White House Rules out Aliens for Flying Objects Shot Down

The U.S. government has sadly ruled out aliens as a possible explanation for the multiple flying objects shot down in recent days.

The military has shot down three unidentified flying objects since Friday. The government seems to be on high alert after shooting down an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon last week. China said the balloon was for meteorological research, but Washington rejected that explanation.

“There is no, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent take-downs,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday.

When General Glen VanHerck was asked Sunday whether the flying objects had extraterrestrial origins, the head of the U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command (NORAD) said, “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”

“At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat…that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it,” VanHerck said.

But he noted the military was unable to determine how the three latest objects stayed airborne, where they came from, or what exactly they even are, which is why “we’re calling them objects, not balloons.”

The government has not publicly cared this much about aliens since 2019, when the FBI investigated a joke Facebook event to storm Area 51.

We’ve seen a lot of UFOs over the past week, and we’re likely to see more. A U.S. official told The Washington Post that the recent objects have changed how analysts filter and interpret information about incursions into U.S. airspace.

Speaking anonymously, the official explained that the data absorbed by sensory equipment is run through filters, to help analysts determine what is important. But “we basically opened the filters,” the official said, allowing more objects to be deemed noteworthy.

But the official also said that the government still doesn’t know if the increased incursions are due to expanding the data parameters or deliberate actions by an unknown entity.

The government has also said that it was able to discover multiple objects, including surveillance balloons that flew over the U.S. during Donald Trump’s presidency, because Joe Biden increased the amount of intelligence resources directed towards detecting Chinese espionage attempts.

“Because the intelligence community made this a priority at the direction of President Biden, we enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said last week.

While it’s not clear where the most recent three high-altitude objects came from, the additional resources are how the government was able to detect the surveillance balloon from China.

Beijing, meanwhile, has begun pushing back, accusing the U.S. of flying high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times over the course of last year, which Washington has denied. The original balloon derailed what was supposed to be U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first trip to China to ease tensions between the two countries.
The White House may have dashed our hopes this time, but who knows what might be behind the next high-altitude object that enters U.S. airspace.

This post has been updated.

Just a week after the hullabaloo of the Chinese spy balloon, the United States shot down an object the size of a small car that was floating over Alaska on Friday.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the object, first observed yesterday, “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.” Per recommendation from the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to shoot down the object, which was cruising at an altitude of roughly 40,000 feet.

Though the government seemed to act more swiftly than with the Chinese spy balloon, there have been fewer details to come with the act. What the object exactly is, from where it originates, and what purpose it was serving are all unclear.

Kirby did say, however, that Air Force pilots allegedly found the aircraft to not be manned before the final order to shoot it down.

The object follows reports of numerous Chinese spy balloons flying all over the world, including at least once earlier during Biden’s presidency and three times during Trump’s. Unlike the previous balloons, which seemed to be flying at an even higher altitude, its flight path was low enough to potentially threaten civilian aircraft. The object was also much smaller than last week’s balloon, which was reportedly 200 feet tall.

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna may have fabricated her Jewish heritage, according to a new report by The Washington Post.

The freshman MAGA Republican seems to inhabit a space usually reserved for serial fabulist George Santos. In addition to potentially lying about her religious background, Luna appears to have embellished other parts of her personal history.

Luna is Mexican on her mother’s side and Mexican and German on her father’s side. She has repeatedly said while campaigning and in an interview with Jewish Insider that she has Ashkenazi roots and her father was a Messianic Jew, or a Jewish person who believes Jesus was the Messiah. But several family members told the Post that not only did Luna’s father have no ties to Judaism but his father served in the Nazi army in Germany as a young man.

Messianic Judaism is an offshoot of Protestant Christianity, not Judaism. Jews believe that Jesus was not the Messiah, and most denominations do not recognize Messianic Judaism as actual Judaism. Some of Luna’s family members told the Post that both her father and grandfather were Catholic.

Luna’s claim that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father” directly contradicts another refrain of hers: that her mother raised her alone with “no family to rely on.” Other family members have also said that Luna was always with them and supported by an extended family network growing up.

Luna served in the Air Force from 2009 to 2014, during which time the people who knew her described her as apolitical or even liberal. She expressed support for Barack Obama and said her heritage was Middle Eastern, Jewish, or Eastern European.

