About two weeks ago, the United States downed a Chinese spy balloon. The term “balloon” on its face indicates something low-cost and low-tech. One imagines Montgolfier over Paris, or the colorful balloons over Albuquerque sooner than a Graf Zeppelin steered like a drone from Beijing as it monitors communications.
Since then, American F22 fighter planes have downed two more over North America and Canada. Ostensibly smaller balloons, the public knows less about them.
I have a lot of questions. Like, did American intelligence know about these balloons for a long while? Have we been spying on the spy balloons? Does China know we knew about them? Have we been feeding them disinformation? Have we been letting them fly because they’re low risk and because maintaining good diplomatic ties with China has superseded the need to shoot them down? Is it to our diplomatic advantage to make people in the Chinese espionage community lose face?
Yet, when I ask these questions, many of my fellow Americans want to talk not about China, but whether these UFOs are truly visitors from other galaxies, covered up by big government. Many have already run away with conspiracy theories about alien invasions and government secrets.
It always seems we run away with implausible conspiracies when better explanations suffice. The more ludicrous the conspiracy, the more it takes hold. Space aliens? It’s more probable we launched the balloons as a false flag operation, or that a child in Mauritania had them on a string and accidentally let go and they floated to Canada—and those are far more improbable than many other explanations.
Maybe it’s that people replace scary ideas with far scarier ones that cannot possibly be real? After all, if the alien isn’t real, the uncertainty and fear isn’t real, by extension.
Anyway, people need to return to Carl Sagan’s ‘90s magnum opus The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Space Aliens.
I really don’t even know what else to say.
Here's an article from 2021 about the spate of "UFO sightings" by pilots as a campaign of data collection on US air defense by a near-peer adversary:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos