By Justin Snead
Over three days in February 2023, when NORAD took the unprecedented move to shoot down airborne clutter that popped up on its newly calibrated radar systems, nearly everyone in the UFO community, including key players in the Disclosure movement, made a series of wrong calls and overreactions. We found ourselves in the middle of an unusual but ultimately conventional military situation. Our pent-up anticipation, need for validation, and the demands of our respective agendas led us to project onto the situation what we wanted to be true, and cloud our judgment about what was actually happening. This is a problem for several reasons, but the most important is this: the same chaotic mix of reactions is likely to recur during a real Disclosure-level UFO event. Next time around, we all need to be more cautious, discerning, and grounded in the facts, especially leaders of the movement. Below I’m going to retrace the history of those missteps, and provide some practical advice on how to avoid them in the future.
First, let’s dispense with the notion that the shootdowns that occurred on February 10, 11, and 12 were of genuinely anomalous objects. Two things happened between the discovery of the Chinese spy balloon and the three shootdowns. Biden became genuinely frustrated that he could not shoot down the spy balloon earlier than the military did, and Republicans began to use the delay as a political weapon. To forestall a repeat of this problem, NORAD “opened the filters” of its radar systems to see smaller and slower objects. When they did that, they saw three objects in the same general trajectory as the spy balloon, and they shot them down before they passed into the populated regions of the continental United States.
Unlike nearly everyone else, the Executive Branch was careful not to conflate these three objects and UAPs. John Kirby of the National Security Council categorized them as “unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.” Biden called them “unmanned and unidentified aerial objects.”
Jim Himes, who is a Democrat and member of the Gang of Eight, said in March that “an awful lot of what people think are UFOs is just garbage.” He fingered the National Weather Service and a Michigan balloon weather operators club as potential owners of the three downed objects. Tim Burchett, a Republican who is able to speak more candidly (also not someone afraid to cry “cover up”), said in an interview, “I think the last three were basically a distraction so that we would get off the President’s back [about the Chinese spy balloon]. They started shooting down weather balloons, which we see quite a bit of.”
If you are still on the fence, ask yourself which of the following is more likely: 1) NORAD shot down airborne clutter and is not revealing gun camera video because of classification rules and a fear of revealing to the public (and the Chinese government) that they massively overreacted due to political pressure, wasting a ton of taxpayer money in the process; 2) After decades of flying through restricted airspace with impunity, and also known instances of deactivating aircraft weaponry and entire nuclear arsenals, three genuine UFOs were easily downed by American fighter jets. Option one is the only logical conclusion.
The three objects should not have been conflated with UFOs. But they were. Why were so many so quick to do that? It all started with that Chinese spy balloon.
UFO Skeptics Started It
It’s easy to forget that UFO skeptics were the first people to bring UFOs into this conversation. This occurred almost as soon as the Chinese spy balloon was discovered, a full week before the other three objects were shot down. They jumped at the chance to showcase an example of why they think people are fooled into believing in UFOs.
Reporter Julian Barnes has a track record for quoting unnamed sources in the Pentagon who would really prefer Congress move on from its recent interest in UFOs. Barnes published an article in The New York Times on the day the spy balloon was shot down that cited the 2022 UAP report. He wrote that “the Pentagon has examined 366 [UAP] incidents that were initially unexplained and said 163 were balloons.” (He skips over the part of that report that said those numbers reflect only an initial review, not the final conclusion, a point that Helene Cooper made in her article when she wrote accurately that “nearly all the [UAP] incidents remain officially unexplained.”) Barnes also included details from his own reporting about an entirely different classified report supplied to Congress in January that provided evidence of a “rival power conducting aerial surveillance with what appeared to be unknown cutting-edge technology.” This bombshell revelation was 1) thinly sourced; 2) only mentioned in connection to the spy balloon and never followed up on; 3) described by Barnes in a way that would lead the casual reader to think that this classified report was the same as the 2022 UAP report. Barnes’s reporting about the spy balloon gives the impression that Congress and others are only interested in UFOs these days because they are misidentifying balloons and other spy devices.
