UFOs (now UAPs) getting shot down left and right--what the heck is going on?

The three UFOs shot down in the past couple of weeks are hardly alone—the military is reporting that UFO sightings are now running in the hundreds per year.

What the heck is going on?

We've seen strange objects off Hawai'i, and the Air Force has scrambled to check them out. There have been a couple of U.S. corporate balloons, and a Chinese balloon. So far, we haven't shot any down off Hawai'i (as far as wel know.) But policies seem to be changing, particularly when these things appear in skies occupied by passenger aircraft. 

The Chinese spy balloon we shot down two weeks ago already seems fairly mundane in view the bigger story. 

Now we've shot down an unidentified, unmanned object over northern Alaska. And today, another was shot down over the central Yukon in Canada.

The Canadian Minister of National Defense, Anita Anand, reported that the item shot down over Canada today was cylindrical in shape—that doesn’t sound like a balloon. It was flying at 40,000 feet, the same elevation as the object shot down the day before over Alaska.

This year, we have learned of hundreds more UFOs (now called UAPs) being identified over our skies, many by trained military pilots.

“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) reporting is increasing,” said an unclassified report from the federal administration to Congress last month. The Director of National Intelligence issued the report under the title, “2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” 

Some of the things they’re seeing in our skies are understandable. Weather balloons and such. Some are being found in interesting places, including high security places. There is probably some bias in the data, because there would naturally be a lot more eyes in the sky in such places, but there sure seems to be something else going on, too.

Some of the objects have characteristics of spying activity: “UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” that report said.

The U.S. military is taking that seriously, having established the Department of Defense (DoD) All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO.) Its goal—Figure out what’s going on. It will link military and intelligence branches of the U.S. government, to work together “against the UAP problem set.”

Canada’s Anand reported today that Canada plans to dramatically increase its own capacity to respond to aerial threats.

There are lots of problems with figuring out UFO/UAP identities, including distance, weather, bad lighting, and confusing sensor data. And due to such issues, some assessments are simply wrong: “a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

But not all of them. Of 366 new reports studied by AARO in less than a year, the organization preliminarily concluded that 26 were some kind of unmanned aircraft, 163 were balloons or objects like balloons (one presumes things like blimps), and six were dismissed as clutter. But that left 171 uncharacterized, and some of them had spooky behavior.

“Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”

There was one report that the Yukon UAP may have been interfering with a military jet's sensors. 

Stay tuned. Ufology is suddenly top of mind, has moved clear of the woo-woo set, and is being treated as a significant threat by the U.S as well as Canada.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023