The introductory epistle
above constitutes the final seven lines of “The Blimp”, (complete lyrics below
as Attachment One) composed and performed by one Captain Beefheart,
(aka Don VanVliet: 1941 – 2010) who was among the
curiosities in the cabinet of Frank Zappa, also RIP.(See his obituary as Attachment Two)
Lincoln’s Birthday come and
gone.Valentine’s Day, too.The Grammies,
Superbowl and State of the Union over; Mardi Gras, Easter and the Oscars still
to come... the Turko-Syrian earthquake, the war in
Ukraine, inflation, George Santos stealing puppies from the Amish – well, like
Portuguese Joe’s “Teenage Riot”, it’s all “still goin’
on”.*
But what was on the mind of
Don Jones and creeping through his daylight fears and nighttime shudders?
The blimp!
As the movies, TV shows and
alien (Martian and beyond, not Mexican or Guatemalan) reassure us (or threaten
us, according to the producers’ whim), the truth is always “out there.”Out
there, beyond the beyond, where beds are usually uncomfortable and baths
might be undertaken with sulfuric acid or some other liquid, but noxious
chemical.“Out there”, down here at Area
Fifty One.
But who would have suspected
your children’s birthday party balloons.
Big, evil balloons -
technically blimps – or, rather, the confirmed Chinese balloon with its
three-car long “bay” full of either “weather equipment” (if you believe
President Xi) or spy stuff (if you believe the CIA, NSA, FBI and other spooktakular American sorts)... plus three new “objects”
shot down over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron recently – these, instead of big
plastic dirigibles being small metallic things...
sometimes octagonal and dangling tentacles like flying squids.“Objects” – created and launched by...
By the Chinese?Likely as not.By other foreign governments with malign
intent... maybe the Russians or, in descending order of probability, Iranians,
Cubans, Venezuelans, Afghans, NoKos, HoHo’s or Ding Dongs?By private entrepreneurs: American or other?Possible.
By, uh...
Little green men?
“Over the
last couple of years, America has faced up to the decades-long taboo
about UFOs, and
gradually dedicated more time and resources to researching the mysterious objects
in our skies. And, lo and behold, the US government spotted something
interesting hovering over Montana earlier this month... and promptly shot it
down. By now, you’ve probably already heard the working theory about the
Chinese surveillance balloon, sent to spy on US soil from above.”(Daze Digital – Attachment Three)
The
dirigible intruder was tracked and then... while G.O.Politicians,
many under the blimp in Western states condemned President Joe as a coward and
presumed China symp-chimp and those same Chinese
vocally and absurdly contended it was just a weather balloon blown off
course... shot it down off the tourist resort of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Soon, Daze
D. reported (and many, many others chimed in), several
more UFOs were shot down over North America, including an “octagonal” flying
object over Lake Huron, Michigan, and high-altitude UFOs over Canada’s Yukon
territory and Deadhorse, Alaska.
Could
North America have been swarmed by Chinese surveillance balloons? Or, surmised
the Dazers, “could it actually be a swarm of aliens, preparing to whisk us off
our festering space rock or zap us out of existence? We want to believe,” the
believers said.
Even the
money people covered their China cards with Aldebarian
dice.“Maybe they came from China. Maybe from somewhere farther away,” suggested
David Klepper of Fortune.“A lot farther away.”(Attachment Four)Not that Wall Street is panicking over
UFO’s... nor, perhaps, taking an optimistic outlook that the aliens are benign
and will bring us new cures for cancer, new superstrong
metallic compounds or new strains of grapefruit, does Fortune validate the
reality of the little green men.“(C)omplicated world events and a lack of information can
quickly create the perfect conditions for unchecked conjecture and
misinformation,” Klepper ultimately warned.
“Don’t worry, just some of my friends of mine stopping by,” Elon Musk,
the CEO of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, joked in a tweet Sunday.
Tuesday morning, once
the Valentines’ Day roses were deposited in water and chocolate candies in
mouths, CBS News (February 15th, Attachment Five) undertook a
timeline of the big balloon and little silver objects’ journey through the
American skies, leading to panic (for some), hope and/or excitement (for
others) and a mutual Sino-American anger that resulted in the cancellation
of Secretary of State Antony Blinken's tripto China.Some of the principle
contentions of timeliner Catlin Yilek,
CBS and various sources were...
7:26
PM / FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Jan. 28
China's
surveillance balloon entered U.S. airspace near Alaska before transiting over
Canada and then the continental U.S.
Feb. 2
The
Defense Department said it was tracking the balloon over the continental U.S.,
and that the balloon had been over Montana a day earlier, on Feb. 1. Following
the announcement, the balloon stopped loitering and proceeded as fast as it
could toward the East Coast, a U.S. official said.
The
spy balloon's height was comparable to the Statue of Liberty, about "200
feet tall with a jetliner size payload," Assistant Secretary of Defense
Melissa Dalton told senators during a subsequent hearing.
Feb.
3:
Blinken
cancels his weekend in China.
Feb.
4:
“Loitering” presumably having been determined a
capital crime, “a U.S. fighter jet shot down the
balloon off the coast of South Carolina.
Feb. 5:
Recovery
of the balloon began. It was delayed by a day after it was shot down because of
rough seas off the coast of South Carolina, Dalton said.
Feb. 8
In
an interview with CBS News, Defense Secretary
Lloyd Austin said that
the "majority" of the balloon pieces that were on the surface had
been recovered. "We've mapped out the debris field and now we'll go
through detailed efforts to recover the debris that's on the ocean floor,"
Austin said.
Feb. 10 to 12:
The
search for debris was suspended because of bad weather.Three more objects were spotted over U.S. and
Canadian airspace. On Friday, Feb. 10, U.S. officials
downed a "high-altitude object" off the coast of Alaska. An
unidentified object was shot down in
Canadian airspace the
next day, and the U.S. military shot down another object spotted over the Great
Lakes region that Sunday, Feb. 12.
The
unidentified object that was downed near Alaska was the size of a small car,
according to the Pentagon. The object shot down over Lake Huron appeared to be
octagonal in shape with strings hanging off, but no discernable payload, a
senior administration official said.
Feb. 13: Balloon recovery
Recovery
efforts resumed after being postponed because of bad weather.
A
U.S. official said a "significant" portion – 30 to 40 feet – of the
balloon's antenna array was recovered from the ocean bottom. These portions
will be going to an FBI lab at Quantico, an official said.
The
search for the objects shot down off the coast of Alaska and over Canada
continued, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said during a White
House briefing, because the remains are located in remote terrain, making them
hard to find. He said the object over Lake Huron is in deep water.
Kirby
said that the U.S. did not detect that any of the objects were sending
communications signals before they were shot down. The U.S. also assessed that
they showed no signs of self-propulsion or maneuvering and were not manned, he
said.
"The
likely hypothesis is they were being moved by the prevailing winds," Kirby
said.
Feb. 14
Kirby
said there is so far no indication that the three unidentified objects were
part of Chinas' spying program or involved in "external intelligence
collection efforts." The U.S. is also "ruling out that they were U.S.
government objects," he said, though it's still possible they were linked
to commercial or research entities.
And,
U.S. officials also said Tuesday that U.S. intelligence had tracked the spy balloon that was shot down earlier
this month when it lifted off from Hainan Island, off the south coast of China.
It drifted east in the direction of Guam and Hawaii and then went north toward
Alaska, entering U.S. airspace on Jan. 28. Given the path, it's possible that
the balloon was blown off course by weather, but officials said that once
it came south over the continental United States, it was being controlled by
China.
As evidence of the ChiComs’ “sinister” intentions and the possible
implications... everything from sanctions to nuclear war... rolled across the
world, foreigners (sympathetic and hostile) hopped on the bandwagon of their
choice.
Here and there, a bolt of common
sense pierced the diplomatic dark.Of course China’s balloon was spying,” stated Jonathan
Steele of the customarily liberal and pacifist Guardian UK.“States all spy on each other.”
Recalling from the Cold War the American U-2 spy plane
and capture of pilot Gary Powers by the Russians, who gave him a ten year sentence (only
slightly longer than Britney Griner’s term for smoking pot).He was swapped out for Russian Col. Abel
after nearly two years,
“The reality is that using
technology to spy on other states’ military capabilities is as old as it is
widespread. So is the use of covert tools to discover another government’s
intentions. The methods are constantly being updated,” wrote Steele – who also
went one step beyond (Attachment Six), calling such spying “a benefit” and
“(t)he more that countries know about a potential enemy’s defence
systems the better it usually is.
“Starting hostilities is less
likely if you have accurate and up-to-date information about what your army is
up against (a lesson Vladimir Putin failed to learn before 24 February last
year).”
And then, Steele turned to butter
with the wishy-washy contention that “the crucial issue, which no amount of
balloons or satellites can provide, is empathy. Put yourself in the other
side’s shoes. Understand their history, culture and the economic and political
pressures their leaders are under.”
He might have added the mental
delusion of some “leaders”... Putin, certainly, probably NoKo’s
Kim, maybe China’s Xi... that 11th or 16th or 18th
century notions of glorious conquest and world domination by an umpty-great
Alexander or Genghis Khan grandson, coupled with the seething genocidal hatred
of ninety years ago are, as Lindsay Graham said on This Week yesterday morning,
simply to be defeated, not provoked,The
Russian case was clear as even Kamala Harris admitted (if not her boss)... the
contention that the two countries “are rivals and competitors, but they are not
enemies,” should be taken with a drop of salt (and a larger drop of ammunition).
“Everything should be done by
western countries not to slip into a mindset that treats China as hostile,”
Steele bent. “Peace in Asia – and indeed the whole world – is too important to
be hijacked by hysterical excitement over a roving balloon.”
Fortunately, the U.S. Military has
been pivoting toward a “zero tolerance” of territorial overflights at altitudes
which pose a risk to private and public aircraft as well as the higher heights
with no real purpose save surveillance.
Also on Valentine’s Day, Time
asked the question: why
does the military keeps spotting so many unidentified flying objects—“and then shooting them down?”(February 14, Attachment Seven)
In the first two weeks of February, after all, the U.S.
Air Force had shot down four flying objects that had
intruded on the skies over North America: the alleged Chinese surveillance balloon that the Biden
Administration said was part of a years-long scheme to spy on nations across
the Earth, then three other “objects”... a “car-sized” inatruder
shot down over Alaska on Friday, a “cylindrical” UFO, “potentially a balloon,
but smaller than the Chinese balloon” on Saturday, and then the third “object”
– shot and sunk within the deep waters of Lake Huron on Monday.
While the Chinese balloon was at 60,000 feet of
altitude—well above the ceiling for passenger planes—the other objects were
flying much lower, closer to the 20,000-40,000 feet that commercial aircraft
reach.
“Experts” told Time that the North
American Aerospace Command (NORAD” was, until this month, previously focusing on “spotting
fast-moving objects that generated a lot of heat—think missiles, bombers and
fighter jets. When radars and other surveillance methods are tuned to those
threats, it can be easy to miss slow-moving balloons, which also might not show
up on radar as well.”
