UFOs and a ballooning national security crisis

It seemed little more than a curiosity. The massive white orb, drifting at 60,000 feet elevation and carrying a payload the size of three buses, was first spotted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)on Jan. 28. But it was three days before there was enough concern for President Biden to be briefed by his top general, and a week before Biden gave the order for the balloon to be shot down by an F-22 fighter off the South Carolina coast.

I thought the U.S. government missed an early opportunity to defuse the situation with humor. When China claimed the device was a weather balloon and angrily insisted on their property being returned, we could have told them what people are told when they lose property: Describe it in detail and if that’s what was found, you can have it back.

Since then, the situation has rapidly escalated.

A high-level visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China was postponed. Three more UFOs have been shot down, although it’s not yet clear if they are balloons or if they are Chinese or even if they have a military purpose. A pattern of intrusions has now been revealed that has violated the sovereignty of countries on five continents. China and America are drifting into a new Cold War.

There’s nothing new about military balloons. The military have been used balloons for reconnaissance since the time of Napoleon, when the French used one in 1794 to gain advantage in their war with Austria. The Montgolfier brothers’ first balloon flight (carrying animals) was just eleven years earlier. Modern spy balloons are unmanned and they typically fly at high altitudes, well above 20,000 feet. Satellites are the workhorses of military spying, but balloons have some advantages. They are far closer to the ground so can take very sharp images, and they move slowly so they can capture a lot of data from a small area.

What’s new is heightened tension with a rival whose miliary budget has been growing rapidly. China’s defense budget is second only to the United States, and twice that of our other major rival, Russia. In this context, working with limited data, mistakes can have disastrous consequences.

At a press conference on Monday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House does not believe aliens or extraterrestrial activity is involved in the UFOs. In the past few years, the U.S. military has brought renewed attention to UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) as they have been rebranded. In 2021, a preliminary assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence could only explain one of 144 reports with high confidence, and it was a “large, deflating balloon.” The same agency’s 2022 annual report characterized 163 out of 366 new sightings as balloons or balloon-like entities.

What are we to make of this confusing situation?

Every day, some 1,600 high-altitude weather balloons are released to give a snapshot of Earth’s upper atmosphere. Logic and evidence suggest that for any particular sighting, a weather balloon is the best hypothesis, a spying device is the second best and visiting aliens comes in a distant third. Let’s hope hot air is kept to a minimum and that cooler heads prevail.

To come full circle, let’s revisit “ground zero” for UFOs: the Roswell incident. On June 14, 1947, a New Mexico rancher and his son discovered a swath of debris consisting of metallic, lightweight fabric. Three weeks later, the local newspaper quoted an Army intelligence officer saying they had “come into the possession of a flying saucer.” With that, UFO sightings proliferated, and a modern cultural phenomenon was born. At a time of high Cold War tension, the military did not want to reveal a secret program to detect acoustic signals from Soviet nuclear tests. The device used for that program: a high-altitude balloon.

Chris Impey is a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of hundreds of research papers on observational cosmology and education, and he has written popular books on black holes, the future of space travel, teaching cosmology to Buddhist monks, how the universe began, and how the universe will end. His massive open online courses have enrolled over 370,000 people.