How many more unidentified flying objects — UFOs — are hovering in North American airspace? Who is sending them? What are these devices doing? And what does the United States intend to do about them?
The questions continue to pile up as U.S. Northern Command, responsible for the North American theater, picks up more objects of various shapes and sizes on its radar. February has proved to be a busy month for U.S. fighter pilots, who have shot down four objects over the last eight days. The most significant, a large, white surveillance balloon operated by China’s People’s Liberation Army, was downed over the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4 after traveling across the continental U.S. for several days.
The latest, a much smaller octagonal object, was taken out over Michigan’s Lake Huron at roughly 40,000 feet over the weekend, a day after yet another device was destroyed over Canada. The great state of Alaska hasn’t been immune either.
The shootdowns have gotten to such a point that it’s becoming difficult to track them all. When the week is over, it wouldn’t be a surprise if a U.S. fighter jet took down an additional device or two (or three) somewhere over the North American continent. At this point, the frequency with which these events are occurring almost makes them ordinary and predictable.
Yet for the Biden administration, the UFO sightings are a nagging story that won’t go away. With every device spotted on North American Air Defense’s radar systems, the White House is forced to explain why they keep popping up, which country (assuming it’s a country) is behind them and what intelligence is being collected. Pressure is growing on President Joe Biden to be more transparent. Lawmakers spent Sunday morning shows pressing the White House for more information; Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, called recent events “nothing short of craziness
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.”The problem for the administration, of course, is that the U.S. intelligence community is still in the early stages of determining what is going on while the American people want answers to their legitimate questions. On Monday, the administration announced the creation of an interagency group, which includes the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration, to study the aerial phenomena. With the exception of the spy balloon, the U.S. doesn’t have a clue as to whether the UFOs are part of a single state’s comprehensive espionage campaign against the U.S. or whether they are sporadic events unrelated to each other. While the second option sounds fanciful to some, it’s still quite plausible; according to a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, there have been 366 UFO “incidents” in American airspace since the summer of 2021. More than 160 of those incidents, or roughly 45%, have involved balloons, while 46% couldn’t be identified one way or the other.
Another explanation is also on the table: Because the diligent spotters at NORAD are now extra-vigilant toward aerial devices in the wake of the outrage over the spy balloon, the command is finding more blips on its high-tech screens. This is what Melissa Dalton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said during a briefing with reporters over the weekend.
“We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase (in UFO events),” Dalton said. In short: It’s not that North America is suddenly being bombarded with UFOs but that more eyes are now fixated on the skies.
In times like these, when weird, mysterious objects with heavy payloads and surveillance equipment are flying 20,000 to 60,000 feet above our heads, it’s easy to get lost in a spiral of sensationalistic panic. Some people, including those in positions of responsibility, will quickly settle on two conclusions, neither of which is particularly soothing to the blood pressure: U.S. air defenses aren’t as strong and resilient as we once thought, and China, Russia or some other adversarial nation is violating U.S. sovereignty to steal our military secrets and devise what our plans are.
How on earth, you might ask, could the U.S. possibly let this happen?
Emotion, however, has no place in this discussion. Is it creepy and disconcerting that U.S. fighter jets are blowing things out of the sky with such regularity? Of course. But by the Pentagon’s own admission, the craft don’t present an immediate danger to U.S. national security. If the folks who get paid to worry night and day about every single, horrible contingency that could befall the American public aren’t alarmingly concerned about the unmanned, unarmed objects in U.S. airspace, should we really be frantically running around as if the U.S. is any less powerful today than it was last week or last month?
This isn’t to suggest the men and women tasked with keeping the North American region safe should be lackadaisical about everything that has gone on over the past 10 days. If U.S. military officers believe a flying object poses a high risk to commercial aircraft or people on the ground, U.S. fighter planes should be scrambled, shadow the device until it’s over a relatively unpopulated area of the country and neutralize it with one of those expensive air-to-air missiles that are paid for courtesy of the American taxpayer. This is exactly what U.S. pilots are doing.
Even so, we shouldn’t treat the UFO breaches as groundbreaking events in the annals of world history or let our dark, wild imaginations get in the way of levelheadedness.
Because let’s face it: Threat inflation isn’t a good precursor to good policy.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the baiduhai.
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