Thursday, February 16, 2023

Balloons, UAPs and Chinese Spying

 

Although it wasn’t a UFO sighting, the spotting of the Chinese spy balloon certainly has implications for UFO research. While it didn’t make much of a splash (pun intended), other than scoring of political points, it was similar to balloons that had overflown the US during the Trump Administration that weren’t detected at the time… at least according to General Glen Van Herch. He said it was deduced later but gave no details on how that was done. Some of the details emerged later.

I also wondered why missiles were used. I was told that sometime in the past that they had attempted to shoot down balloons using machine guns. The bullets only caused slow leaks so missiles were used. But wouldn’t a 20 mm Vulcan cannon shred the balloon envelop, causing it to fall. And, wouldn’t the slow leak be acceptable if you were worried about injuries on the ground? Anyone who couldn’t get out of the way of a slowly descending balloon just wasn’t paying attention.

Here's one of the points sometimes overlooked. This huge balloon, flying at more than 60,000 feet seemed to have escaped detection at the time. You have to wonder what else has escaped detection. Or maybe they were detected at some level, but that information was not communicated up the chain of command because of policy in place at the time.

Let me point out here that the sighting of a balloon would not require any direct action. It would be seen as nonthreatening and therefore wouldn’t be intercepted. Think about all the UFO sightings of the past that did not result in any type of interception. In fact, after 1969, if you reported a UFO sighting to the Air Force, their response was to tell you to call your local law enforcement if you felt threatened.

However, it has been suggested that the review of UAP sightings reported by military personnel might have had a role in the detection of those earlier flights. The witness statements and the data collected suggest an answer that wasn’t all that important until the Chinese spy balloon entered the picture.

Here’s the trouble as I see it. This is not a problem of detection, but of reporting, meaning, that some of the reports were not sent up the chain of command. Who was making that decision, and why weren’t the civilian leaders in the military chain, from the president on down through the Secretary of Defense and the civilian leaders at the top of the services told about this. I touched on this in UFOs and the Deep State, which suggested that information about UFOs was not being communicated to those in charge at the highest levels. Who really is controlling access to the information? This latest seems to underscore that lack of communication with those at the top.

The upshot of all this is that a balloon that is drifting around at tens of thousands of feet do not seem to pose a threat to national security and there is no reason to pass the information up the chain of command. The president doesn’t need to know about a balloon overhead. The top of the military chain of command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, do not need to know. The local commander makes that call based on the observations being made.

I will note here, that according to various sources including some who sat in on the classified version of the latest reports, about half of the UAP reports are of balloons or balloon-like objects. I know from studying the Blue Book files that something labeled as a balloon might have another, more esoteric explanation. In other words, balloon-like is not the same as balloon. Again, there is good evidence of these sorts of reports not being submitted up the chain of command.

There is another point here that has escaped some notice. It has been reliably reported that 1800 weather balloons are launched daily around the world. There are corporate and scientific entities that are launching balloons for research purposes. While I hesitate to evoke the specter of Project Mogul, the purpose of those balloon launches was to develop a constant level balloon to spy on the Soviet Union. High flying aircraft such as the SR-71 and then satellites render most of this sort of thing obsolete but for a time these strange balloon arrays were being launched in New Mexico.

There are two take aways that related to the UFO field that haven’t been explored by the main stream media when examining these balloon flights.

First, a couple of the statements made by high-ranking officials about aliens or the possibility of these UFOs, have an extraterrestrial component to them. I noticed they called them UFOs rather than UAPs, as if attempting to separate UFOs from UAPs. Is this an attempt to change the thinking of people by telling us that UFOs are not UAPs? Once the thinking has been altered, then when they begin to explain all the UAP sightings as having terrestrial explanations, they have eliminated a problem that have plagued them for 75 years. They’ll tell us that there is nothing to see here and the solution is based on Earth and not in outer space.

Second, in discussing why the balloons haven’t been detected on radar, they mentioned that the military radars are set to discriminate between those targets that might be hostile and those that are believed to pose no threat. This means that aircraft and, well, balloons that are flying too slow simply are not displayed. And if they are too high and too fast, they won’t be displayed because an expected attack won’t come from those arenas.

UFOs operating outside of the parameters created by the programmers simply do not show up on radar screens. That means that the military can say, honestly, that they had nothing on radar when the radar would see the object but not display it. I will note here that the military admitted that their radars look for specific returns and will only display those. This does render part of the argument about UFOs moot because UFOs operating outside the discrimination limits do not show on the screens.

And, as I have said, repeatedly, our stealth technology has rendered part of the argument irrelevant. That it didn’t show on radar doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there, only that it wasn’t show on radar.

These are the points that I noticed and without invoking a conspiracy theory here, much say that I see where all this can be used to demystify the UFO phenomena, something they have been attempting since 1952. They haven’t explained the sightings, only labeled them which was the mission set up by the Robertson Panel. And we now have these balloons lumped in with the other UAP data which can lead us astray.

3 comments:

Bryan Sentes said...

Kevin, I always read your cogent posts with a thankful sigh as my hypervigilant critical guard relaxes in the welcome comfort of their relative sanity.

Moonman said...

I liked how they said they "looked back" at the data and were able to see the balloons going over the US from the Trump era. This suggests they have a big database of radar data of unknown retention period, but at least 5 years. Thus, they could draw upon that to find all the UAP they care to, going at whatever speed. Clouds of insects, reflections of atmospheric phenomena, the whole thing. But one thing is for sure, we won't get to see it.

It is pretty weird that just because something goes slow, it was the military paradigm that it is not of interest or considered hostile. This is so old school. It needed to go as fast as a missile or jet to raise the DEFCON level. But fly a fleet of slow moving aircraft/balloons/dirigibles packed with nukes/biologicals/chemicals over the US and it is ignored. Of course, the Chinese could just load those weapons into container ships and send them with all the color TVs and other consumer goods to the US more easily.

Louis Nicholson said...

Kevin said:
" Anyone who couldn’t get out of the way of a slowly descending balloon just wasn’t paying attention."

That one almost made me fall off my chair laughing! So true!

What's the story about the initial Chinese balloon? Haven't they recovered the debris by now and analyzed it? Haven't heard anything on the news about what the debris was.