Even if Chinese spy balloons – or alien spacecraft scouting the planet ahead of their coming invasion – start being deployed more discreetly than they have been of late, there will still be more sightings than usual of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs: a new set of initials designed to help UFOs shed their dodgy past). The word has gone out that the stigma attached to military personnel who report UAPs has gone, and they appear to have responded: there were more reported UAP sightings between March 2021 and August 2022 than in the previous 17 years, including nearly 200 that remain unexplained. What’s more, the sensors that scan American skies have been recalibrated to catch slower-moving items, such as suspicious Chinese balloons – something that is bound to give rise to more false alarms. 

The speculation that three out of the four floating interlopers recently downed by the US – the ‘cylindrical object’, the octagonal object and the object the size of a small car – were of alien origin owed a lot to the fact that the US is in the middle of one of its periodic waves of UFO sightings, known as ‘flaps’. Such flaps have a way of spreading, even if this one was triggered by sightings and video imagery which may owe more to Beijing’s balloons and drones than anything that has made its way to us from beyond the stars. People see what they want or expect to see. 

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