The space-writer Marina Koren makes this point explicitly. On the day before the Chinese spy balloon was downed, her article in The Atlantic was headlined “The Chinese Balloon and the Disappointing Reality of UFOs.” She wrote, “if aliens exist (or once existed), their stories are probably playing out (or once did) light-years from Earth. You know what is everywhere? Balloons.”
I wrote at the time that the Chinese spy balloon was not a UFO story and never needed to be one. It was made into a UFO story by the people whose agenda was served by the comparison: Pentagon ostriches and UFO skeptics.
But five days later, this dynamic reversed, and it was the UFO community’s turn to conflate the current situation with UFOs.
The Media and the Executive Branch
On Saturday, February 11, the object that would eventually be shot down over Lake Huron appeared over Montana, but it seemed to be behaving strangely by disappearing and then reappearing on radar. Ross Douthat, who occasionally writes about UFOs in his New York Times Opinion page column, tweeted the following:
At the hastily called NORAD press conference Sunday night, after all three objects had been downed, Pentagon Press Secretary, Brigadier General Pat Ryder, explained why they had used to the word “anomaly” to describe the object over Montana:
“It’s also important to point out in this part of United States that we did not have data link for… the radars on the ground to share information to the fighters airborne, allowing them to queue their sensors and their visual acuity in an attempt to visually identify the track. At sunset, we were unable to find the track. Also, our radar operators lost the track on radar. And the FAA was never tracking the radar. Therefore, that’s why we called it an anomaly because we weren’t able to identify it.”
It was at this press conference when Helene Cooper explicitly asked General Glen VanHerck, Commander of NORAD, about UFOs. Here is that exchange:
COOPER: Because you still haven’t been able to tell us what these things are that we are shooting out of the sky, that raises the question, have you ruled out aliens or extraterrestrials? And if so, why? Because that is what everyone is asking us right now.
GEN. VANHERCK: I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.
The general’s second sentence received the most commentary, even though it does not suggest VanHereck thinks it might be aliens. He would have said the same thing if Cooper had asked if he had ruled out Santa Clause. It’s a way of not engaging with the premise of the question. His first sentence is more telling. He kicked the UFO question right over to the Director of National Intelligence. Other Pentagon spokespeople have done the same of late. The UAP report is a DNI product. AARO is a joint DoD/DNI effort, but ultimately the DNI will be the ones communicating what is a UFO and what is not. The Pentagon seems to interpret this new arrangement for AARO as a license to put responsibility for the UFO question squarely on the DNI’s desk. This allows VanHerck to pass the buck when asked the UFO question, as he did here.
After the Sunday night briefing, New York Times reporter Edward Wong tweeted out the resulting article. He not only included The X-Files tagline, but referred to the three downed objects as UFOs.
On Monday, the White House Press Secretary used humor to bat down press questions about UFOs:
“Again, there is no indication of aliens or [extra]terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. Wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that. And it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it. I’m just — you know, I loved ‘E.T.’ the movie. But I’m gon — I’m just going to leave it there.”
So, to recap, “everyone is asking” and “hearing a lot about” UFOs in connection with the shootdowns. But why?
Even though there was no such connection, it’s understandable. There was a genuine fog of uncertainty. The objects were unidentified–no one could explain what they were. NORAD had never in its history taken such aggressive action as to shoot down something over the mainland, let alone three one after the other. It felt like a historic moment where extreme outcomes might be possible. Also, since 2017 there has been much public conversation about unidentified objects flying around where they don’t belong. On January 12, just four weeks before the final shootdown, the DNI released its second major report on these incidents.
But was it accurate to say “everyone is asking” about UFOs? Who was everyone? Was it wise to inject UFOs into a fluid, unusual breaking-news situation based only on excited speculation and no direct evidence? Journalists and press secretaries do a public service, but they do not speak for the public, let alone those of us who follow the UFO topic closely. They can be swept up as easily as any of us. Hearing the mainstream press discuss UFOs seriously can feel exciting and cathartic considering their long disdain for the topic, but just because they do does not necessarily mean they are reflecting the reality of a situation.
