America scrambles jets to repel sudden UFO invasion of North America with Beetle-sized bogies

(Originally published Feb. 13 in “What in the World“) The U.S. military just shot down its third unidentified flying object since blasting a Chinese balloon out of the skies over the Atlantic Ocean after it traversed the American continent.

Theories abound about why there are suddenly so many UFOs seemingly invading North America, from assault by runaway weather balloons to invasion by extraterrestrials. But one factor explaining the sudden proliferation of objects is that the Pentagon’s radars have been notched up to 11 after the embarrassment of allowing a massive Chinese balloon to drift all the way to Montana before alerted to its presence by gawping civilians on the ground.

The first was an object spotted Friday flying at the gentle speed of 30-60 kph over Alaska, but much lower than the Chinese balloon’s 60,000 feet, so the concern was it might interfere with passenger air traffic in the area, which has picked up since Russian airspace was closed off due to the war in Ukraine. While the Chinese balloon carried a payload about the size of a small passenger jet, this object was described as roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The remedy was the same as for the Chinese balloon: Lockheed Martin F-22 firing a Raytheon Sidewinder missile. That’s my air force right there, buddy!

The second was a cylindrical object much smaller than the Chinese balloon, flying Saturday at an altitude of about 12km, or 40,000 feet, over Canada’s Yukon territory. It, too, was the size of a passenger car. Spotted by the combined U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command as it passed over Alaska into Canadian airspace, the remedy was the same: a U.S. F-22 firing a Sidewinder.

The third object was octagonal in shape and flying Sunday at just 20,000 feet over Lake Huron after being first spotted, like the Chinese balloon, over Montana, home to many of America’s nuclear missile silos. It was described as roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. This time, a Lockheed Martin F-16—the very plane Ukraine would like the U.S. to send it—was sent to fire the Sidewinder that brought the Beetle-sized bogie down.

One theory is that China, and possibly Russia, are using balloons as a relatively low-tech, difficult-to-detect means of spying on American defenses, or possibly to probe its ability to detect such objects and how it responds to them—the same way militaries have used aircraft since at least the beginning of the Cold War. Another is that the objects are part of an effort to harass the United States in a way similar to how the Pentagon is developing ways to use drone swarms. It’s easy to devise more: climate change and the bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers it’s creating are driving weather balloons farther off course than usual. Another: Mexican drug cartels have swapped submarines for dirigibles, the same way the military considered using weather balloons to spy on them.

The problem is that no one yet knows what the three objects were, whether they were balloons, or who sent them. Blasting them out of the air over water or uninhabited wilderness reduces the risk of casualties on the ground but also makes it difficult to recover the scattered debris created. So far, it seems these latest objects didn’t exhibit the kind of fantastic flight capabilities that pilots have witnessed in other UFO sightings in recent years.

But alien invasion hasn’t yet been ruled out. Military and civilian pilots have reported at least 11 “near misses” since 2019, in which UFOs have come within 150 meters of aircraft. These include declassified encounters by U.S. Navy pilots with objects displaying flight characteristics beyond those of any known aircraft, some of which appeared to also voyage undersea.

Last October, the U.S. government assembled a crack team to respond to the threat to aircraft posed by these UFOs. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which includes the country’s largest defense and space contractors, established three committees to study and assess the UFO risk. This is in addition to the Institute’s Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Community of Interest and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office established at the Pentagon last July.