Déjà Vu: Flying Saucers on the Attack

What follows is an excerpt from Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade, and Eugene Daniels' 2-12-23 POLITICO article entitled "Playbook: UFO Fever Grips Washington":

— On Friday, President JOE BIDEN ordered a balloon with a car-sized payload destroyed after it violated U.S. airspace over Alaska. It was flying at just 40,000 feet, roughly the altitude of civilian airliners, and was destroyed by an F-22 over a frozen portion of the Arctic Ocean near Alaska. The Pentagon noted that the UFO “does not resemble in any way the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina earlier this week.”

BUT they don’t know what it is — or at least they’re not saying.

“We have no further details about the object at this time, including any description of its capabilities, purpose or origin,” said the Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Brig. Gen. PAT RYDER.

— Later that same night, NORAD detected another object over Alaska and two American F-22s began tracking it. On Saturday, the UFO drifted into Canadian airspace and the F-22s were joined by two Canadian aircraft.

Biden’s national security advisers saw the UFO as a serious enough issue that the president was “continually briefed by his national security team since the object was detected,” according to the White House. The “high-altitude airborne object” soon merited a phone call between Biden and Canadian Prime Minister JUSTIN TRUDEAU, and the two leaders agreed to take it out.

A U.S. F-22 shot down the object over the Canadian Yukon using an AIM 9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile around 3:41 p.m. ET. As with the Friday night UFO, we still don’t know what it was we shot on Saturday. Biden and Trudeau “discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin,” according to the White House.

Canadian Minister of Defense ANITA ANAND said the object was similar to the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, “though smaller in size and cylindrical in nature.”

— Perhaps because everyone is a little on edge with all the UFOs, a few hours later on Saturday the FAA temporarily shut down airspace in central Montana after the military saw something unusual on radar. There was little explanation about what it was. “NORAD detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate,” NORAD said in a statement. “Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits. NORAD will continue to monitor the situation.”

Click HERE to read the entire article.

As 1950s-style "UFO fever" grips the nation, I recommend taking this opportunity to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with Harold T. Wilkins' classic 1954 book, Flying Saucers on the Attack, particularly Chapter Six ("Colossal Death Ray Aeroform"), in which the author attempts to blame various unsolved air disasters on the hostile actions of UFOs. Almost seventy years after its initial publication, Wilkins' eccentric reportage still commands the reader's attention. Delving into Wilkins' entire book (which can be purchased HERE) would not be a waste of anyone's time. You can also find the entire text at Archive.org right HERE.