Lawmakers, including senior congressional Democrats, have expressed concern about the overall lack of transparency. Rather than volunteer information about the first incident, over Alaska, John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, waited until a reporter asked him about “rumors” of “another Chinese balloon” before reading what sounded like a prepared statement. (The administration declassified more details on Thursday, though these had mostly already appeared in the pages of the Washington Post.) So far, at least, officials have not been fully forthcoming about the weekend shootdowns either. (It is, perhaps, fitting that Gillian Anderson is playing journalists these days.)Īs I wrote last Monday, the Biden administration was not initially very forthcoming about The Balloon, with stony-faced Pentagon officials batting away media questions (some of them admittedly silly) and confirming only their assessment of what The Balloon was and the level of threat they viewed it as posing. The New York Times, CNN, and Politico, meanwhile, all referenced “the truth” being “out there,” an old tagline from The X-Files. ![]() “US General Doesn’t Rule Out Aliens as UFOs Mount,” one magazine headline read (and not in the National Enquirer). Predictably, the sci-fi connotations of that phrase have bled into news coverage. Unlike in the case of The Balloon, it’s still not at all clear what the three things shot down over the weekend were, making them, by definition, unidentified flying objects. ![]() ![]() (Or “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” if you prefer.) Since Friday, US officials-in conjunction, on one occasion, with their Canadian counterparts-have ordered the shootdown of objects that appeared in the skies over Alaska, northern Canada, and Michigan, just days after US planes also shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon that had traversed the continental United States before plopping into the sea off South Carolina.
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