Written by Mary Kyle Mills
If you haven’t been keeping up with the news recently, you may have missed all the talk about UFOs, Russian fighter jets, the release of toxic chemicals in Ohio and green Chinese satellite lasers being shot over Hawaii. On Feb. 12, I was getting ready for a Super Bowl party when I happened to scroll across a headline reposted on someone’s Instagram story that said “U.S. shoots down unidentified cylindrical object over Canada.” Though I was skeptical albeit curious, a quick Google search showed countless articles about the U.S. military shooting down multiple “UFOs” in different parts of the country and some over Canadian airspace.
While searching through news articles (making me and my husband late to our party), I came across multiple conspiracy theories about the objects. Some online suspected that they were Communist spy vessels, and others said the situation was all fabricated by our own government to distract us from events such as the recent claims surrounding Pfizer’s research integrity, the U.S blowing up the Nordstream Pipeline, the potential reveal of the Epstein client list and the deadly chemical release disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Others still confidently said “aliens.”
I quickly took screenshots of an assortment of news articles and conspiracy tweets and started posting them on my story, asking my followers to answer polls and give their input on the situation. I was surprised by the wide range of opinions, which were anywhere from “demonic forces” to “it’s them darned Communists.” For those who may not know, several days prior to the government shooting down the “UFOs,” President Joe Biden gave the order to shoot down an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon over the coast of South Carolina after several days of it soaring over the continental U.S. Considering these events, I was and remain unsure what to think, but I was concerned about the lack of reaction from my peers. Seems like if the U.S. is sending the military to shoot stuff down it would be a big deal right? Perhaps a worldwide pandemic has desensitized us to big news.
I read a lot of articles and watched news reports from many different outlets, and what I kept coming back to in the back of my mind was the rabbit hole that is Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plan drafted by United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 to push propaganda, stage events and even commit acts of terrorism on the U.S. public and Cuban refugees. Why? To put the blame on Cuba in order to garner American civilian support for war. The plan was denied by President John F. Kennedy and was later declassified in the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. While several responses to my Instagram stories thought this is exactly what is going on, I do not feel firmly that the Chinese spy balloon and these UFO reports are fabrications of the U.S. government to make its citizens “anti-China” or “anti-Russia” (consider also the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s recent reports of Russian fighter jets being intercepted near Alaska). However, it is not above our government to consider it, nor should we believe everything we read. In January, four-star U.S. Air Force General Miki Minihan stated that his gut told him the United States would fight China in the next two years (the Pentagon spoke against these statements).
While the UFOs really may just be harmless, runaway weather balloons like some claim, all of this caused me to realize there is so much about our current world I need to pay attention to, and I think you should too.
