Gillibrand on UFOs: "Some Look Like Drones, Some Look Like Balloons"

​Fortunately for all of us, Ancient Aliens isn’t on this week as the History channel prepares to launch the new season of William Shatner’s The UnXplained. I will be enjoying the night off. I’ve been a bit overwhelmed trying to work through all of the paperwork, permissions, and photography that goes into producing a book, so I have had relatively little time to write this week. However, I did want to point out this interview that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand gave to my local public radio station, WAMC, this week. Note that the hype about space aliens and interdimensional poltergeists has faded into a fairly straightforward question of why the military never bothered to check for balloons and drones.

Last question. You have been pressing the Department of Defense for more information about UAPs, also known as UFOs, have you gotten any answers?
 
Not any answers that you would think were interesting. What I have learned is this: we have not been really patrolling the skies in a meaningful way. The FAA looks at this sky for air traffic control to make sure planes don't crash and Space Force and parts of Commerce Department, they do the work of making sure we know where satellites are and what they're doing. But nobody's been looking in between. And the spy balloon was a big wakeup call that other countries are taking advantage of this and spying on us, China being one of them. So we'd heard a lot of reporting from pilots that they keep seeing drones and other different types unidentified flying objects, unidentified aerial phenomenon, doesn't matter what you call it, it's something in the air that you don't understand. Some look like drones, some look like balloons. And they really see it as a safety issue that they're gonna crash into these objects. And they've been very distressed about it.
 
So I was chair of the [Senate Armed Services] Personnel Subcommittee when a lot of these reports were coming in. And so I wanted to create an office that would review all these UAPs and assess what are they? Are they spy balloons? Are they spy drones? Are they something else? We need to have domain awareness and we need to have air superiority for our national security. And so now we have an office [the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO] that's been reviewing all these cases, they have about 800 cases they're reviewing. They're assessing what they are. A lot of [them] are drones, a lot of them are balloons, a lot of them are unclear. But we are going to add sensors, we are going to add detection devices on our aircraft, we're going to do over the horizon radars, we're going to do a lot more to have that domain awareness and air superiority. And that I think is really important and meaningful because if there is any UAP out there that's not from here, we will find that. We will be able to assess that and, and if not, then we've got a lot going on that is probably adversaries like China, Russia and Iran, that we have a huge responsibility to know what they're doing.

​The writing is on the wall. Despite some half-hearted feints toward “unclear” objects that no one other than the extreme ufology fringe seems to expect will be space aliens anymore, the offramp for Congress’s infatuation with UFOs is the same one that we’ve seen over and over again, realizing that the story of UFOs is one of natural phenomena, floating debris, balloons, and drones. It’s bizarre to me that nobody in the Air Force monitors such things, but that is beyond my concern. For our purposes, it’s worth noting that all the way back in 1947, the first government investigation of UFO sightings found hoaxes, misunderstood natural phenomena, balloons, and model aircraft (i.e., “drones” in today’s parlance), and nothing has changed, not even the need for each generation to relearn the same lesson.