White House Rules out Aliens for Flying Objects Shot Down
“There is no, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.”
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.