Jack Lockhart '25

by Jack Lockhart '25 on April 6, 2023
News Staff

The North American skyline has become the center of an aviation mystery that has gripped Canada and the United States in extraterrestrial fervor and domestic angst. Three unidentified flying objects were shot down over Canadian-American airspace. Last weekend’s unprecedented aerial appearances represented the first time in the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s 65-year history that any object had been shot down on the United States mainland. This occurred in the wake of the  downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of the Carolinas on Feb. 4, following a coast-to-coast tour of the United States, constituting a precariously anxious moment in national security and igniting a yearning for answers within the populace.

This most recent string of aeronautic anomalies began around midday Friday, Feb. 10, when an object, described by National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communication John F. Kirby, as “roughly the size of a small car,” was shot down on direct orders from President Biden about 40,000 feet above northern Alaska. While press figures were understandably coy with the depth of their answers, they acknowledged that the object could not be described as a weather balloon with the information present at the time. At the time of writing, the wreckage of this craft, reportedly shot down by an F-22, has not yet been recovered.

Saturday, Feb. 11, saw another U.F.O.  downed over the Yukon territory of Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated via his Twitter account, “NORAD Command shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” which was described by Canadian Defense Secretary Anita Anand as a cylindrical object hovering about 14,000 feet above the ground. The latest evolution in the apparent aerial invasion of America also began on Saturday, with a radar blip over Havre, MT, indicating some phenomena occurring in the skies of North America, only for its subsequent disappearance to render it a radar error in the eyes of NORAD. This anomaly then began resurfacing across the Midwest, initially reappearing in Montana, and traveling across the heartland through Wisconsin before eventually heading to Lake Huron, at which point a commercial no-fly zone was established over the object’s general area and F-16s scrambled to intercept and eventually down the craft. Notably, the first missile launched by the American fighter jet failed to reach its target; whether this is due to evasive maneuvers made by the craft or simple mechanical errors is unknown. Described as octagonal in shape and containing strings of some kind hanging down beneath it, the craft has yet to be recovered from the depths of Lake Huron, much like the other objects  shot down throughout North American skies over the weekend.

Fueling the flames of domestic confusion, fear, and mistrust toward the government’s handling of the situation is the wide breadth of contradictory explanations given by elected officials and military personnel as to what is actually going on right above our heads. As mentioned above, White House spokespeople such as John Kirby and Karine Jean-Pierre have used purposefully muddled verbiage in describing the nature of the crafts, opting to describe them as simple objects as opposed to specifying anything regarding their nature. Contrarily, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had been briefed on the issue by national security advisor Jake Sullivan, suggested on Sunday that the objects were more than likely smaller variants of the previous Chinese surveillance balloon. One of these  explanations came from General Glen Vanherck, commander of NORAD, who  stated on Sunday: “I haven’t ruled out anything,” when asked about the potential of extraterrestrial involvement.

At the time of writing, the White House has publicly stated that no available evidence pointed towards an alien conclusion. Most startlingly, at the time of writing, President Joe Biden has made no comment regarding the string of incidents that occurred over the weekend of Feb. 10, leaving the American public in a state of collective confusion and anxiety regarding the nature of these objects and the opaque answers we’ve received as of yet. In the age of social media, President Biden’s silence is indicative of an administration still deliberating a course of action in handling such an unprecedented phenomena. At any rate, expect the coming weeks to shine some sort of light upon the situation.