At latest count, Sidewinder missiles have burst both a wayward Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” floating over the U.S. and Canada. These suspected spies cast an unexpected spotlight on a significant national security issue: balloons and drones gathering intelligence for foreign powers.
But they also provide a likely explanation for some of the last decade’s highly publicized sightings of unidentified flying objects by military pilots. At least a more plausible explanation than extraterrestrials. And the Pentagon’s past habit of punting such observations to a quirky and inadequate team of investigators from an obscure task force was an institutional failure.
Although the first balloon burst, a 200-foot-high white sphere, was the opposite of stealthy or unidentified, the more recent aerial objects downed over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron, fell squarely in the realm of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the latest name for UFO’s that the Pentagon settled on last year.
Birds, party balloons, weather balloons and trash that might be labeled UAP fill the sky, along with drones, consumer and otherwise. We now know that the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command had blunted its radars to prevent such aerial flotsam from cluttering its screens, according to the White House. Until now, the priority targets were aircraft and missiles, which are large and fast. Small, slow objects, like balloons, were filtered out and ignored.
That’s why we didn’t know about the balloons that likely explain the “GoFast” UFO sighting made by U.S. Navy pilots in 2015, a seeming high speed encounter over the ocean that, in truth, depicts a much slower object made to look fast by the parallax effect, where the high speed is only relative to the Navy plane, like a tree “flying” past the window of a train. Balloons might even explain some aspects of the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” incidents.
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