UFOs or More Chinese Spy Balloons?
An Intelligence source reveals what is known so far
Over the weekend, reports emerged of more shoot-downs of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) over United States and Canadian territory. Last Friday an object entered northern Alaskan airspace and was intercepted by US aircraft. On Saturday another object was detected and downed over Yukon in northwest Canada. And on Sunday yet another object–described by defense officials as an unmanned "octagonal structure" with strings attached to it–was downed over Lake Huron in Michigan near the Canadian border.
Meanwhile, speculation has been running wild in the media about what these UFOs could be. Even some commentators are theorizing they could be extraterrestrial spacecraft.
According to a trusted source in the United States Intelligence Community, the first two objects shot down over the weekend were smaller Chinese balloons. The one on Sunday is still categorized as unidentified but possibly a meteorological balloon of some type.
The source also stated:
The large Chinese spy balloon that traversed much of the United States weeks ago, and was finally downed on February 4, was supposed to stay over the Pacific, loitering off of the West Coast of the United States. However, the Chinese somehow lost control of it, and as it entered continental airspace the balloon was too obvious for either side to plausibly deny. This is what started a public international incident between the two superpowers.
The United States has flown hundreds and hundreds of small balloons over both Russia and China for years. They are “hard to detect,” presumably because they use stealth technology. The President was never informed of these operations in order to maintain plausible deniability for the Executive Branch.
What exactly is “plausible deniability?” The term is defined as “the ability of people, typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command, to deny knowledge of or responsibility for actions committed by members of their organizational hierarchy.” 1 Plausible deniability has been a longtime strategy that covert intelligence agencies use to protect themselves, and their governments, from public exposure. Both China and the United States have for years spied on each other by flying balloons over each other’s territory. As long as there was no major mishap, both countries could secretly continue these intelligence-gathering operations while publicly denying they were taking place.
However, the large Chinese spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4th changed all of that. Now both United States and Chinese officials are forced to acknowledge the spy vs. spy balloon war that was (until recently) waged in the shadows for years.
There is no telling if either side will cease incursions into the airspace of the other. What is for sure is that all of this will blow up into a political scandal on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.
Plausible deniability. (2023, February 10). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability