(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . There may be a very simple explanation for the weekend's series of unidentified flying objects [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-13 Now NORAD is taking interest in things it might previously have automatically filtered out of the data it looks at. “We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we’ve detected over the past week,” Melissa Dalton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said at a Sunday evening news conference. As CNN analyst and former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem put it, “What we can’t answer now is, is this bigger aperture picking up lots of stuff that has essentially been forgiven, around in the skies, because it didn’t pose a threat, or is it part of something organized for whatever surveillance?” The object over Alaska on Friday was described by an unnamed U.S. official as “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon; it “wasn't 'flying' with any sort of propulsion.” Saturday’s object, which crossed Alaska and went into Canadian airspace, was a “small, cylindrical object” at around 40,000 feet, according to Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand. ”These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the [suspected Chinese] balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” a White House Security Council spokesperson told ABC News. The object shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday had previously been detected over Montana. It was octagonal and traveling at around 20,000 feet, prompting concerns that it would interfere with commercial aviation. All three objects were described as “unmanned.” The political ramifications of all this obviously depend, in the not-too-distant future, on what these objects are determined to be. While the government isn’t offering much information, Republicans are looking to use the incidents to cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s leadership in vague ways that leave them room to shift in whatever direction is most advantageous after more information emerges. But that’s a given—the Republican response to any news story at all is to attack Biden in one way or another. Right now we just don’t know if the military is, in response to the Chinese surveillance balloon, now shooting down the kind of stuff that has been flying over us for years without anyone knowing. We do know that the military has been encountering unidentified objects for years—hundreds of them. All anyone has publicly seemed to care about, until now, is that they aren’t aliens, that “unidentified flying object” is not just a synonym for “alien spaceship.” At this point you have to figure that the military and Biden administration will offer some kind of explanation for the last three days of objects shot down, in the knowledge that an information vacuum is going to give rise to wild conspiracy theories. But in the current partisan environment, there are going to be conspiracy theories no matter what, because Republicans don't believe they can afford to let up on attacking Biden for one single instant, and because they as a major political party have encouraged their base to routinely turn to conspiracy theories to explain anything that makes them the least bit uncomfortable. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/13/2152667/-Military-shoots-down-three-unidentified-flying-objects-in-three-days-What-s-going-on Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/