John Ivison: Look! Up in the sky! It’s an overblown security panic!
Is there more to the mystery flying object story than meets the eye? Or is it likely that there is much, much less? I’d bet on the latter.
Every decade or so, America panics about its security — the bomber gap of the 1950s, the missile gap of the 1960s, the Iraq weapons of mass destruction angst of the early 2000s. The justification for the alarm is usually entirely fictional and prompted by perceptions of a coming crisis and/or loss of control.
After the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina, three more unidentified aerial objects have been blasted out of the skies —including one that was flying at 40,000 feet over central Yukon.
They were the first objects that the North American Aerospace Defense Command has ever shot down (that we know of, at any rate), which is itself a milestone.
But the story has been greeted by a hysteria that the facts don’t warrant — a frenzy probably not helped by the comment by U.S. Northern Command’s General Glen VanHerck that he could not rule out that the objects were extraterrestrial. Republican congressmen took to the airwaves to blame President Joe Biden for a “major UFO cover-up.”
