse an adversary. That seems to be part of the playbook being executed here, and what better passively-reinforced cover story is there in America than UFOs and all the stigma that goes along with it? The fact that pilots have historically refrained from reporting unexplained craft in the skies due to fear of their careers being impacted is all you really need to know when quantifying how relevant and effective such a tactic can be.
With that being said, not only could these things, or other platforms nearby, passively suck up electronic intelligence that presents itself in their vicinity, but the genius of their employment is that they themselves are the targets, and they are not necessarily friend or foe. This makes them flying intelligence 'honey traps' in their own regard. They get aircraft and ships to lock them up directly, likely running through multiple radar modes in the process as they get fully interrogated by various platforms, even at close range. This provides otherwise unthinkable opportunities to record all those signatures and tactics, even ones that may not be used otherwise if there was a known intelligence-gathering threat present.
These non-satellite signals intelligence collection systems are all-too-often seen in airspace restricted for military training purposes off the North Carolina and Southern California coasts.
The point is for vehicles of this type to be detected (on radar) causing responses that generate electronic signatures of various types or radar and targeting systems. Navy pilots have long been reluctant to report visual encounters for fear of being labeled a UFO/conspiracy nut.
None of this reporting on their part disregards evidence suggesting that there really are UFOs. It’s just that there are so many other incidents that it’s unlikely that an alien power would allow themselves to be seen with such frequency, especially over prime military targets.
A bigger question will be ‘where are these unknown vehicles coming from?’ Perhaps an analysis of wreckage from objects 2-4 will give up clues. But you have to realize that, if it’s true the US has had a major intelligence failure, there is a strong case to be made for not revealing the activities of an adversarial power due to embarrassment.
What Rogoway and others suggest is that we’ve allowed our cultural biases to dictate defense strategy, meaning that airspace intrusions have been brushed off as UFO nonsense or a belief that our adversaries aren’t smart enough to outsmart us.
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