Commentary: Chinese Spy Balloon Hysteria… or Not?

Nobody is saying, and that's the alarming part.

The whole big thing got started when a giant balloon was spotted drifting along westward, as things tend to drift, across the North American continent. The balloon was huge, the size, we've been told, of three school buses. An odd analogy, but okay. Then, over the last week or so, there have been three more objects that we've shot down, one in or around the Canada border, so it was a joint exercise, the shooting down of this thing that they either don't know what it was or they're not saying. And there was one more off the frozen north coast of Alaska, too, that got shot down and is awaiting recovery, though polar bears might beat us to it.

The one that got the ball rolling was the Chinese spy balloon. China, for its part, is saying that it's a weather balloon, which if it was, utilized heretofore unknown three-bus-sized weather balloon technology. Heck, even if it was a spy balloon, why was it so giant? And don't they have satellites to do that kind of snooping? I know that we do.

The government's reaction to the giant floaty was puzzling, "puzzling" in that it sounded like made-up stuff. Let's get this straight. Giant spy balloon, floating over the northwestern United States, and the government decides not to shoot it down because it didn't want the wreckage to fall on anybody Wizard of Oz-style. That's fair, but then again, the thing was floating across the giant metropolises of Wyoming and South Dakota, where the chances of it hitting anything were remote, even if the Air Force blew the calculations.

So, instead, improbably, and inscrutably, they let it drift across the entire country and then took it out of the sky with a sidewinder missile fired from an F-22 Raptor, about which internet jokesters had a field day. It was, in all fairness, the first "kill" in the 15-year history of the F-22, a program that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And one balloon. It was F-22 haters heaven. Not to mention that the shooting down of it really made the already uncomfortable school buses comparison even worse. For the record, no children or alien spawn were harmed in the downing of the space invader.

But why didn't they shoot it down as soon as they knew it was there? Apart from the hard-to-believe Wizard of Oz story, they aren't saying. Were they afraid it was toxic? That there were people in it? Did they want to study it to better understand it before Sidewindering it to smithereens? All good questions, but answers to them are nowhere to be found.

And when the government has no answers or unbelievable ones, then they're hiding something. But what?

In circumstances such as this, it's impossible not to jump to weird, or formerly weird, conspiracy theories, namely UAPs, formerly UFOs. These unidentified aerial phenomena (could this new term be any vaguer?) are widely accepted today both inside and outside the Pentagon as being actual things, though nobody knows what they are, other than actual. Or if they do know, they're not telling us, which is straight out of a Spielberg plot.

Read about the mysterious UFO swarms of the Hudson Valley.

So, what are they? We know as much as you don't know either.

And why did we wait so long to shoot down the first one and then waste no time in obliterating the next wave? Your bizarre theory is as good as ours.

And why is there such an uptick in these unknown aerial whatevers? At least this one has a plausible answer, which is that the methods we use to look for things in the sky determines what we find, and this makes perfect sense. In short, if you're looking for elephants in a lake, you're likely to miss a few crocodiles. We're now looking for crocodiles, too, and finding plenty of them.

Does this mean we've been missing Chinese spy balloons galore all this time? Probably. Reports in the mainstream news indicated that China has been doing this slow-floating aerial espionage for some time. Maybe this one balloon got low enough for some reason that it attracted more attention than the others have. Then again, who knows what we're being told or not being told. The government has a long and quantifiable track record of not being forthcoming when it comes to matters of national security or little green men. If those are indeed two different things. Ask them.

Could this all be very serious stuff that we all need to take very seriously or risk very serious consequences? Seriously? It feels unlikely. But then again, who's surprised by weird turns anymore? Surely not the hybrid polar bear grizzlies patrolling the north as pieces of possible UAP/UFOs fall down around their ears and upon the melting tundra in these pandemic times.

I'm afraid to say it, but the presence of Chinese spy balloons and/or UFOs is one of the least weird news stories we've heard lately.

Going Direct: I want NOT to believe, but the evidence is mounting.