General Glen VanHerck, NORAD’s
commander, said the U.S. has adjusted its radar to track slower objects. “With
some adjustments, we’ve been able to get a better categorization of radar
tracks now,” he said, “and that’s why I think you’re seeing these, plus there’s
a heightened alert to look for this information.”
An alternate explanation for the “information”... one that
is supported by perhaps half the Joneses in America... is that
those “objects” which are not Chinese come from ... you know... up there.
Way up there – above fifty, a hundred, a thousand thousand feet or, perhaps, millions.
And
celebrities believe, wholly or partially or... like Green Bay’s quarterback
Aaron Rodgers... who suggested to a TV sports journalist that the “objects” were being hyped up
for nefarious reasons.
“It’s interesting
timing on everything,” the anti-vaxxing Rodgers told
Pat McAfee (Indy One Hundred, Attachment Eight). “There’s a lot of other things
going on in the world,” citing, in addition to the war, inflation, crime and
weather, “the (Jeffrey) Epstein client list about to be released?”
Also according to
Indy, Tucker Carlson has begun “fuelling the flames of an alien conspiracy
theory among his loyal followers, during his Fox News show on Monday night, telling viewers: “So here
you have three unknown objects in three days. If these things are
extraterrestrial, what we’re seeing is an alien invasion.”
Carlson seized on the
suggestion by Gen. Mark Milley that he “wouldn’t rule
out extraterrestrials or any other explanation yet” and harvested a bouquet of
delighted tweets “with users responding with alien-head emojis and clamouring that “they” should take Joe Biden away with
them.”(Attachment Eight A)
The Indies also
reported on official denials by official officials that there was nothing to
worry about from alien astronauts with White House spokesperson John Kirby,
saying: "I don't think the American people need to worry about aliens with
respect to these crafts, period,” and President Joe’s SecPress
asserting that “there is no, again no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial
activity with these recent takedowns."
However, according to
the Jan.15 issue of Time, the Chinese,
in the face of loss of face, have been doing some sanctioning themselves
causing President Joe to moan and pulls his My Pillow over his face.
China
has now accused the U.S. of flying several balloons into its airspace since the
spring of last year, which White House spokesperson John Kirby flatly denied
during an appearance Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
"We
do not deploy surveillance balloons over China," Kirby said, though he
declined to answer a follow-up question on whether the U.S. spies on China.
The
bedazzled (above and Attachment Three) also reported that: “The excitement of amateur ufologists was only heightened over the
weekend, when Glen VanHerck, who oversees the North
American Aerospace Defense Command, told a journalist that he wasn’t prepared
to dismiss the possibility of aliens just yet. “I’ll let the intel community
and the counterintelligence community figure that out,” he said. “I haven’t
ruled out anything.”
So the matter was,
officially, “put to bed” and the public told to go back to sleep.But a Pentagon study published in June 2021
did not rule out a possible extraterrestrial origin for 144 "unidentified
aerial phenomena."
If, however, the
politicians want Don Jones to swallow some Quaaludes and melatonin, washed down
by a double Black Jack regarding wrinkled old E.T., some want us up and at ‘em
over those sinister Celestials.
“The evolution of
Washington’s understanding of the Chinese military’s original goals and new
details that reveal misreadings of the U.S. reaction
by Chinese officials in private meetings reflect how difficult it is for the
United States and China to discern each other’s intentions,” declared
Thursday’s New York Times (Attachment Nine)... — a gap that American officials
fear “could lead to greater mistrust in an already fraught relationship or even
to armed conflict.
“Chinese officials,”
the Times reported, “...did nothing about the balloon as it passed over the
continental United States — including above nuclear missile silos in Montana —
for days after senior American diplomats first confronted Chinese officials in private
over it.”
On Friday, Feb. 3,
after China issued a public statement expressing regret, SecStateBlinken canceled a planned
weekend visit to Beijing, initiating a tit
for spat and matching of denouncements and sanctions plus a diplomatic freeze
that did not begin to thaw until yesterday, when Tony and the Chinese envoy Wang
Yi held what, as usual, were called
“frank” discussions over the incident during a gathering of Russia-less
globalists in Munich.
Subsequently, Beijing
went back on its words again, as reports circulated that they are now prepared
to give (or more likely to sell or swap for gas and oil) “lethal” weapons which
will extend Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Even earlier, some
military intelligence experts warned that “Beijing may be developing the
program to supplement its satellite intelligence collection and also to have
backups for the satellites in the event of war with the United States.”
John Culver, a former
U.S. intelligence analyst on China told the Times that China has “260
intelligence satellites in orbit.They’re a major space power. This can augment that capability.”
“When public opinion that the other country is
an enemy solidifies,” said Yuen Yuen Ang, a China
scholar at Johns Hopkins University, “it becomes ever harder for leaders in
America and China to soften their stances and stabilize relations.”
“Since the Feb. 4 downing of the balloon, the United States has
sanctioned six Chinese entities it said are linked to Beijing’s aerospace
programs,” reported the Associated Press (Attachment Ten).The U.S. House of Representatives
subsequently voted unanimously to condemn China for a “brazen
violation” of U.S. sovereignty and efforts to “deceive the international
community through false claims about its intelligence collection campaigns.”
Ilhan Omar, George Santos and MTG on the same side of the
fence?Formidable!
A further sign of linkage with the West and rejection of the
Chinese presumptions to sovereignty over Asia was flashed by senior lawmakers
in Japan’s governing party who said they were considering expanding the Self
Defense Force law to also include violations of Japanese airspace by foreign
balloons.Toss Taiwan and SoKo into the chop suey and you have the makings of what
independent Presidential candidate Jack Parnell has touted as “the birthing of
an Asian prosperity and defense sphere” that establishes a rule of law and
order similar to that over which fly the flags of NATO and/or the European
Union.
The Chinese are justifiably enraged and terrified, but remain
confident that their intimidation of Asian rivals (and potential enemies)
ranging from the Japanese and Indian superstates to tiny island sanctuaries
will forestall Western retaliatory measures.Malaysia
and the Philippines (Time, Attachment Eleven).
“Southeast Asian nations are eager to avoid that sort of
outcome and looking to avoid any conduct that might upset Beijing,” says Chong
Ja Ian, an expert on China’s diplomacy and professor at the National University
of Singapore.
“Some of this [reticence] is driven by a continued lack of
confidence in the United States,” says Chong. Regional powers, he adds, are
“not sure whether there might be a return of Trump or a Trump-like figure.”
Facing the prospect of
conflict with China at the same time as America was concerned that Putin’s War
might escalate, there was a measure of prudent (to supporters, cowardly to
hardliners) justification of Beijing’s aims and actions.The Washington
Post was the first to report that the balloon “may have
been diverted from its original route and that the resulting incident and
tensions with China might have been due, in part, to a mistake.” (ABC News,
Attachment Twelve)It was said that the
balloon “was on course to fly toward the U.S. territory of Guam when it took an
unexpected turn north due to strong winds,” (as if our military installations
in the Pacific were somehow less important than nuclear bases in Montana).
On
the other hand, it could have been an instance of mind control.
Targeted
alien mind control.
The
man who went on a deadly rampage with a U-Haul truck Monday in New York City,
for example, was deemed to be suffering from “an apparent mental health crisis
and said he started mowing people down after seeing an “invisible object”
coming toward him, police said Tuesday.” (AP International, Attachment
Thirteen)
But
could that invisible object have been an alien targeting agent... dropped off
by the blimp during its journey and making his/her/its way to Gotham?
Weng
Sor, a troubled man with a history of violence and mental illness, told police
that seeing an “invisible object” set him off, Chief of Detectives James Essig
told reporters Tuesday. Sor’s family said he’d stopped taking his medication,
Essig said.
So, for some, it was
back to the little green men.Could it actually have been that “swarm of
aliens,” as Daze D hypothesized, above.Could the “abundance of caution: expressed by Kirby was intended to
protect “our security, our interests and flight safety? (New Zealand Herald,
Feb. 13th, Attachment Fourteen)
The Kiwis, down
under, reported that General VanHerck stressed that
“we’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason”.
“I’m not able to categorise how they stay aloft,” he said. “It could be a
gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a
propulsion system.”
Those Kiwis, the
koalas and kangaroos, too reported that some online conspiracy theorists,
meanwhile, have dismissed the latest UFO wave as a “psy-op”
being waged by the US government inasmuch as if “bubble boys” were confined to
big balloons to prevent infections, aliens could traverse the galaxy in the
same manner.
Conspiracy podcast
host Stew Peters, banned from Spotify in 2021 for spreading Covid
misinformation, slammed the UFO reports as “fake”.
“We’re supposed to
believe US pilots shot down an object over Canadian airspace but we let a
massive spy balloon slowly float over US airspace for days without shooting it
down. This is all FAKE!” he wrote on Twitter.
He later added,
“EXPLANATION OF FAKE UFO ‘reports’: Our government doesn’t know how to govern
unless they create some kind of fake threat to drag us into an entirely phony
war.”
Conservative YouTube
comedians the Hodge Twins tweeted, “We going straight from the Covid Plandemic into some Alien invasion psy-op.”
Former professional
baseball player Aubrey Huff wrote, “Calm down everyone. What you’re seeing in
the sky isn’t from another planet. It’s Project Blue Beam to once again scare,
confuse and distort the truth so we remain compliant and reliant on corrupt
governments.”
Project Blue Beam is
a conspiracy theory, first floated in 1994 by Canadian journalist Serge Monast, that claims NASA and the United Nations will
attempt to establish the “New World Order” using advanced technology to put on
a gigantic 3D space show.
According to the
theory, the holographic display — created in co-operation with the Antichrist —
would simulate the Second Coming tailored to each faith, with each depiction of
the Messiah then merging into one to abolish the world’s religions.
“Social engineering
for Project Blue Beam takes another step forward,” tweeted far-right YouTuber
Paul Joseph Watson.
It has long been
noted that Monast’s Project Blue Beam concept was
essentially the same as Gene Roddenberry’s original screenplay for the
1975 Star Trek movie,
which was scrapped but later published as a novel.
And the NZH, back in
December, reported that the Pentagon’s
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has received “several hundreds” of
new reports.(Attachment Fifteen)
CNN producer Gabe
Ramirez further stoked the fear, further reporting that: “Today is like an
opening scene to every 80s/90s alien invasion movie. People getting ready for
their Super Bowl parties, while the invaders are just starting to orbit earth.”
Barron’s journalist
Josh Nathan-Kazis ventured: “I just think it’s sort
of a big deal that there is a non-zero chance that the US shot down two
extraterrestrial airships in the past two days? I’m not saying I think it’s
probably aliens! I’m just saying that it’s not definitely not aliens, and also
we’re shooting at them.”
And podcaster Patrick
Hinds joked, “We are experiencing literally the laziest alien invasion possible.”
“There will be an
investigation and we will learn more, but until then this story has created a
playground for people interested in speculating or stirring the pot for their
own reasons,” said Jim Ludes, a former national defense analyst who now leads
the Pell Center for International Relations at Salve Regina University.
“In part,” Ludes told
Fortune (above and Attachment Four), “because it feeds into so many narratives
about government secrecy.”