Takeaway 1: Just because journalists and government employees are talking about UFOs in the Pentagon and White House briefing rooms, doesn’t mean we should particularly care. They might not know more than anybody else. They might be wrong.
Takeaway 2: Whenever the “Is it UFOs?” question comes up in a developing situation, be careful. Ask instead: is that the right question?; why is that being asked?; do the known facts justify it?
Some of us were undoubtedly trying to follow that advice. But then Congress got involved and took this to another level.
Congress
Disclosure leaders in Congress used the shootdowns as an opportunity to first pat themselves on the back, and then ask for more money for their pet project, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Politicians to the core.
Gillibrand sent out multiple tweets like this one on February 13, which she used to reshare the Wong X-Files tweet.
On February 15, she said this to CNN:
“It’s all the service members who have reported this for years and been dismissed, derided, disregarded. Their careers have been harmed. Those are the heroes of this moment, because men and women have been reporting these sightings, certainly for our military, for decades, and they have been met with derision.”
And here she is in a March 28 Armed Services Committee hearing, asking the Secretary of Defense for more money for AARO:
“The incidents last month involving the Chinese high-altitude balloon and the three unknown objects highlighted the need for us to continue to improve our understanding of UAP’s over U.S. airspace.”
Representative Mike Gallagher referred to the three downed objects as “as yet UAPs,” meaning that until proven otherwise he considered them in the same classification as the Tic Tac UAP. He also said on CNN, “For years now we’ve had a problem with Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon… But until now, until it burst into public view, it really didn’t get the attention it deserved.” Like Gillibrand, he was using the situation to highlight the office he helped create.
The reason statements such as these sow confusion is that AARO was set up by Congress to investigate “anomalous spaceborne, airborne, seaborne, or transmedium observations that are not yet attributable to known actors or causes.” None of the four downed objects from February fit that description. At the time, three of them may have been unidentified, but there was no evidence they were anomalous. And there was much evidence and common sense pointing to the conclusion that they could be attributed to airborne clutter.
Senator Rubio took a different tack. In his statements he repeatedly tried to downplay the UFO angle, and play up the airspace sovereignty threat. On February 13 he tweeted:
He released a video statement before going into classified briefing on balloon shootdowns:
“This is a topic I’ve been on for a long time. This is not new. It may sound new, but it really isn’t. We have been seeing objects flying over restricted airspace in the United States for a long time now. No one took it seriously because immediately it was about UFOs and flying saucers and aliens, and that’s not my concern. My concern is that some other country has developed a capability to monitor and enter our airspace and that we are not prepared to identify it because … we’re looking for airplanes, we’re looking for missiles, we’re not looking for objects that don’t fit that criteria.”
After the briefing he said this to the press:
“We have hundreds and hundreds of these over the years. The report that was issued by the Department of National Intelligence earlier this year lists over 500 such cases, dozens this year alone. … What bothers me the most is that everyone is acting like this is the first time we’ve ever seen these things, and so we reacted that way. No, it isn’t. We have hundreds and hundreds of cases reported by military personnel, we have been talking about it for years.”
Again, the confusion lies in the category error of lumping together the Chinese spy balloon, which was a foreign nation “flying something over places they aren’t allowed,” with the three other objects, which were certainly not that, with the conclusions of the UAP reports, which were about an entirely different class of unidentified object.
Politicians are like surfers. They have a sixth sense for the trending wave of public attention, and they will try to ride it in order to serve their political agenda or help a message breakout with a larger audience. The current news hook need not perfectly sync with the topic they want to push. Doing so may reveal certain political realities, but it clouds actual reality.
That is what happened with the balloon shootdowns. Some in Congress used them to call attention and support to the work of AARO, even though AARO would be wasting its time if it got involved in the four incidents the politicians were referencing. All of the politicians who spouted off about transparency and how the American public can handle the truth–they were not talking about UFOs, or even whatever they think AARO is investigating. Most of them could not tell you what the four letters in AARO stand for, and were simply trying to leverage the public conversation to box the Biden administration into admitting that it wasted several very expensive missiles shooting down some kids’ science experiment launched from the roof of Lake Wobegon High School.
