Did Anybody Notice Biden’s UFO Handling Was a Complete Farce?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 20, 2023

 

When President Joe Biden finally deigned to fill the American people in on why his administration had turned the skies above North America into a live-fire zone over the course of two weeks in early February, the backdrop against which he delivered his address was widespread confusion. In lieu of new or relevant facts and seemingly aware that an inexplicable rain of fiery debris descending across the continent can become a political liability, however, the president approached the lectern armed only with defensive bravado.

 

Biden began by informing the nation that his Pentagon had responded to the incursion of a Chinese surveillance balloon, which U.S. forces neutralized on February 4, with enhanced scrutiny of the skies over North America. That survey was alarmingly productive, turning up at least three unidentified objects that were shot out of the sky in as many days. This course was taken “out of an abundance of caution,” Biden said, in part because the objects were flying at altitudes shared by commercial air traffic but also “because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities.” The president did, however, note that the unidentified objects remain unidentified, and there was “nothing” to indicate that the vehicles were related to foreign surveillance programs.

 

Much of what the president said contributed to the impression that this adventure was a spectacular cock-up fueled by apprehension: The administration had suddenly realized that American airspace was penetrable by low-tech devices operated by aggressive armed forces abroad. After all, the problems presented by unmanned aircraft flying at dangerous altitudes has vexed regulatory authorities for years, but it had never previously necessitated a military response — much less three kinetic events in quick succession. That perhaps explained why Biden assumed the booming cadence he deploys to convey resolve, even if his resolve in this case was to meet the threat posed by objects that were “most likely” associated with “private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

 

Biden confessed that the incidents over Alaska, the Yukon, and Lake Huron were still being assessed by U.S. intelligence agencies, and American and Canadian armed forces were “seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed that, until the objects are recovered, “we can’t definitively say without analyzing the debris what these objects were.” But within 48 hours of these remarks, the U.S. and Canada called off the search, the debris fields having turned up nothing. To judge by the administration’s self-set criteria, we’ll never definitively know what the objects that so menacingly compromised North American airspace really were.

 

Biden went on to attempt to reassure Americans that the unprecedented and anomalous conduct in which U.S. warplanes engaged was not necessarily a sign of things to come. “We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky,” the president insisted. “We’re now just seeing more of them, partially because the steps we’ve taken to increase our radars — to narrow our radars.”

 

That rings true. After U.S. forces broadened the aperture of its radar surveys, they found that “if you look for unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, you will find them floating in US skies,” as CNN put it. After NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) adjusted its algorithms and data filters, the low-tech vehicles detected and occasional “radar anomaly” repeatedly forced it to scramble jets and temporarily close sensitive airspace. But these suddenly ubiquitous phenomena disappeared just as abruptly. When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked about this aerial invasion on February 15, he confessed that no additional objects had been detected “in the last 48 hours.” Either these vehicles suddenly skedaddled, or NORAD once again narrowed its radar sweeps to avoid capturing benign objects and anomalous signatures.

 

It’s safe to assume that the president meant all this to be reassuring. “Make no mistake,” Biden declared, “if any object presents a threat to the safety and security of the American people, I will take it down.” That might be encouraging if he were not similarly intent on shooting down entirely harmless commercial or research vessels. Moreover, it would be easy enough to ponder this irresolvable ambiguity and chalk it up to error if the administration wasn’t also retailing its hyper-competence and technological supremacy.

 

According to “U.S. intelligence officials,” the Pentagon monitored the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the whole of the American continent from the moment it took off. Officials observed the balloon as it drifted toward Guam until it allegedly veered off course, making its way to Alaska on January 28 before finally being shot down off the South Carolina coast a week later. To hear senior officials tell it, the appearance of such craft in our skies has been a regular occurrence, which explains their lethargy. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Pentagon retroactively determined that Chinese spy vessels violated U.S. airspace during the Trump administration, “believing Beijing was using them to test radar-jamming systems over sensitive U.S. military sites.” But these “basic assessments” were somehow never kicked up the administrative chain. Nevertheless, if the U.S. has such a firm handle on Chinese surveillance craft, what explains the alarm over objects we did not similarly track?

 

“Since I came into office,” Biden concluded, “we’ve developed the ability to identify, track, and study high-altitude surveillance balloons connected with the Chinese military.” Casual observers could be forgiven for refusing to take the president’s word for it. Nothing about the initially paralytic response to the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon over Montana, the downplaying of its significance, and the sudden about-face on shooting it and anything else that moved out of the sky conveys a command of the situation.

 

This bout of trigger-happy panic would be disconcerting enough if the White House hadn’t tried to disguise its discombobulation by appealing to flippancy. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this,” Jean-Pierre offered without solicitation, “but there is no — again no indication — of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.” The press predictably lapped up the opportunity to cover the “national craziness” over what’s in our skies and the violent means taken to address it as they would an appetite-whetting human-interest story. But that betrays only their discomfort in processing what we all witnessed.

 

Only after the public had on its own come to terms with the administration’s befuddlement did the president come out and admit as much, but in a tenor that conveyed his firm determination to deter American balloon enthusiasts from challenging the geostrategic status quo. In the absence of an unspoken imperative to avoid providing Republicans with political fodder, it’s likely that the fourth estate would regard the administration’s erratic, hair-trigger approach to dealing with inexplicable aerial phenomena as something other than a passing news cycle. Given that imperative, it will be left to Republicans to litigate these events and the White House’s response to them. Democrats and their allies in the press had better hope the public is as uninterested in what the GOP might find as it appears to be.