OPINION:
A giant Chinese spy balloon floats unmolested across the United States before President Biden sees fit to shoot it down. Soon, fighter jets are firing missiles at smaller skyborne objects one after another, like a sci-fi computer game come to life. Heaven forbid a child should let go of the string on a “happy birthday” balloon and send it aloft into the kill zone. What gives? As mysterious floating gizmos proliferate above the nation, the Biden administration’s shabby record of truth-telling has left Americans struggling to extract fact from fiction.
At last count, four unidentified flying objects have been spotted and destroyed by U.S. military aircraft in the past week or so. The initial high-tech surveillance dirigible sailed above sensitive U.S. military bases before an indecisive President Biden ordered the Air Force to obliterate it over the South Carolina coast. While Pentagon officials identified it as Chinese in origin, bits and pieces retrieved from the ocean floor carry labels written in English, bringing to mind a disturbing dictum often attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
As Americans crane their necks skyward, unsurprisingly, more bewildering floaters have been spotted. In recent days, smaller objects have appeared over Alaska, the Canadian Yukon Territory and Lake Huron. One is described as “cylindrical,” evoking memories of the mystifying “Tic Tac,” an oblong-shaped craft that Navy pilots caught on camera in 2004 as it raced across the sky in unearthly fashion. Fighter jets are not hesitating to scramble and down these most recent crafts.
Asked by reporters the hyper-speculative question of whether extraterrestrials could be commanding the aerial phenomena, Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, could only manage, “I haven’t ruled anything out at this point.” Lest the statement cause imaginations to run wild, the White House quickly jumped in to reassure Americans there is “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.” That’s comforting, sort of.
The dearth of information leaves the public to ponder the ongoing phenomena with their own powers of reason. As a long-standing problem-solving principle, Occam’s razor says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Accordingly, if the first, massive balloon has been positively identified as a Chinese spy airship, then subsequent, smaller ones are likely of Chinese origin, or possibly copycats from neighboring and equally adversarial Russia.
Beijing has expressed regret for the first incursion only, and it has also charged that the U.S. snoops in similar fashion, sending at least 10 surveillance balloons over Chinese territory since 2022. A National Security Council spokeswoman dismissed the claim on Monday. But then, Washington officialdom has variously alleged that former President Donald Trump is a Russian asset, parents of schoolchildren are domestic terrorists and, most recently, Catholics who enjoy hearing Mass in Latin are a clear and present danger to the republic. Each of these assertions is political propaganda.
Such deceit corrupts the public’s faith in government, and the current aerial mystery has Mr. Biden’s credibility hanging in the balance. Americans believe, as it were, that “the truth is out there.” It’s balloon truth or bust.
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