In fact, many of the usual UFO-loving
suspects (read: right-wing podcast bros) have flipped the script in the past
few days, proposing that the US government’s UFO sightings are manufactured or
overblown to distract from more down-to-Earth issues.
By Monday, “many
social media sites in the U.S. lit up with theories that Biden had deployed the
aerial devices as a way to distract Americans” from other, more pressing
issues. (Daze Digi, above)“Even the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor
Greene, who once claimed that she couldn’t have been at the
January 6 insurrection because she was abducted by a Jewish spaceship, has
hinted that UFOs are being used to lead citizens away from the real issues.”
As the “Chinese spy balloon” and its
various spin-off conspiracy theories have dominated headlines over the last
week, it’s undeniable that the story comes at a convenient time for the US
government.Daze D contends that it’s
pulled significant media attention away from the disastrous train derailment in
Palestine, Ohio, which has seen toxic chemicals rain down on the surrounding
area.
Other distractive concerns
include immigration, inflation, the war in Ukraine and Republican investigations
into Hunter Biden, the president’s son – extreme memes smelling like savory
barbecue to the latenite talk show comedians.
So they pounced.(Guardian UK, Attachment Sixteen)
Stephen
Colbert: “It could
be aliens, it could be balloons, or it could be alien balloons”
Jimmy
Kimmel: “I’d never in a million years
thought I’d say this: where the hell is the Space Force?”
Seth
Meyers: “I never thought I would say this,
but this is one time I kinda wish Donald Trump was still president,” he added.
“Just for like, one hour. Because if it was aliens, he would blurt it out
instantly.”
As the lakes of menace dried up
(excepting, as always, the possibility of blundering into war with China), the
facts flopped on the dry surface like tasty trout and salmon - and these
attacked predators... the bears, the wolves, the birds of the air, the beasts
of the forest, maybe a few galloping gourmets and, notably, the comedians and
comediennes of screen and stage and unwoke workplace
water coolers, all standing up for their rights to ridicule Science and
Government and other assorted authorities.
Some commenters said
Biden’s decision to wait until the balloon had reached the East Coast before
shooting it down showed he was in league with China. Others, meanwhile,
chastised Biden for shooting down foreign aircraft that they imagined could be
carrying bioweapons or nuclear weapons.
By volume, the Biden
distraction conspiracy theories seem to be overtaking the mean little green
queens from Planet Irene with the AP stating that Biden’s “unparalleled decision to shoot down four objects over
North America in eight days“ has furthered the “dissonant messages being sent
about sensitive efforts to protect the homeland.”
President Joe’s legal justification for the downings
— that the objects might imperil civilian flight — is viewed by some officials
as such a remote possibility “that it raises questions about whether it was a
mere pretext for acting tough.”(Attachment Seventeen)
Biden “wants to appear tough on China, and this is a good
example of where actions speak louder than words,” said Brian Ott, co-author of
“The Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage.”
“If we find ourselves next year in a presidential debate between
the two of them, Trump will try to cast Biden as weak on national security, and
Biden will be able turn to Trump and say, ‘How many of these Chinese balloons
and unidentified objects did you shoot out of the sky?’”
And then, over
the weekend, America returned to a grudging, groaning reality. Some commenters said
Biden’s decision to wait until the balloon had reached the East Coast before
shooting it down showed he was in league with China. Others, meanwhile,
chastised Biden for shooting down foreign aircraft that they imagined could be
carrying bioweapons or nuclear weapons.
And others now
believed that little green men and President Joe’s big white junk were of less
import than the distractions from whatever imperilment they feared... vinyl
chloride, immigration, Hunter’s laptop... whatever.
The “objects” may have
been malleable, the cover-ups impermeable.
And
the lawyers?Inevitable!
On
Wednesday, an Illinois hobby club told The Fox that it feared its balloon was
shot down by the Government.
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap
Balloon Brigade’s (NIBBB) silver-coated, party-style "pico
balloon" reported its last position on Feb. 10 at nearly 40,000 ft. off
the west coast of Alaska.
Projections showed that the object
would have been floating over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb.
11 – the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an
unidentified object in the general area.
“Small pico
balloons,” Fox explains (Attachment Eighteen) range between $12 and $180 and
are naturally buoyant above 43,000 ft. These objects carry an 11-gram tracker,
with HF and VHF/UHG antennas to update their positions around the world,
according to Aviation Week.
President Joe refused to
apologize... to the Chinese, to the aliens, to the hobby lobby.During a briefing with governors on Monday, a
White House adviser said the objects shot down “could be any number of
things, including used car lot balloons” while admitting that the three
might have been “benign.”
“We
don’t see anything that points right now to being part of the PRC spy balloon
program,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told the AP
(Attachment Nineteen), referring to the People’s Republic of China. It’s also
not likely the objects were “intelligence collection against the United States
of any kind — that’s the indication now.”
No
country or private company has come forward to claim any of the objects, Kirby
said. They do not appear to have been operated by the U.S. government.
Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters after the briefing that he didn’t think
the objects posed a threat.
“They’re
trying to figure out — you know there’s a bunch of junk up there. So you got to
figure out what’s the threat, what’s not. You see something, you shouldn’t
always have to shoot it down,” Graham said.
The
AP also reported that a first missile aimed at the object over Lake Huron
landed instead in the water, but that a second one hit the target.
Gen.
Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
the military went to “great lengths” to make sure none of the strikes put
civilians at risk, including identifying what the debris field size was likely
to be and the maximum effective range of the missiles used.
“We’re
very, very careful to make sure that those shots are in fact safe,” Milley said. “And that’s the guidance from the president.
Shoot it down, but make sure we minimize collateral damage and we preserve the
safety of the American people.”
A sneak leaker told Rolling
Stone (Attachment Twenty) that the blimp took off from
a base on Hainan Island along the country’s southern coast, American
intelligence reportedly believes. New satellite imagery obtained by researchers
shows that the island is home to a balloon launch facility – perhaps making it
second only to Disney as a hotbed of kiddy party fun.
Sam Lair, a Middlebury Institute of International Studies
(MIIS) researcher who identified the facility along with colleagues Michael Duitsman and Tricia White, says his team also found imagery
of the location hosting airships in Google Earth.
“The entire facility is surrounded by a perimeter security fence
and also includes three large radomes,” used to house
radar antennas, says Lair. The 140 meter launch pad
also has what appears to be launch equipment visible in the satellite imagery,
which was captured in mid-January.
Repercussions
escalated following the destruction of the spy balloon and the Blinken cancellation.CNBC reported that the United States announced new sanctions last week
on six Chinese military and aerial technology firms for their alleged
involvement in China’s global aerial surveillance program (Attachment Twenty
One), quickly followed by retaliatory sanctions aganst
U.S. tech and defense companies like Raytheon.
“But
rather than raise the stakes even higher with his remarks, Biden sought to defuse
tensions between the world’s two largest economies, tensions that some experts
say are near an all-time high,” CNBC wrote.
“We
seek competition, not conflict with China,” said the president. “We’re not
looking for a new Cold War ... we will compete and will we responsibly manage
that competition so that it doesn’t veer into conflict.”
“Coward!”
some sectors of the MAGAsphere responded... even
those whose sympathies lie with Putin who now find themselves in an ideological
quagmire as Mad Vlad and Xi discuss China’s provision of “lethal” artifacts to
the Russians after Biden had told Alexander NBC’s Peter Alexander: “I think the
last thing that Xi wants is to fundamentally rip the relationship with the
United States that was made, in terms of access” to U.S. markets.
Oops!
After
all, why encourage trade when you can just kill your competitor and take
whatever you want.
“Let’s make no bones about it,” clocked in the
pacifists at GUK. (Attachment Twenty Three) “It would be better if China didn’t
spy on the United States. Any US leader would be hard pressed not to shoot down
a Chinese object that the American public has seen flying over US sovereign
airspace – as President Biden decided to do on 4 February. But the reality is
that events like this will be more and more likely in the next decade as the
United States and China bump up against each other globally. The risk of
clashes in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea have preoccupied military
experts for years, but the balloon incident shows they could happen almost
anywhere.
“One
thing seems certain, however: incidents like these could too easily spiral out
of control in the future, ending in disaster. Unless something is done,
dangerous waters lie ahead. Unfortunately, both sides are reluctant to do
what’s needed.
“In the coming years, both sides are certain to seek advantages through intelligence
collection, military posturing and other moves, but each side also has a vital
interest in preventing an unintended spiral of escalation that could end in
catastrophe,” the Guardian concluded.But they did not admit that there are three, not two sides, in what increasably
appears to be a multilateral campaign to conquer and enslave the world...
Xi...
And
Putin...
And,
perhaps... Trump?
As the U.S. military adamitted
that it had ended its search for airborne objects that were shot down near Deadhorse, Alaska,
and over Lake Huron on
Feb. 10 and 12, President Joe took off for an alleged trip to Poland (which
turned out to be something else entirely, as we’ll consider next Lesson).
“The statement released late Friday came hours after
officials said the U.S. had finished efforts to
recover the remnants of the large balloon that was shot down Feb. 4 off
the coast of South Carolina, and analysis of the debris so far reinforced
conclusions that it was a Chinese spy balloon.(USA Today, Attachment Twenty Four)
U.S. Northern Command reported that the decision
to end the search for the objects shot down over Alaska and Lake Huron came
after the U.S. and Canada "conducted systematic searches of each area
using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors,
surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate
debris." Northern Command said air and maritime safety perimeters were
also being lifted at both those sites.
One of the
scientific sorts, writing for Scientific American (Attachment Twenty Five)
decried the Pentagon’s having “fostered a UFO fad” over the decades, devoting
far too much energy to the little green men at the expense of human enemies.
“Until now, the priority targets were aircraft and
missiles (and, of course, flying saucers), which are large and fast. Small,
slow objects, like balloons, were filtered out and ignored.”
The Scientific Americans contend that balloon might
even explain UFO foster fads like “GoFast” or “Tic Tac” as opposed to the Tik Tok clock by which Beijing
(and or Moscow) might be counting down the minutes and sthe
seconds to a surprise nuclear strike.
Now radars
are looking for such objects.
Time (Feb. 16th, Attachment Twenty Six)
postulated that the balloon granfalloon was a “Sputnik Moment” inasmuch as the
Chinese have a longstanding practice of communicating their indirectly. This
balloon flight, on the eve of a visit by the U.S. Secretary of State, “could have been
China’s effort to show strength. In Beijing’s mind, the balloon collection
effort could have been a way of saying that they want friendship but are strong
and will not bow down to the U.S.”
Or they don’t
want friendship, and want us to bow
down to them.(Or, at least, pay off some of our debts.)
Or, on the other hand, a Turkish newspaper reported Saturday that US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken did meet
China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich
Security Conference.(Attachment Twenty Seven)
And see some lyrics as Attachment Twenty Eight.
February 13th – February 19th, 2023
Monday, February 13, 2023
Dow:34,295.93
Death toll
in Syria and Turkey reaches 36,000.Turkish
government and private contractors who erected so many of the shoddy
apartment buildings that collapsed upon their tenants are headed to court and
many of the latter are headed to prison.Here and there, miracle rescues still surprise and delight the
population.
Death toll at Michigan State University a
more modest three as... go figure!... a mass killer unloads upon students and
teachers for reasons unknown, then kills himself.In New York City, a maniace
U-Haul driver mows down eight more, but only one dies.
Mixed messages on the disaster front...
the ruptured (or sabotaged) gasoline pipeline on the West Coast is repaired
and the panic at the pumps in Las Vegas begins to ease.But in Palestine (Ohio) a train derailment
spreads fumes of toxic vinyl chloride, necessitating evacuations.(In Palestine... the Middle East... Israeli
air strikes slaughter civilians in Gaza as retaliation for last week’s
terror.)
Kansas City defeats Philadelphia 38-35 on
blown pass interference call leading to a last second field goal.The victorious Chiefs go to Disneyland and
MVP Patrick Mahomes gets his picture taken with
Mickey Mouse.The Eagles go back to
Philadelphia where angry fans break things and set fires.
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Dow:34,089.27
It’s Valentine’s Day (and also
Dating Violence Awareness Month).Love
is in the air – as is something else.(See above)Gen. van Herch says “I have not ruled out anythimg,” regarding the alien objects shot down over Deadhorse, Alaska,
the Canadian Yukon and Lake Huron.President Joe’s SecPress K. J. Pierre says
there is “absolutely no proof that these were aliens.”Believers remain unconvinced.
CDC cites unlovely lives of teenage girls,
facing an epidemic of drugs, despair and suicide.They are said to be afflicted with record
high rates of sadness.Over in Turkey,
however, a 16 year old girl is glad to have been rescued after a record high
201 hours buried under the rubble while Unicef says
that seven million more children are “at risk” from cold and hunger.A ways north, Russian troops... including
convict mercenaries... make gains in surrounding the Ukrainian town of Bahkmut, but take a huge amount of casualties in the
doing.
Girl power goes to Washington as former
Governor and diplomat Nikki Haley (R-SC) launches her campaign for the
Presidency, challenging Donald Trump who cites her “disloyalty”.Rep. Angie Craig (D-Mn) is attacked in an
elevator by a homeless man with a dozen prior convictions while protesters find a new issue to become enraged about... seems
that women’s underwear is taxed more heavily than men’s.
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Dow:34,128.06
Following Valentine’s Day comes National Hippopotamus Day – animal lovers
condemn the climate change and poaching that has driven the giant mammals
closer to extinction.
A 74 year
old man breaks the record for longest time under rubble... 227
hours... as the Turko-Syrian death toll rises to
41,000.Ukraine begs the West for more
ammunition as civilians in the occupied territories are being rounded up and
sent to Russian “re-education camps.”
Police say that mass school
shootings are up 115% over the last five years.Authorities in Michigan say that school
shooter Anthony McRae was “a loner with mental health problems” while New
York reports that the U-Haul maniac had “mental health issues”.Meanwhile four more are shot at a mall in
El Paso (next door to the WalMart’s where 2019’s
racist holocaust killed 23).The racist
Buffalo grocery store killer is sentenced to life and saved from an angry mob
that storms the courthouse while another grocery killing transpires at a
Kroger’s in Wisc.On the other hand, a
man in St. Louis, wrongly convicted and jailed 28 years on the testimony of a
“coerced” witness is freed and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.)
is cleared of sex charges.
Nikki Haley hits the campaign
trail and calls for “generational change” while promising to support laws
that would require mandatory mental competence hearings for all political
candidates over 75 (including both President Joe and DjonaldUnYoung).
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Dow:33,696.85
There’s yet another near
collision on the airport runway – this one in Hawaii.TSA spokesman assures Don Jones that: “We
are safe!” as spring break travel season begins.Other calming government agents say that
the water in Palestine, Ohio is perfectly safe to drink, but if skeptics want
to purchase and drink bottled water then that is their Constitutional right,
too.Just “trust the government.”
A mysterious secret tip sends the FBI off
on a hunt for more Biden stolen confidential files that are alleged to be at
the University of Delaware.President
Joe himself undergoes his physical exam and is pronounced “healthy and
vigorous.”Sen. Fetterman (D-Pa) not
so, still suffering from effects of a stroke, he checks in to Arkham for “clinical depression.”
Troubled Tesla recalls 350,000
self-driving cars that self-drive badly while Elon Musk scoffs that it’s a
computer software correction not a recall.But he does not euphemize the euthanizaiton
of workers who want to start a union... they’re just fired.
Friday, February 17, 2023
Dow:33,826.50
Neo-Nazi with long, nasty history
kills two Jews in front of L.A. synagogue.“The guy came out of the bushes and shot my friend, then ran away,”
says a witness.Police arrest Jaime Tran, a known anti-Semite.A mass
Miss. shooter kills six, including his ex-wife and father in law, also
captured.And a viral video shows
woman successfully fighting off an abductor who invaded her gym.
Five Memphis cops in the Tyre Nichols case go to court on charges that include
“official oppression”.Disclosures
from their (white) lawyers indicate a potential racial defense strategy; also
that they may be turning upon one another.Another wild bunch of L.A. police are arrested for shooting another
unarmed man.And in Staten Island, NY,
22 firefighters are injured when a burning building collapses.Wall Street Journal reports on National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children contending that Tik Tok is infested
with pedophiles.And Chinese spies.
Good news?Buick is named the best car brand.“Good Vibrations” is voted the happiest song in the world by a panel
of academics who like to pontificate upon such things.And, speaking of pontification, Pope
Francis denies that he’s planning to retire.
Saturday, February 18, 2023
Dow:(Closed)
After a mild week, the wild
weather returns.Temperatures in the
East soar to record heights, then plummet to subzero cold, but are predicted
to rise again.New York falls from 61°
Friday to 21° today, worse if you consider the wind chills.
Speaking of cold places and colder hearts,
Russia is excluded for the Munich Conference on this and that.Kamala Harris calls Putin’s War a crime
against humanity (which is considered worse than a plain old war crime).“Now is not the time” to negotiate with the
Russians says French Pres. Macron.China does attend, and is scolded by SecStateBlinken for cuddling up to the Evil Empire, said to
be gaining ground but at a terrible loss of mostly drafted soldiers.
More survivors are pulled out of the
rubble of the Turko-Syrian earthquake, the longest
setting a new record of 296 hours trapped.One lucky fellow learns that his wife gave birth while he was buried
alive.The confirmed death toll tops
45,000 with many more missing.
Chicago’s basketball nun, Sister Jean,
turns 103 and writes a book.Former
President Jimmy Carter, five years younger, goes into hospice care.
Sunday, February 12, 2023
Dow:(Closed)
SecStateBlinken
finally talks with Chinese envoy on blimps and stuff in Munich and the media
reports that discussions, as usual, were “frank”.But not productive, Beijing leaks that it
intends to provide Putin with “lethal” equipment and, as NoKo
keeps firing rockets towards Japan, the wargasm spurts and slimes.But President Joe throws money at the
crisis... half a billion, angering some Republicans with another hundred mil.
for the Turks... but still no fighter jets, no nukes and, as Tony says the
stupid Slavs of Kyev do not know how to fly the
jets, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reminds America that Ukraine turned 1,700 big bad
bombs over to Bad Vlad for some treaty confetti, calls Team Biden cowards and
says: “I don’t want to provoke Putin, I want to beat him.”
But there’s no recourse to the previous
Administration, not even for the Fox.Dominion sues Team Trump for defamation after Djonald,
Rudy and the rest of his “echo chamber” say that Ol’ 45 won the popular vote
by 2.7 million.A suddenly quiescent
Republican Congress and Senate remain largely silent while members... even
Ted Cruz!... express sympathy for Jimmy Carter and John Fetterman (D-Pa).
The week ends with volleys of American on
American gunfire: carjackers kill a Temple U. policeman in Philadelphia,
unsub or subs scrub a popular L.A. bishop.Nine children (5 to 17) shot after teenage riot party in Columbus, Ga,
five more at pre-Mardi Gras practice shootings in New Orleans.
China
retaliates against US balloon busting by sanctioning Raytheon and Lockheed
after balloon flap terminates visit by SecStateBlinken to Beijing.Threats and counterthreats escalate and...
Terrorism
2%
300
2/13/23
-0.5%
2/27/23
292.72
291.26
...President
Xi says he will consider suppling more “leghal”
armaments to Putin,USA shoots down
Iranian drone in Syria, (in addition to four balloons) and also terminates
ISIS leaders but lose four soldiers and a K-9 when one detonates his suicide
vest.
Politics
3%
450
2/13/23
+0.2%
2/27/23
470.11
471.04
Nikki
Haley hits the campaign trail playing the gender and age cards, accusing Joe
and Djonald of “oldness” while Tim Scott launches a
Freedom in America tour (a campaign surrogate?).Economists say plague & polarization
speeded up destruction of the middle class so Bernie Sanders writes a book
about it, hitting GMA and Colbert today.
Economics
3%
450
2/13/23
-0.2%
2/27/23
438.77
437.89
Consumer
retail sales pivoting from Valentine’s to President’s Day.Small businesses protest proposed Georgia
raising of minwage from $5 to $15 hr.AirBNB profits up
but Ford posts $2B loss – halting production of F-150s over battery
“lightning”.Americans travel and buy
on plastic - now owing a record 980B in credit card bills (Debt Clock, above,
says only 940B) which comes out to $6,500 per capita m/d.Interest rates up above 20% and so are delinquincies.Kraft/Heinz raises prices on mac and cheese and beans.Evil doctors at Wisc. meatpacking plants
fined one million dollars! for
violating child
labor laws in eight states.(Well, $1.5M)
Crime
1%
150
2/13/23
-0.3%
2/27/23
270.62
269.81
Mass Miss.
shooter kills six including ex-wife and father-in-law, 9 children shot in
Columbus Ga, five in pre-Mardi Gras New Orleans. Rotting corpse found in
backyard after three months.Woman
fights off kidnapper but another falls (or jumps) off Disneyland parking
garage.
ACTS of GOD
(6%)
Environment/Weather
3%
450
2/13/23
-0.1%
2/27/23
427.68
427.25
Wild
February mood swings with temperatures way up, way down, then up again.Flooding in W. Virginia.Thirty vehicle snowcrash
in Midwest, record cold in L.A., record heat, then cold, then heat again East
of the Mississippi (where there are tornadoes).Something for (and against) everyone!...
and Texas gets meteorites.Big ones!
Disasters
3%
450
2/13/23
-0.2%
2/27/23
443.66
442.77
Workers at
Mars Candy factory fall into a vat of chocolate.Two die in Tennessee National Guard copter
crash: pilot remembered as a hero for avoidinghomes.22 firefighters injured in Staten I. NY
blaze.Government agent tells
residents of Palestine (Ohio) to trust the government.They don’t.TSA tells fliers they are safe despite recent accidents and the
beginning of Spring Break.
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX
(15%)
Science, Tech, Educ.