In 2015, she registered to vote in Florida and checked her race as “White, not of Hispanic origin.” That same year, she filed a petition in Washington state to change her last name to Luna, her mother’s family name, from Mayerhofer.

She joined the conservative group Turning Point USA in 2018, working for less than a year as their Hispanic engagement director. When she launched her campaign for Congress, she had fully embraced her Hispanic heritage, even changing the pronunciation of her first name to “Ah-na” from “Ann-a,” which surprised some of her friends and family members.

Luna has also talked about experiencing a “home invasion” in 2019, when her landlord broke into her apartment in the middle of the night. She links this to her support for gun ownership.

Her roommate from the time disputes this story, saying their apartment was broken into multiple times during the day, when neither of them was home. Nothing was taken, and they never figured out who did it.

There is one thing Luna has said about herself that definitely appears to be true: “I’m able to take on different personalities depending on what image I am going for,” she told the Canadian magazine Skyn in 2017. “I think getting into [the] character of what you are selling is super important.”

Representative George Santos claimed that, despite his less-than-friendly interaction with Senator Mitt Romney during the State of the Union speech, Senator Kyrsten Sinema told Santos “something to the effects of ‘Hang in there, buddy,’” offering a “very kindhearted” hand of support.

Sinema’s office denies this ever happening. “I know this is *shocking* but he is lying,” Sinema spokeswoman Hannah Hurley said in an email to The Washington Post on Friday. “Kyrsten did not speak to him.”

Santos made the claim in an interview on Newsmax Thursday night, one in which he also failed to satisfy the far-right network about his previous claims of having had a brain tumor. He also claimed to have obtained his “legitimate” campaign money from his organizational work of “capital introduction relationship management of high net-worth individuals,” which he supposedly, at the age of 13, had already done “for years.”

Santos explained to Newsmax his attention-drawing interaction with Romney on Tuesday night was “not meant for television.” While the pair have slightly different accounts of what exactly was said, it is clear that Romney expressed his disapproval of Santos.

Meanwhile, Santos claimed that Sinema went out of her way to tell him to “hang in there” against the gathering storm brewed by his own lies.

While pretty much everything Santos says at this point should be taken with a pound of salt, Sinema is not one to necessarily automatically believe either. Her whole career trajectory in many ways is one based on a certain dishonesty—she began as an unabashed Green Party member all to become an independent who has watered down Democratic legislation and met more often with officials and executives than her own constituents.

But Sinema and Romney have been … close for a while:

And the pair also sat together during the State of the Union. Judging by Sinema and Romney’s affinity for each other and the scale of Santos’s lying track record, one would be inclined to believe he might be lying once again too. But what, if anything, was exactly said between Sinema and Santos is not certain; such is the challenge when a pathological and unhesitating liar meets his match with a more practiced, less egregious one.

No investigation into the January 6 riot could be complete without interviewing Mike Pence, and now it may finally happen: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s role in the insurrection has subpoenaed the former vice president.

It is not clear when Jack Smith issued the summons, which was first reported Thursday, but it should come as no surprise that he did: Pence is a key witness to both the events of January 6 and Trump’s state leading up to them.

Smith was appointed in November to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 attack, as well as his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and the investigation has been slowly drawing in on the former president.

This latest subpoena is one of the clearest moves yet to investigate Trump’s inner circle.

But it’s unclear how much Pence will cooperate. You’d think, considering that the rioters wanted to hang him and his former boss didn’t exactly have his back, he’d be willing to talk about what happened.

But the Department of Justice has been trying to get Pence to testify for months. Pence has previously said that, despite January 6 being “the most difficult day of my public life,” the House of Representatives investigative committee had “no right” to his testimony.

Pence could argue he is protected by executive privilege. Trump has repeatedly claimed that executive privilege protects him against testifying in the January 6 investigation, and Pence could do the same.

That argument, though, doesn’t hold as much water considering Pence has released a tell-all memoir in which he includes many details he would be asked to testify on.

Pence’s refusal to testify in January 6 investigations is spineless and infuriating, but it makes sense: He is reportedly considering running for president in 2024. In interviews and his book, he has sought to distance himself from Trump, a bid to appeal to moderates and independents.

But if he were to testify, he’d have to denounce Trump, alienating his former boss’s most loyal supporters in the process.