Top general not ruling out aliens after 3 UFOs shot down

The US Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said Sunday he was not ruling out aliens after a string of shoot-downs of unidentified objects.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three floating objects shot down by warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out.”

“I haven’t ruled out anything,” added VanHerck, head of US North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command.

“At this point we continue to assess every threat or potential threat, unknown, that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”

VanHerck’s comments came during a Pentagon briefing after an F-16 fighter jet shot down an octagonal-shaped object over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.

The mystery object had strings hanging off it but carried no perceptible payload. It was shot out of the sky with an AIM9x missile about 20,000 feet over Lake Huron. The military was planning to retrieve it from the water to learn about its origin.

The incidents over the past three days involving airborne objects of unknown origin follow the Feb. 4 downing of a Chinese spy balloon that put North American air defenses on high alert. US officials said that the balloon was being used for surveillance.

Another US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military had seen no evidence suggesting any of the objects in question were of extraterrestrial origin.

VanHerck said the military was unable to immediately determine the means by which any of the three latest objects were kept aloft or where they were coming from.

“We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” said VanHerck.

The shoot-down over Lake Huron followed the US takedowns of two other unidentified objects over Alaska and Canada Friday and Saturday, respectively.

VanHerck said the three most recent objects were “very, very small” and moved at slow speeds.

The incidents come as the Pentagon has undertaken a new push in recent years to investigate military sightings of UFOs – rebranded in official government parlance as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs.

The government’s effort to investigate anomalous, unidentified objects – whether they are in space, the skies or even underwater – has led to hundreds of documented reports that are being investigated, senior military leaders have said.

But the Pentagon says it has not found evidence to indicate Earthly visits from intelligent alien life.

Analysis of military sightings are conducted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in conjunction with a newly created Pentagon bureau known as AARO, short for the cryptically named All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

Their first report to Congress in June 2021 examined 144 sightings by US military aviators dating to 2004.

That study attributed one incident to a large, deflating balloon but found the rest were beyond the government’s ability to explain without further analysis.

A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued last month cited 366 additional sightings, mostly things like balloons, drones, birds or airborne clutter. But 171 remained officially unexplained.

“Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” the office said in the report.

Sill, Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, told reporters in December that he had not seen anything in the files to indicate intelligent alien life.

“I have not seen anything in those holdings to date that would suggest that there has been an alien visitation, an alien crash or anything like that,” Moultrie said.

With Post wires