4%
600
2/13/23
-0.4%
2/27/23
631.03
628.51
Microsoft
“disables” old Internet browsers, leaving the poor in the lurch.Tesla recalls 350,000 “self-driving” cars
that don’t do what they’re told, then fires workers who try to organiza.Space X
launches 51 satellites, not at anybody in particular.
Equality (econ/social)
4%
600
2/13/23
-0.2%
2/27/23
614.25
613.02
Memphis
killer cops turning on each other, their (white) lawyer promises to play the
race card (as blacks 5x more likely to be face incarceration).Prosecutors will play the Scorpion card...
elite SWAT force has hundreds of excessive force complaints with 75 between
just the five. Texas moves to ban abortion pill imports from other states
and/or countries.
Health
4%
600
2/13/23
-0.3%
2/27/23
475.84
474.41
Bird flu
falling but dog flu up.Rowf! Residents worry that toxic vinyl chloride smoke
from rail disaster in Palestine, OH (above) will lead to cancers in later
life and among children, especially those whom CDC says do not eat a
vegetable a day.Naltrexone
recommended for stopping all drinking
and Starbucks’ vanilla frappucinos with special
ingredient, shards of glass, recalled too.Oprah’s Book of the Month: Susan Cain’s self-help Bittersweet.
Freedom and Justice
3%
450
2/13/23
+0.1%
2/27/23
460.85
461.31
St. Louis
man freed after 28 years for wrongful conviction on murder charges.Matt Gaetz
acquitted of sex crimes.Georgia
promotes legislation to solve homelessness problem – with prisons.And the same old Al-trials (Baldwain, Murdaugh) drag on –
potential Baldwin jail time cut, more Murdaugh
flubs
MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX
(7%)
Cultural incidents
3%
450
2/13/23
+0.3%
2/27/23
480.26
481.70
Following
her Superbowl show, Rihanna announces that she is pregnant.Celebrities at the game include Brittney
Griner, Martha Stewart and Sir Paul and even more celebrities populate the
commercials.Magic Mike Three finally
dethrones Avatar Two at the box office with a weak $8M gross.Tiger Woods makes cut at Genesis
Invitational, then makes a misogynistic joke.Michael Jordan celebrates 60th by donating 10M to
Make-a-Wish.
RIP
actress/pinup girls Raquel Welch (One Million Years BC), Stella Stevens (“The
Nutty Professor”), “Law and Order” actor Richard Belzer,
catcher/broadcaster Tim McCarver, rocker Huey “Piano”
Smith.R(etire)IP:
You Tube CEO Susan Wojcicki TV host Ryan Secrist,
Tom Brady (for real, this time?) but not Pope Frank.
Misc. incidents
4%
450
2/13/23
+0.1%
2/27/23
472.61
473.08
Record
Powerball winner revealed in Ca. takes 997M lump sum as long lost “relatives”
swarm.Governments give up searching
for “unidentified objects” in Deadhorse and Lake Huron.Also for the escaped Central Park owl.
The
Don Jones Index for the week of February 13th through February 19th,
2023 was DOWN21.51 points
The Don Jones Index
is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and
Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian
Doohan, Administrator.The CNC denies,
emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers
(including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin
Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works,
“Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best,
mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective
legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.
Our
Managing Editor, formerly a reporter and columnist, also workedthe Dead Beat (obituaries) for the now
dead journal “Playgrounds”, where he paid tribute to the fallen Captain as
follows...
PLAYGROUNDS
REMEMBERS…
DON
van VLIET (CAPTAIN BEEFHEART)
He never scored a
Top 40 hit, and never performed on the Dick Clark Show, but when notorious
producer and guitarist Frank Zappa was in the mood for something really
strange… stranger than himself… the Captain was there.
Possessing a loud,
growling voice that some compared to the blues howlers of seven decades ago
(others likened it to a drunk in an alley at 3AM) as well as facility with
numerous instruments, van Vliet attended high school with Zappa… three weeks
older… in Lancaster, California, and they formed a band, The Blackouts, with
Zappa on drums and co-authored a musical, “Captain Beefheart
versus the Grunt People”.(He claimed
that the name originated from his Uncle Alan’s favorite term for that bodily
organ he exposed to the good citizens of Lancaster.)
Dropping out of
high school to sell shoes and vacuum cleaners… he closed on writer Aldous
Huxley by promising “I assure you, sir, that this thing sucks!”…
he also worked his way up the Southern California nightclub ladder before
recording two albums, “Safe as Milk” and “Strictly Personal” despite numerous
label changes occasioned by his rather difficult personality (the Beatles were
among his earliest fans and tried to sign him to their label, but he derided
their music in public).
Finally,
he rejoined Zappa, recording what Wikipedia called his magnum opus, “Trout Mask Replica” on the Straight label in
1969.He would release nine albums over
the next few years, but his increasingly dictatorial, almost cultlike treatment
of the backup musicians he called his Magic Band… including starvation, beating
them with broomsticks and shooting them with crossbows… made it difficult to
find collaborators.(He threw drummer
John French down a flight of stairs and paid him only $78 for three lengthy
tours – French retaliated by penning a scabrous biography: Beefheart:
Through The Eyes of Magic.Only the last three, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982) approached the standards of his earlier work.
Thereafter, the Captain retired to the tall redwood country,
and became a painter whose canvases would sell for up to $25,000.He was offered many opportunities to record
or perform again, but refused… increasingly debilitated by multiple sclerosis,
he died on December 17th at 69.Check out Captain Beefheart’s Radar Station at http:/www.beefheart.com.
UNRAVELLING THE CONSPIRACIES ABOUT AMERICA’S UFO SIGHTINGS
The truth is out there
Over the last couple of years, America has
faced up to the decades-long taboo about UFOs, and gradually
dedicated more time and resources to researching the mysterious objects in our
skies. And, lo and behold, the US government spotted something interesting
hovering over Montana earlier this month... and promptly shot it down. By now,
you’ve probably already heard the working theory about the Chinese surveillance
balloon, sent to spy on US soil from above.
Earlier this week, the US military said
that it had managed to retrieve wreckage from the suspected surveillance
balloon that it shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4 (after
waiting for it to float over the ocean in order to avoid pieces falling onto
land). “Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site,”
said US Northern Command in a statement on Monday. “Including all of the priority
sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the
structure.”
China, however, has denied the accusation
that it’s been using balloons to spy on Americans, claiming that it was
actually intended for civilian purposes and drifted into the US by accident.
Moreover, the country says that the US has been peeking over its borders with
high-altitude balloons for years.
Whose story are we supposed to believe?
Well, at this point it’s basically a case of trusting one global superpower over
the other, and neither are known to be particularly reliable. That’s not to
mention the conspiracies about aliens and government psyops that have
proliferated online, or the fact that the so-called Chinese surveillance
balloon was just the beginning. Yes, in case you haven’t heard: several more
UFOs have been shot down over North America in the last week, including an
“octagonal” flying object over Lake Huron, Michigan, and high-altitude UFOs
over Canada’s Yukon territory and Deadhorse, Alaska.
What does it all mean? Is North America
really being swarmed by Chinese surveillance balloons? Could it actually be a
swarm of aliens, preparing to whisk us off our festering space rock or zap us
out of existence? We want to believe.
FIRST, THE ALIEN
QUESTION
Aliens are what most people immediately
think of when they hear the word “UFO” – despite the actual definition being a
little bit broader – and are, undeniably, the most enticing option. With
mysterious objects floating over the US (AKA the epicentre
of UFO sightings since UFO sightings began) it’s no surprise that a good
portion of the speculation has been devoted to little green men.
The excitement of amateur ufologists was
only heightened over the weekend, when Glen VanHerck,
who oversees the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told a journalist
that he wasn’t prepared to dismiss the possibility of aliens just yet. “I’ll
let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out,”
he said. “I haven’t ruled out anything.”
Unfortunately, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has since publicly stated that there’s
“no indication” of aliens or extraterrestrial activity related to the recent
takedowns. Although National Security Council’s John Kirby couldn’t say what
the objects actually are, he has also stated: “I don’t think the American
people need to worry about aliens.”
But that’s what the government would say
if they wanted to cover up aliens infiltrating our airspace en masse, right?
THE LIKELY
EXPLANATION IS MUCH MORE BORING
As usual, the reality is probably much
duller (and dumber) than alien contact. When Montana man Chase Doak posted a video of the OG balloon on February 1, it was
seemingly the first time anyone had paid attention to the floating orb, despite
the US military and other institutions scanning the skies 24/7 with
sophisticated radar systems. The conclusion? They’d simply failed to take such
small, slow-moving objects into account.
After making some adjustments, more of
these objects started coming into view, such as the UFOs above Michigan,
Alaska, and the Yukon – which could actually be
benign, after all. Although it seems like UFOs are converging on
North America, the likely story is that they’ve been there for some time, and
people just haven’t been looking for them. A statement made on Sunday by
Melissa Dalton, the US assistant secretary of defence,
backs up this theory. “We have been more closely scrutinising
our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar,” she explained.
“Which may at least partly explain the increase in objects.”
The US government has offered few official
theories about how long giant balloons have been floating under the radar, but
it’s safe to say that there are a lot of them right now – either civilian or
otherwise. If they want to shoot down every one, then they’ll have a big job on
their hands.
THE UK IS DUE A
WAVE OF UFO SIGHTINGS
As UFO rumours
grew last week, discussion forums were flooded with posts by enthusiasts whose
life goal is to get beamed up by a flying saucer. Thanks to the renewed
interest, experts have advised that the UK is also in for a new wave of
“sightings”, which will mostly amount to people going out into the garden and
getting excited about satellites and stray birthday paraphernalia.
The possibility that foreign surveillance
balloons have drifted into UK airspace has also triggered a security review,
meaning that increased discoveries are likely, as in the US. Rishi Sunak has
confirmed that jets are always on standby in case an airborne object needs to
be shot down (now might not be the time for that romantic hot air balloon trip
you were planning).
CONSPIRACY
THEORISTS... DON’T LIKE ALIENS NOW?
The rash of UFOs over North America puts
US conspiracy theorists in something of a difficult spot, since it places a few
of their favourite suspicions – namely, the existence
of aliens, the interference of foreign powers, and domestic government psyops –
at odds.
In fact, many of the usual UFO-loving
suspects (read: right-wing podcast bros) have flipped the script in the past
few days, proposing that the US government’s UFO sightings are manufactured or
overblown to distract from more down-to-Earth issues. Even the congresswoman
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once claimed that
she couldn’t have been at the January 6 insurrection because she was abducted
by a Jewish spaceship, has hinted that UFOs are being used to lead citizens
away from the real issues.
THE OHIO TRAIN
DISASTER
As the “Chinese spy balloon” and its
various spin-off conspiracy theories have dominated headlines over the last
week, it’s undeniable that the story comes at a convenient time for the US
government. More specifically, it’s pulled significant media attention away
from the disastrous train derailment in Palestine, Ohio, which has seen toxic
chemicals rain down on the surrounding area.
On February 3, a freight train carrying 20
cars of hazardous substances derailed near East Palestine, prompting fears
about lasting environmental damage, and the risk
of illnesses including cancer for residents. It’s already been
reported that pets and other animals have become sick or died since the
derailment and subsequent controlled detonation. Nevertheless, Ohio governor
Mike DeWine claims that it’s safe for residents to return to their homes.
