[DanielGreenfield] 2022 was a banner year for UFO nuts. And for Chinese spying on America.The Biden administration, following in the footsteps of the Carter and Clinton administrations, had an interest in flying saucers. Conspiracy theorists embraced the release of Pentagon reports about UFOs, but the real conspiracy was down to earth and hiding in plain sight.
Last month, the Director of National Intelligence released a report on "unidentified aerial phenomena", especially those in "restricted or sensitive airspace". The report characterized 26 reports as "Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS)" and 163 as "balloon or balloon-like entities."
We didn’t have a plague of UFOs, but a massive Chinese aerial surveillance operation. We now know that Chinese spy balloons had previously targeted Navy facilities in Guam and Hawaii.
Democrats and their media had no interest in the balloons or UAS systems showing up in sensitive airspace. And the UFO nuts they allied with gleefully dismissed "weather balloons" as a military cover-up for flying saucers. But it was the UFOs that were the real cover-up.
When a Montana resident captured the first video of the Chinese spy balloon, he first thought it was a UFO. The Biden administration, which had been aware of the balloon all along, kept it secret until videos and photos by Montana residents forced their hand. For the first time, top officials had to go on record about Chinese spy balloons and to even shoot one of them down.
That was much more awkward than talking about UFOs. Advanced alien spaceships in the sky may be a silly thing to comment on, but they don’t expose their duplicity and cowardice. Letting Communist China operate surveillance devices near our air bases, planes and ships does.
What did China think it was doing? The Communist regime is gathering information on our aircraft and ships, on our pilots and personnel, in preparation for an expected war over Taiwan. They want to know as much as they can about everything from capabilities to reaction times. While we’re stumbling into a war and wandering in a scifi haze, they’re doing everything they can to get an edge on us so that when the war happens, they can win swiftly and decisively.
Beijing just assumed that our government would go on covering it up. And that was a good bet.
The Biden administration remained committed to a cover-up until the American public found out through crowdsourced social media means. That is something that Communist China could not have counted on. Or perhaps it assumed that, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Biden administration had the leverage with Big Tech to suppress any story. That may be technically true, but the social media censors were late to brand it as "disinformation" or "lacks context".
China’s drone, balloon and other surveillance operations have often been passed off as UFOs.