Takeaway 3: Politicians always cater to highly specific political or practical aspects of their jobs. Always factor in the full context of their statements.
Takeaway 4: Not everything a politician says needs to be taken seriously. Sometimes they don’t know what they are talking about.
Disclosure Leaders
Finally there are the founders of the modern iteration of the Disclosure movement, who only performed a little better. On the afternoon of February 12, after the third shootdown but before NORAD provided any information, Lue Elizondo tweeted:
Again, it’s understandable that he felt this way at the time. But with hindsight this makes it sound like he resigned because the military was refusing to produce a full accounting of airborne clutter. Tweets like this contributed to the atmosphere that we were in a Disclosure moment, that we were dealing with real UAPs. We weren’t.
Chris Mellon, in a blog post published February 14, also used the shootdowns as an opportunity to plug his Disclosure efforts and AARO, but he at least put this qualification at the top:
“Most of these [UAP] incursions were not slow, high-flying objects, but craft operating at much higher speeds at much lower elevation in much closer proximity to U.S. forces and facilities. Notably, many of these objects appeared to exhibit performance characteristics that are far more impressive and concerning than any of the objects recently downed by the U.S. Air Force.”
By the end of the month, Ryan Graves cut through all the confusion with a Politico article titled “We Have a Real UFO Problem. And It’s Not Balloons.” Graves knows better than anyone because he has seen them from his fighter jet.
Just what is a UAP anyway?
Balloons and UFOs have been getting mixed up long before the term UFO was invented. But part of the current confusion stems from the fact that we have inserted a new term–Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon–that is supposed to fit somewhere between conventional objects like balloons and the far-out possibility of the UFO. (It also does not help that Congress keeps changing and adding to the letters in UAP.) In March, when Politico asked the Pentagon for an update on the still unidentified objects shot down in February, spokesperson Susan Gough gave the official definition:
“UAP are objects that cannot be immediately identified and may exhibit anomalous behavior. Anomalous behavior means that DoD operators or sensors cannot make immediate sense of collected data, actions or activities.”
My larger point is that within days or hours of the shootdowns, all of us could have used common sense to make sense of what those objects were.
Of the three words that make up UAP, the emphasis should always be placed on Phenomenon and not Unidentified. UAP are called a phenomenon because they represent a complex mystery. Based on the DNI’s own assessments, and Congress’s explicit directives, “resolving” genuine UAP will require extensive interagency cooperation, especially with NASA. Also, it will involve deep scientific analysis, and may possibly require “additional scientific knowledge” and “pending scientific advances” that are years beyond current understanding.
In July 2022, the Senate Intelligence Committee directed AARO not to waste its or Congress’s time reporting on misidentified conventional objects like what would be shot down seven months later: “Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena.”
Yes, the three objects were unidentified. But there was no evidence that they fit the definition of a UAP.
Takeaway 5: Not everything that is unidentified should be considered a potential UFO.
Next time around, we need sharper instincts. If another conventional aerial encounter gets spun up into a UFO story, it will only make everyone less willing to entertain the reality of UFOs in the future.
But, crucially, the kinds of missteps outlined above will also cause problems in a genuine UFO event that involves the wider public and the media. Because when that event unfolds, it’s not going to be as simple as a UFO landing on the Washington Mall announcing its intentions in clear terms. It might not be clear for some time what is even happening. As with the shootdowns, there will be a fog of uncertainty that might last days.
The last thing we will need is public figures jumping up and down saying “this is what I’ve been talking about” when what they have been talking about might not accurately describe what is actually occurring. The last thing we will need is politicians confusing the public with category errors (weather balloon vs. spy balloons vs. “balloon-like entities” vs. airborne clutter vs. drones vs. unmanned aerial systems vs. UAPs that are all of the above vs. UAPs that are truly anomalous vs. UFOs…) The last thing we will need is a politician who doesn’t know anything telling people to “lock their doors.” The last thing we will need is the media pretending it knows what the public is thinking and translating that through pop culture cliches. All of this happened before and will happen again. We don’t need to fall for it next time.
Final takeaway: Ground yourself in the known facts, whatever they are. Separate the facts from the speculation and the BS.