Alongside the train company, authorities have been criticised
for their relative silence on the derailment and its fallout, while others have
called for accountability over the lack of regulations that allowed the
disaster to take place.
We’re not saying that the UFOs are a
coordinated effort to swing the spotlight away from this disaster; two things
can happen at once. If you were thinking of spending the next few hours
comparing pictures of balloons to snapshots taken around Area 51, though, then
your time is probably better spent catching up with what’s
happening in Ohio.
ATTACHMENT
FOUR – From Fortune
SOCIAL MEDIA’S REACTION TO THE BALLOONING UFO
CARNAGE SHOWS THAT THE INTERNET DOESN’T TRUST THE GOVERNMENT
Maybe they came from
China. Maybe from somewhere farther away. A lot farther away.
The downing of four aerial devices by U.S. warplanes has
touched off rampant misinformation about the objects, their origin and their
purpose, showing how complicated world events and a lack of information can
quickly create the perfect conditions for unchecked conjecture and
misinformation.
The presence of
mysterious objects high in the sky doesn’t help.
“There will be an
investigation and we will learn more, but until then this story has created a
playground for people interested in speculating or stirring the pot for their
own reasons,” said Jim Ludes, a former national defense analyst who now leads
the Pell Center for International Relations at Salve Regina University.
“In part,” Ludes
added, “because it feeds into so many narratives about government secrecy.”
President Joe Biden
and other top Washington officials have said little about the repeated shootdowns,
which began with a suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this month. Three more
unidentified devices have been shot down, with the latest Sunday over Lake
Huron. Pentagon officials said they posed no security threats but have not
disclosed their origins or purpose.
On Monday, many social
media sites in the U.S. lit up with theories that Biden had deployed the aerial
devices as a way to distract Americans from other, more pressing issues. Those
concerns included immigration, inflation, the war in Ukraine and Republican
investigations into Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
One of the most
popular theories suggested the White House and Pentagon are using the airborne
devices to divert attention from a chemical spill earlier this month in Ohio.
That incident, caused
by a train derailment, occurred several days before the most recent devices
were shot down, and was covered extensively. Nonetheless, it
remained the top subject searched on Google on
Monday, showing continued public interest in the story.
Some commenters said
Biden’s decision to wait until the balloon had reached the East Coast before
shooting it down showed he was in league with China. Others, meanwhile,
chastised Biden for shooting down foreign aircraft that they imagined could be
carrying bioweapons or nuclear weapons.
Misleading claims
about the airborne devices have also prompted violent threats, according to an
analysis by the SITE Intelligence Group, a firm that tracks extremist rhetoric
online. After the White House said earlier surveillance flights went undetected during
Donald Trump’s presidency, an article circulated on far-right sites urging the
execution of any Trump administration officials who may
have withheld the information. (Hang Djonnie?F**g italics added!!)
Trump administration
officials have said they knew of no such surveillance craft.
Alongside the
political conspiracy theories were suggestions that the aerial objects were
extraterrestrial in origin. Photos of alleged UFOs wered online and web searches for the term
“UFO” soared around the world Sunday, according to information from Google
Trends.
“Don’t worry, just
some of my friends of mine stopping by,” Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX,
joked in a tweet Sunday.
Humor aside, while the
details of the different claims vary, they have two things in common: a lack of
evidence and a strong distrust of America’s elected
leaders.
“Maybe Joe built the
balloon & had Hunter launch it to scare we the people!” wrote one Facebook
user. “How do WE know??? We don’t!”
The federal government
must balance the public’s desire to know the details with the need for secrecy
regarding national security and defense, Ludes said. That’s not likely to
satisfy Biden’s critics, Ludes said, or prevent misleading explanations from
going viral.
High-profile news
stories and events often precede a spike in false and misleading claims as
people turn to the internet for explanations. Conspiracy theories about Buffalo
Bills player Damar Hamlin spread quickly after his dramatic on-field collapse in
January. Something similar happened last year when the Nord Stream pipelines in
the North Sea were
damaged.
In that instance,
Russia spread conspiracy theories blaming the U.S. for the sabotage. The baseless
theories were quickly amplified by far-right users in the U.S. It’s not the
first time America’s authoritarian adversaries have seized on global events to
portray the U.S. as belligerent.
China has claimed the
balloon shot down Feb. 4 was engaged in meteorological research. On Monday,
China’s foreign ministry said 10 U.S. balloons had entered Chinese airspace without
permission in the past year.
Beijing’s response to
this latest diplomatic row seeks to portray China as the responsible actor,
while sidestepping surveillance allegations made by the U.S., according to
Kenton Thibault, a China expert at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic
Research Lab, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks foreign disinformation
and propaganda.
“It’s about projecting
an image of responsibility and rationality, of being the adult in the room,”
Thibault said of China’s response. “It’s a clear signal to nations in the
developing world that the U.S. is selfish, untrustworthy and hypocritical.”
On Monday, White House
press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did refute one
viral claim to have emerged from the balloon saga.
“I know there have
been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again no indication —
of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,”
Jean-Pierre told reporters. “I 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.”
ATTACHMENT
FIVE –From CBS News
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT THE CHINESE SPY BALLOON AND THE OTHER OBJECTS
SHOT DOWN
BY CAITLIN YILEKUPDATED ON: FEBRUARY 15, 2023 / 8:15
AM / CBS NEWS
China has maintained it was a
weather balloon that veered off course. But the balloon was doing something
much more sinister, according to the U.S.
There have since been a number of
other incidents involving flying objects, raising even more concern.
Here's what we know about the
balloon and those other objects:
7:26 PM /
FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Jan. 28
China's surveillance balloon
entered U.S. airspace near Alaska before transiting over Canada and then the
continental U.S.
Feb. 2
The Defense Department said it was
tracking the balloon over the continental U.S., and that the balloon had been
over Montana a day earlier, on Feb. 1. Following the announcement, the balloon
stopped loitering and proceeded as fast as it could toward the East Coast, a
U.S. official said.
Loitering?
Feb. 4:
Balloon shot down
A U.S. fighter jet shot down the balloon off the coast of
South Carolina.
The spy balloon's height was
comparable to the Statue of Liberty, about "200 feet tall with a jetliner
size payload," Assistant Secretary of Defense Melissa Dalton told senators
during a hearing on Feb. 9.
It had collection pod equipment,
including high-tech equipment that could collect communications signals and
other sensitive information, and solar panels located on the metal truss
suspended below the balloon, according to government officials. It had
equipment that was "clearly for intelligence surveillance," including
"multiple antennas" that were "likely capable of collecting and
geo-locating communications," according to a
statement by a senior State Department official.
Video of the balloon showed small
motors and multiple propellers that allowed China to actively maneuver the
balloon over specific locations, according to a senior administration official,
and it was steered by rudder, a U.S. official said.
The balloon's payload weighed more
than a couple thousand pounds, according to Gen. Glen VanHerck,
commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern
Command.
Feb. 5:
Balloon recovery begins
Recovery of the balloon began. It
was delayed by a day after it was shot down because of rough seas off the coast
of South Carolina, Dalton said.
A U.S. official said later that
underwater pictures of the debris field show the wreckage remarkably intact
given its fall from 60,000 feet. The debris field is about seven miles wide and
the debris is in relatively shallow water, at about 47 feet deep, according to
a senior military official.
Navy and FBI dive teams have been
involved in the search. Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal
Group 2 recover a high altitude balloon off the coast
of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 5, 2023.
Upon collection of the wreckage,
the evidence was rinsed clean of salt water before the FBI forensically
examined it, according to senior FBI officials.
The FBI has been evaluating
evidence collected from debris field in the Atlantic at the bureau's lab in
Quantico, Virginia, senior FBI officials said. The FBI lab has the balloon
canopy, wires and other electronic components collected from the water surface.
The officials said they have not detected explosive materials on the evidence
that has already been examined.
Feb. 8
In an interview with CBS
News, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the
"majority" of the balloon pieces that were on the surface had been
recovered. "We've mapped out the debris field and now we'll go through
detailed efforts to recover the debris that's on the ocean floor," Austin
said.
Feb. 10
The search for debris was
suspended because of bad weather. The debris that was not retrieved from the
bottom of the ocean had been weighted down to prevent it from being moved by
the heavy seas.
Feb. 10 to
12: Three more unidentified objects
Three more objects were spotted
over U.S. and Canadian airspace. On Friday, Feb. 10, U.S. officials downed a "high-altitude object" off the coast of Alaska. An
unidentified object was shot down in Canadian airspace the next day, and the U.S. military shot
down another object spotted over the Great Lakes region that Sunday, Feb. 12.
During a briefing that night,
Defense Department officials said the last three objects did not pose a kinetic
military threat, but their path and proximity to sensitive Defense Department
sites and the altitude they were flying could be a hazard to civilian aviation
and thus raised concern.
Dalton said in the briefing with
reporters that the U.S has been more closely scrutinizing airspace at certain
altitudes, including enhancing the radar.
The unidentified object that was
downed near Alaska was the size of a small car, according to the Pentagon. The
object shot down over Lake Huron appeared to be octagonal in shape with strings
hanging off, but no discernable payload, a senior administration official
said.
Feb. 13:
Balloon recovery
Recovery efforts resumed after
being postponed because of bad weather.
A U.S. official said a
"significant" portion – 30 to 40 feet – of the balloon's antenna
array was recovered from the ocean bottom. These portions will be going to an
FBI lab at Quantico, an official said.
State Department spokesman Ned Price
said that the State Department has had communication with its Chinese
counterpart because "we believe in keeping lines of communication
open."
Price said the focus remained on
recovery efforts.
More photos were released of what
has been recovered so far of the balloon.
Feb. 13:
Other unidentified objects
The search for the objects shot
down off the coast of Alaska and over Canada is continuing, National Security
Council spokesman John Kirby said during a White House briefing, because the
remains are located in remote terrain, making them hard to find. He said the
object over Lake Huron is in deep water.
Kirby said that the U.S. did not
detect that any of the objects were sending communications signals before they
were shot down. The U.S. also assessed that they showed no signs of
self-propulsion or maneuvering and were not manned, he said.
"The likely hypothesis is
they were being moved by the prevailing winds," Kirby said.
Kirby said on MSNBC on Monday that
the objects were flying at between 20,000 and 40,000 feet. Most commercial
aircraft fly at about 30,000 feet. These objects were also shot down, he said,
because they were much smaller than the Chinese balloon.
No one has claimed ownership of
any of them and the U.S., Kirby said, has not yet been able to gain access to
the unmanned objects in part because of weather conditions and also because the
one shot down Sunday over Lake Huron is underwater.
There may be "completely
benign and totally explainable reasons" for why these objects were flying
over North America, but the U.S. won't know whether that's the case until they
are retrieved, Kirby said.
1:55 PM /
FEBRUARY 14, 2023
Feb. 14
Kirby said there is so far no indication
that the three unidentified objects were part of Chinas' spying program or
involved in "external intelligence collection efforts." The U.S. is
also "ruling out that they were U.S. government objects," he said.
Though it's still possible they were linked to commercial or research
entities.
"That very well could be or
could emerge as a leading explanation here," he told reporters.
Army Gen. Mark Milley,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that the first missile fired
by a U.S. fighter jet at the object over Lake Huron missed its target and
landed in the water. The second missile hit the target, he said.
Milley also revealed more about the
search for the three objects, saying none have yet been recovered because
they're located in "very difficult terrain" — one in the Arctic
Circle off the coast of Alaska, the second in a mountain range in northern
Canada and the third is likely a couple hundred feet underwater in Lake
Huron.
"We'll get them eventually
but it's going to take some time to recover them," he said.
And, U.S. officials also said
Tuesday that U.S. intelligence tracked the spy balloon that
was shot down earlier this month when it lifted off from Hainan Island, off the
south coast of China. It drifted east in the direction of Guam and Hawaii and
then went north toward Alaska, entering U.S. airspace on Jan. 28. Given the
path, it's possible that the balloon was blown off course by weather,
but officials said that once it came south over the continental United
States, it was being controlled by China.
ATTACHMENT
SIX –From the Guardian U.K.
OF COURSE CHINA’S
BALLOON WAS SPYING. STATES ALL SPY ON EACH OTHER – AND WE ALL BENEFIT
The latest
standoff has sparked international hysteria. But the more countries know about
friends and enemies, the better
By Jonathan Steele
Long ago, in May 1960, an
American U-2 spy plane took off from Pakistan to fly at high altitude across
the Soviet Union as part of a mission to photograph key facilities and military
sites on behalf of the CIA. The Russians saw it and shot it down. The pilot, Gary Powers,
managed to descend by parachute and was arrested. In Washington, the Eisenhower
administration lied about his mission, claiming the U-2 was a “weather plane”
that had strayed off course after its pilot had “difficulties with his oxygen
equipment” (sound familiar?).
The incident
caused a temporary poisoning of US-Soviet relations as the Kremlin turned it
into political theatre. Moscow subjected Powers to a highly publicised criminal trialand gave him a 10-year sentence.
In the US, Powers
was portrayed as an all-American clean-cut hero who neither smoked nor drank
(which was not true). In spite of the mutual fury neither side was genuinely
shocked, since it was accepted that spying was routine. The technology might
change as improvements were made in information-gathering systems, but the
practice of surveillance went back to time immemorial and could not be stopped.
The analogy
with the US downing of a Chinese
high-altitude balloon that intruded into US airspace last week
is clear. It too produced a hurricane of hypocritical outrage. The Republicans
attacked Joe Biden for being weak and failing to protect US national security.
They said he should have shot the intruding
balloon down as soon
as it was spotted. Fearful of being seen as too old to run for a second term,
Biden ordered his secretary of state to delay a planned visit to Beijing.
In a pathetic
parody of the political row in Washington, the UK government promptly ordered a
review of Britain’s security. Rishi Sunak forestalled any Labour
charges of being weak on defence by announcing
that RAF jets were on standby to shoot down any Chinese
surveillance balloons that penetrated UK airspace. What about Chinese spy
satellites? Are they also going to be taken out by doughty British pilots?
The reality
is that using technology to spy on other states’ military capabilities is as
old as it is widespread. So is the use of covert tools to discover another
government’s intentions. The methods are constantly being updated. Listening
devices and phone-tapping have now been supplemented by cyber systems to hack
emails and other internet messaging. An Israeli company, NSO Group, has – as well documented in the
Guardian developed
the Pegasus technology that can listen to conversations, read SMS texts, take
screenshots and access people’s lists of contacts. It has sold the system to a
range of authoritarian foreign governments that want to monitor their own
citizens’ views and behaviour.
Phone-tapping
and cyber surveillance are not only done by governments to potential or actual
enemies. Remember the row in 2013 that erupted during Barack Obama’s presidency
after Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency had been listening to German chancellor Angela
Merkel’s mobile phone conversations for years. The Germans were almost as
embarrassed as the Americans. Merkel angrily declared that “spying between
friends just isn’t on” but an inquiry by the German federal prosecutor
was quietly dropped.
Let’s face
it. Spying is a benefit. The more that countries know about a potential enemy’s
defence systems the better it usually is. Starting
hostilities is less likely if you have accurate and up-to-date information
about what your army is up against (a lesson Vladimir Putin failed to learn
before 24 February last year).
Understanding
another state’s or another leader’s intentions is even more important, whether
this intelligence-gathering is performed by spies, diplomats and
non-governmental political analysts or by what are politely called “technical
means”. The crucial issue, which no amount of balloons or satellites can
provide, is empathy. Put yourself in the other side’s shoes. Understand their
history, culture and the economic and political pressures their leaders are
under.
There is no
doubt that the relationship between the US and China is the
leading global security challenge of at least the next 10 years. The two countries
are rivals and competitors, but they are not enemies. Everything should be done
by western countries not to slip into a mindset that treats China as hostile.
Peace in Asia – and indeed the whole world – is too important to be hijacked by
hysterical excitement over a roving balloon.
·Jonathan
Steele is a former Guardian correspondent in Moscow
ATTACHMENT
SEVEN –From Time
WHY THE MILITARY KEEPS SPOTTING SO MANY UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS—AND
THEN SHOOTING THEM DOWN
BY SANYA MANSOORFEBRUARY 14, 2023 7:00 AM EST
In the first two weeks of
February, the U.S. Air Force hasshot down four flying objects that have intruded on the skies over
North America. The deployment of force is unprecedented for the U.S. during peacetime—leveraging some of the U.S.
military’s most advanced fighter planes, surveillance tools, and expensive
air-to-air missiles.
The first object shot down
was an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon that the Biden
Administration says was part of a years-long scheme to spy on nations across
the Earth. But so far, officials have been much less clear about what the other
objects are. One shot down over Alaska Feb. 10 was described as a “car-sized
object” that did not appear to have a propulsion source. One downed over Canada
the next day was described as “cylindrical,” potentially a balloon, but smaller
than the Chinese balloon.
That balloon, which was publicly spotted over Montana Feb. 1
and carried sensors capable of spying on conversations on the ground, revealed
an entirely new class of threat to U.S. air space. Experts say two things are
happening as a result: First, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
and other agencies tasked with watching for airborne incursions have
recalibrated their detection methods to pick up smaller, slower-moving objects
that they weren’t previously paying attention to. Second, the military decided
that shooting these objects out of the sky and collecting the wreckage is one
sure way to quickly learn where they’re coming from and what threat they pose.
“We
need to get a better sense of what these things are and whether or not they’re
worth engaging with,” says Ian Williams, deputy director of CSIS’s Missile
Defense Project.
Either
way—it’s unlikely that using Sidewinder air-to-air missiles at about $400,000 a
pop fired from $150 million F-22 stealth fighters will be an economical
response in the long term. “If this is something we’re gonna start doing on the
regular, we may want to look for more cost effective ways,” Williams says.
Why are we
spotting more flying objects?
First, it’s probably not aliens,
experts agree. The White House and intelligence officials have echoed this
point. “Unidentified flying object” in this case means just that—an object that
is flying and has not been identified.
The U.S. has released some details
about the four shootings but it’s still not clear what all of them are or where
they came from.
On Feb. 10, an F-22 shot down a “car-size object” at 40,000 feet over Alaska that officials
said had no obvious propulsion. White House spokesperson John Kirby said its
origins were unclear. The Pentagon had said it could be a potential risk to
civilian air traffic.
On Feb. 11, a U.S. F-22 shot down
a “cylindrical” object over northern Canada. The U.S. and Canada worked
together to take the object down. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said
that the country would analyze the wreckage.
A National Security spokesperson
said before the fourth flying object was downed that “these objects did not
closely resemble and were much smaller than the [People Republic of China]
balloon,” CNN reported.
On Feb. 12, an F-16 used a missile
to destroy an airborne object flying at about 20,000 feet over Lake Huron in Michigan.
The Department of Defense noted that the location chosen to shoot it down
allowed them to “avoid impact to people on the ground while improving chances
for debris recovery.”
An important point with these new
objects is also that they posed a possible threat to civilian aviation. While
the Chinese balloon was at 60,000 feet of altitude—well above the ceiling for
passenger planes—the other objects were flying much lower, closer to the
20,000-40,000 feet that commercial aircraft reach.
Why are we
spotting more flying objects?
Since the U.S. shot down the alleged Chinese spy balloon on Feb. 4 off South Carolina—and admitted to at least three
previous incursions into the country in recent years—it has been finding more
slow-moving flying objects in the sky. That’s because the military now knows to
look for them.
The Chinese balloon—which Beijing
maintains is for civilian weather observation—forced military officials,
lawmakers and the American public to start scrutinizing U.S. surveillance of
its airspace more closely.
Experts say NORAD was previously
focusing on spotting fast-moving objects that generated a lot of heat—think
missiles, bombers and fighter jets. When radars and other surveillance methods
are tuned to those threats, it can be easy to miss slow-moving balloons, which
also might not show up on radar as well.
U.S. officials have worked to improve
the ability of existing radars to track these flying objects down. “We have
been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including
enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects
that we’ve detected over the past week,” Melissa Dalton, the assistant
secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said at a
news conference on Sunday.
General Glen VanHerck,
NORAD’s commander, said the U.S. has adjusted its radar to track slower objects.
“With some adjustments, we’ve been able to get a better categorization of radar
tracks now,” he said, “and that’s why I think you’re seeing these, plus there’s
a heightened alert to look for this information.” VanHerck
had previously admitted that the balloons exposed a “gap” in American air
defenses.
“Now they have some experience and
know what these things look like, on radar, they’re able to refine filters to
look for them… more efficiently,” Williams says. “It’s about finding that
balance of getting what you need but not getting so much that you’re just
chasing flocks of birds around.”
Air defense also appears to be
becoming more of a priority for Congress. “What I think this shows…is that we
really have to declare that we’re going to defend our airspace. And then we
need to invest,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner told CNN.
“This shows some of the problems and gaps that we have. We need to fill those
as soon as possible because we certainly now ascertain there is a threat.”
Gathering
intel
One advantage to shooting down so
many of these objects is that once they are recovered on the ground, they offer
a lot for military and intelligence officials to analyze. “There’s been some
great intel gathering,” says Riki M. Ellison,
chairman & founder of Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.
These objects are in remote
locations; officials noted that recovery of the one shot down in Alaska has
been hampered by limited daylight and arctic weather conditions.
But while shooting these objects
down is one of the only ways to learn about them right now, experts say the
U.S. should consider a sustainable policy to address them once we know more
about the threat they pose.
“We’re shooting these things down
with pretty expensive missiles; if this is something we’re gonna start doing on
the regular, we may want to look for more cost effective ways,” Williams of CSIS says.
Ellison is advocating for greater
radar capabilities to ensure that the U.S. can simultaneously track these
flying objects alongside other threats like bombers and missiles, and
understand how best to engage with them.
So far, he worries that the
American response has been disproportionate compared to China’s efforts “China
wins that fight a little bit,” he says. “Look at the cost imposed on us and
what we had to spend to defend against that; it’s very lopsided.”
