TORONTO – The hypothesis is science fiction, even par excellence. But it would be taking shape, the shape of a UFO. Not a simple “unidentified flying object”, as the literal translation of the acronym suggests, but a real UFO in the literary and cinematographic sense of the term: an alien, extraterrestrial object. No one is able, at the moment, to exclude that the objects shot down in recent days between Canada and the United States are real alien UFOs, at least until the recovery and analysis of the objects themselves are completed. 

According to the american BBC, an US military leader, Gen. Glen VanHerck (in the pic above, from www.defense.gov), does not exclude this lead. The US military, reports the BBC, is not sure what kind of flying objects were shot down in the skies over North America and does not know how they managed to stay aloft.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden ordered another object downed, the fourth total this month. As it was traveling at 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), it could have interfered with commercial air traffic, the United States said. Shot down by an F-16-launched missile over Lake Huron in Michigan near the Canadian border, the object was described by US defense officials as an unmanned “octagonal structure” and “with wires attached”.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, who is U.S. Northern Command Officer, said: “I’m not going to classify them as balloons. We call them objects for a reason” he said. “What we’re seeing are very, very small objects producing a very, very low radar cross-section” he added. Speculation about what the objects might be has intensified in recent days. “I will let the intelligence community and the counterintelligence community investigate and figure it out” General VanHerck said. And when asked if it was possible that the objects were aliens, extraterrestrials, he did not deny. “”I haven’t ruled out anything at this point”. The Pentagon, however, immediately hastened to clarify: “There are no indications of the presence of extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial activity linked to the sighting of unidentified flying objects shot down in recent days by the US air forces”. A movie already seen. 

An alleged Chinese spy balloon was shot down, as is well known, off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, after flying over the United States for days. American officials said it originated in China and was used to monitor sensitive sites, but Beijing has always denied that the object was used for espionage and claimed it was a weather monitoring device that had gone “off road”. However, unlike that spy balloon, the objects shot down over both northern Alaska and the Yukon in northwestern Canada look different. “They were much smaller than Chinese spy balloons and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris” a White House Homeland Security spokesman said. In fact, both the United States and Canada are still working to recover the remains.

Moreover, taking a few steps back (up to December 2022), one thing is noticed: a new Pentagon office created to keep track of UFOs has announced that it has had “hundreds of reports”. This is from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (Aaro), which deals with detections not only in the sky but also under water or in space: it was established after, in June 2021, the director of US national intelligence had reported that between 2004 and 2021 there had been over “144 close encounters,” 80 of which were captured by multiple sensors. Then, from 2021 onwards, i.e. since the activation of the office, hundreds of reports in a few months. Will it be a coincidence?

Meanwhile, on the Canadian side, it’s “a serious situation”, a situation “that we take very seriously”, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau repeated today in Whitehorse, Yukon, where the Canadian military and RCMP officials are engaged, in collaboration with indigenous leaders, in the recovery of the unidentified object shot down by an American F-22 on Saturday in consultation with the Canadian federal government. Object which, it emerged today, is the fourth to appear (and hit) on Canada and the United States in the last ten days.

The first, on February 4, on orders from US President Joe Biden, a US fighter jet shot down what had previously been identified as a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, Carolina South, after spending a week crossing Canada and the United States.

The second, on February 10: another US jet shot down an unmanned high-altitude cylindrical object the size of a small car, off the coast near Deadhorse, Alaska (it was heading towards Canadian airspace).

The third, February 11: on Trudeau’s orders, a US fighter jet shot down an unidentified “cylindrical object” over central Yukon about 100 miles from the Canada-US border (some have described this object as a balloon , although considerably smaller than the original Chinese balloon).

The fourth, February 12: over Lake Huron on the Canada-US border, US “fighters” shot down an octagonal object traveling at 20,000 feet that appeared to have dangling ropes but no payload. With searches still ongoing in the three most recent cases, the US military has not yet identified what the objects are, how they got airborne, or where they originated from.

“I think there is a sort of ‘pattern’ behind this phenomenon: the fact that we are seeing it to a significant extent in the last week is a cause for interest and great attention: it is a serious situation and we are taking it very seriously. The actions that we are undertaking to protect U.S. airspace, to recover and to analyze these objects, the importance of defending our territorial integrity, our sovereignty … it has rarely been as important as it is now” Trudeau said today.

The words of the former national security adviser and former head of the Canadian spy agency CSIS, Richard Fadden, are significant: “If I were Trudeau’s current national security adviser, I would be more worried now that there have been more cases of unknown aerial objects in or around Canadian airspace. And I would be more concerned about when the first balloon appeared. I mean… if these were really the Chinese, they would be much more aggressive than usual… and they can be aggressive too , but they’re sneaky. Whatever this is, they’re not sneaky, so I’d start to worry a little…”.

Meanwhile, the unprecedented series of events has prompted the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, to invite the countries of that military alliance to remain vigilant, assuming that what is happening is “part of a model” of increased Chinese and Russian surveillance against NATO allies. Or maybe something else?

But also in China some “UFOs” appeared. “American balloons have illegally flown over Chinese airspace more than ten times since 1 January 2022” said the spokesman for the Beijing Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, at a press conference, stating that “since 2022 US balloons have flown at high altitudes over Chinese airspace more than ten times without the authorization of the relevant Chinese authorities”. Furthermore, he added, “the United States has also frequently sent ships and aircraft to conduct close reconnaissance activities in China, 657 times last year and 64 times in January of this year alone over the South China Sea, seriously endangering the national security of China and undermining regional peace and stability”. The White House, however, denies the allegations, calling them “false”. If US don’t lie, what were those objects?