It’s likely that these kinds of
objects were always up there in the U.S. airspace but that shooting them down
was not a priority. “We chose to tolerate them,” Ellison says.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT –From Indy100
AARON RODGERS HAS
OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD CONSPIRACY THEORY FOR RECENT UFO SIGHTINGS
Aaron Rodgers’ latest
conspiracy theory is out of this world.
When asked on The Pat
McAfee Show about recent UFO sightings across the US, he appeared to suggest
that they were being hyped up for nefarious reasons.
“It’s interesting
timing on everything,” Rodgers said. “There’s a lot of other things going on in
the world.”
McAfee prodded
Rodgers, who then sarcastically said the government would never try to distract
the general population.
McAfee appeared to
agree, saying: "There’s some wild shit going on right now, Aaron."
Rodgers appeared to
agree, before taking it a step further and asking: "Did you hear about the
Epstein client list about to be released? There’s some
files that have some names on them that might be getting released pretty soon.
Ghislaine Maxwell was the only person ever convicted of trafficking and nobody
who was involved in the trafficking ever went to jail. Nothing to see
here."
It seems far-fetched,
but is par for the course when it comes to the Green Bay QB, who refused
the Covid vaccine; took Ivermectin on Joe Rogan's advice; and later claimed he'd contracted 'Covid toe'.
There has recently been
a lot of speculation surrounding his future, with a potential move to the New
York Jets on the cards.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT (A) –Also from Indy100
TUCKER CARLSON FUELS
'ALIEN INVASION' FEARS WITH SPY BALLOON THEORY
By
Harriet Brewis
Spoiler alert: the unidentified
objects that were shot down over
the US were not being commandeered by little green men.
But that didn’t stop
right-wing darling Tucker Carlson from
fuelling the flames of an alien conspiracy theory among his loyal followers.
Three large, mysterious
objects have been forcibly removed from American skies since the downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon on
4 February. And during a briefing on Sunday, a US Air Force general said he
wouldn’t rule out extraterrestrials or any other explanation yet.
Carlson seized on the
suggestion during his Fox News show
on Monday night, telling viewers: “So here you have three unknown objects in
three days. If these things are extraterrestrial, what we’re seeing is an alien
invasion.”
He continued
mockingly: “That means at some point they’re probably gonna demand to be taken
to our leader. And what are we gonna say then? ‘Er, this is Kamala Harris. She once dated Montel
Williams but now she runs our country because her boss is senile’? Uff, Pretty embarrassing.”
Of course, his
comments were met with delight on Twitter, with users responding with
alien-head emojis and clamouring that “they” should
take Joe Biden away with them.
For the avoidance of
doubt, the White House has clarified that investigations have found no
indication of extraterrestrial activity in relation to the UFOs.
"I know there
have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no, again no
indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent
takedowns," press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
stressed on Monday.
Her colleague, White
House spokesperson John Kirby, tried to put the matter further to bed, saying:
"I don't think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect
to these crafts, period.”
The thing is, people
are bound to “worry”, given that just under half of Americans believe that UFOs
exist and have visited Earth, according to a 2020 IPSOS poll.
The Pentagon has
undertaken a new push in recent years to investigate military sightings of UFOs
– rebranded in official government parlance as "unidentified aerial
phenomena," or UAPs.
The government's
effort to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects - whether they are in
space, the skies or even underwater - has led to hundreds of documented reports
that are being investigated, senior military leaders have said.
One such study,published in June 2021
did not rule out a possible extraterrestrial origin for 144 "unidentified
aerial phenomena."
That report marked a
turning point after the military spent decades deflecting, debunking and
discrediting observations of unidentified flying objects and "flying
saucers" dating back to the 1940s.
Still, we mustn’t
lose sight of the fact that the balloon and UFOs (or UAPs, if you prefer) that
were caught last week were definitely not flying saucers.
So no, Tucker,
America isn't in the midst of an alien invasion, and Biden’s staying put here
on Earth. For now, anyway…
ATTACHMENT
NINE –From the New York Times
HOW A FOG OF
QUESTIONS OVER A SPY BALLOON AND U.F.O.S FED A DIPLOMATIC CRISIS
U.S. officials now
suspect that the balloon was sent to spy on bases in Guam and Hawaii and that
other downed objects were not surveillance machines. Washington’s evolving view
reflects U.S. and Chinese difficulties in discerning each other’s intentions.
By Edward
Wong, Julian E. Barnes and Adam EntousPublished Feb.
15, 2023 Updated Feb. 16, 2023, 10:08 a.m. ET
Pentagon
has received ‘several hundred’ new UFO reports
By Tara Copp16 Dec, 2022 08:06 PM3 mins to read
A new Pentagon office set up to track reports of
unidentified flying objects has received “several hundreds” of new reports, but
no evidence so far of alien life, the agency’s leadership told reporters
Friday.
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution
Office (AARO) was set up in July and is responsible for not only tracking
unidentified objects in the sky, but also underwater or in space — or
potentially an object that has the ability to move from one domain to the next.
The office was established following more than a year of
attention on unidentified flying objects that military pilots have observed but
have sometimes been reluctant to report due to fear of stigma.
In June 2021 the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence reported that between 2004 and 2021, there were 144 such
encounters, 80 of which were captured on multiple sensors.
Since then, “we’ve had lots more reporting” said anomaly
office director Sean Kirkpatrick. When asked to quantify the amount, Kirkpatrick
said “several hundred”.
An updated report from the Director of National Intelligence
that will provide specific figures on new reports received since 2021 is
expected by the end of the year, the officials said.
The office was set up not only to examine the question of
whether there’s extraterrestrial life but also because of the security risk
posed by so many encounters with unknown flying objects by military
installations or military aircraft.
This May, Congress held its first hearing in more than half
a century on the topic, with multiple members expressing concern that whether
or not the objects are alien or potentially new, unknown technology being flown
by China, Russia or another potential adversary, the unknown creates a security
risk.
A pair of facilities
have all the tell-tale signs of launchpads for high-altitude spy balloons
BY ADAM RAWNSLEYFEBRUARY 14, 2023
CHINA’S SPY BALLOON
took off from a base on Hainan Island along the country’s southern coast,
American intelligence reportedly believes. New satellite imagery obtained by
researchers shows that the island is home to a balloon launch facility.
Researchers at the
Middlebury Institute of International Studies identified the facility in satellite
imagery captured by space imaging firm Planet Labs. It’s unclear if the
facility identified in the imagery is related to the spy balloon which crossed
the U.S. earlier this month. But the discovery follows reporting from The
Washington Post late Tuesday that U.S. intelligence officials now think the
People’s Liberation Army launched the infamous spy balloon from Hainan with the
intent of spying on U.S. military bases in the Pacific.
Based on the Post’s
identification of the island as the likely origin of the balloon, “we believe
this is the best launch site candidate on the island, especially as it has
previously hosted aerostats,” says Sam Lair, a Middlebury Institute of
International Studies (MIIS) researcher who helped analyze the imagery for Rolling
Stone.
Lair, who identified
the facility along with colleagues Michael Duitsman
and Tricia White, says his team also found imagery of the location hosting
airships in Google Earth.
“The entire facility
is surrounded by a perimeter security fence and also includes three large radomes,” used to house radar antennas, says Lair. The 140 meter launch pad also has what appears to be launch
equipment visible in the satellite imagery, which was captured in mid-January.
The Middlebury team
was able to identify the Hainan site as a balloon launch facility in part
because of its similarity to another Chinese launch site they found in Dorbod Banner, near China’s northern border with Mongolia.
The circular pad for
launching balloons, high-bay hangar for storing them, and support buildings
with small radome at the Hainan site are all similar
to the Dorbod Banner facility.
That facility in
China’s Inner Mongolia province was first built in mid-2016 and features a
large 350- to 400-meter launchpad, which was expanded in 2021.
“The pairing of a
hangar, support building, and a launch pad is characteristic of balloon launch
sites observed in other countries including the U.S., Australia, and New
Zealand,” says Lair.
Chinese officials
haven’t said much about the Darbod Banner facility,
who owns it, or how they plan to use it. But there are access restrictions
visible in the satellite imagery that make the imagery analysts believe it’s
linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army. “We suspect that it may be a
military facility, but that’s based on the existence of the perimeter security
fence as well as the security fence around the collection buildings,” says
Lair.
The Chinese balloon
which transited the U.S. in February was roughly the size of two to three buses
and was not the first to allegedly violate American airspace, according to
National Security Council spokesman Adm. John Kirby. Chinese spy balloons
drifted into the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration “for
brief periods” much shorter than the trip by the Chinese balloon shot down over
the Atlantic Ocean.
China has claimed
that the balloon shot down was merely a weather balloon for scientific research
and accused the U.S. of flying its own spy balloons across China on 10 separate
occasions.
Beijing is, not
surprisingly, tight-lipped about its alleged balloon espionage program, but
researchers like MIIS’s Eli Hayes have scoured Chinese-language academic
literature and state propaganda to find clues about how academics there think
and talk about known airship and balloon programs. In short: they can help
supplement more expensive surveillance gear, like spy satellites.
In an unpublished
paper from October 2021d with Rolling
Stone, Hayes wrote that papers by Chinese academics working on airship research
express “a widespread belief that airships can serve important roles as an
affordable alternative to satellite capabilities in both civil and military
functions” and can act as a relatively low-cost supplement or replacement to
more conventional platforms in the fields of Intelligence, Surveillance,
Reconnaissance (ISR), earth monitoring, and communications.”
Hayes has also
identified a number of airship design teams from mentions in Chinese-language open source literature. The designers, which include
academic institutions, nuclear weapons research institutes, and private
aerospace companies like the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China.
It’s still unclear
how China is using these sites or whether they’re devoted to the kinds of
intelligence-gathering that prompted the shoot down earlier this month. But the
construction patterns identified by Middlebury at Hainan and Darbod Banner are already bringing China’s capabilities
closer into focus.
‘I
condemned the incursion of the PRC surveillance balloon and stressed it must
never happen again,’ Antony Blinken says
By
AyhanSimsek19.02.2023
MUNICH
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
met China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich
Security Conference.
The meeting marked the first face-to-face between senior
officials of the two countries following the downing of an alleged Chinese spy
balloon by the US.
“Just met with the PRC’s (People's Republic of China) top
diplomat, Wang Yi. “ Blinken
wrote on Twitter. “I condemned the incursion of the PRC surveillance balloon
and stressed it must never happen again.”
Blinken said he warned China against providing materiel support to
Russia, referring to the war in Ukraine.
“I also emphasized the importance of keeping open lines of
communication,” he said.
Earlier Saturday, Wang told the Conference that the downed
balloon was civilian and veered off course and entered the US due to westerly
winds.
“We asked the US to handle it calmly and professionally based on
consultation with the Chinese side,” he said.
“Regrettably, the US disregards these facts and uses advanced
fighter jets, and downed a balloon with its missiles. This is, I would say,
absurd and hysterical,” he added.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY
EIGHT (a) –From the Fifth Dimension