By Bob Gaydos

The unmistakable Trump signature.

 “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it.”

   That was Donald Trump last Friday on the South Lawn of the White House as he left for another weekend of golfing.

   The “it” that he denied signing was a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act to round up and swiftly deport 261 migrants, men and women, his administration says are members of a violent gang from Venezuela. No warrants, no charges, no evidence, no hearings … off to a brutal prison in El Salvador.

    Trump had been asked about the proclamation because a federal judge had ordered the government to hold off on the deportation and provide some legal justification before proceeding, all of which had been ignored.

   District Judge James E. Boasberg asked why the proclamation was “essentially signed in the dark” so that flights could begin immediately. The judge was furious at being stonewalled in court by lawyers for the White House on when they received his orders and why they didn’t turn the planes around. Also, why this ancient law was resurrected as justification.

     So, a rare reporter doing his job asked the person who signed the proclamation when he signed it.

     Not me, said Trump, who holds the title of president and would customarily be the person to sign such an order.

   “Other people handled it,” Trump said. “But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”

     Interestingly, Trump’s well-known signature does appear on the digital image of the proclamation available for viewing with the Federal Register. More directly to the point, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said Trump did actually, personally sign the proclamation.

     Cheung tried to deflect from his discrepancy with his boss by saying Trump meant he didn’t sign the actual proclamation, which was declared in 1798. No one was buying that baloney.

      So what’s going on here? There are several options. 

      Whether Trump actually signed the proclamation or not, at this point there is no satisfactory answer to that question.

      — Trump signed it and forgot. Hardly reassuring for someone occupying the Oval Office. Invoking a wartimes act to deport a couple of hundred people with no legal justification being presented is lawlessness personified. If he forgot, then there are legitimate questions about his mental capabilities. It’s the kind of thing he always accused Joe Biden of. Given Trump’s ramblings on other occasions, his mental capacity seems more than suspect. Someone in Congress should ask for a competency test.

  — He signed it and lied about it because of all the negative publicity arising from the judge’s growing anger over White House lawyers refusing to comply with his order. Trump passed the buck to Marco Rubio, just like he always passed the buck to Rudy Giuliani. Closest person always gets tossed under the bus. Trump never takes responsibility for unpopular actions. This is not good news for Rubio, who apparently agreed to trade his genitals and backbone for the title of secretary of state.

  — Cheung lied. An autopen was used to provide Trump’s signature, because staff members thought either he wouldn’t understand the ramifications, or would confuse the issue, or they just didn’t want to waste time to try to track Trump down to get a signature when the planes were on the runway. Or, they didn’t feel it was necessary to get his actual signature, just chalk the whole thing up, like all the other stuff, to the campaign. Page whatever. Getting rid of bad immigrants. He’ll be fine with that. Get the autopen! This is the one I suspect is true.

    —  Who’s in charge here?

                                        ***

PS: No bullet ever touched his ear.

By Bob Gaydos

   “They’re not out there.”

    The little green men.

    The flying saucers.

    The UAPs.

    The UFOs.

    The whatever-they-are that-move-faster-than possible.

     Trust us. It’s one big game of phone tag encouraged by movies, TV and conspiracy theorists. Nothing happening. Nothing covered up. Nothing being reverse engineered. Get on with your day. That is all.

       The above is the gist of a 67-page report issued recently by the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, entitled “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”

    To wit: Nothing out there. Nothing in some desert in New Mexico. The AARO, given full funding by Congress to do its job, concluded that most sitings were simply “misidentification” and, contrary to recent whistleblower claims, it “found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.”

     Well … not so fast. I’m not a UFO fanatic or a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe the odds favor some form of life elsewhere in the universe and I know it’s risky business blindly accepting a report by a government agency summarily dismissing allegations against other segments of the same department.

   Also, I know that there were no weapons of mass destruction buried in Iraq, the U.S. did secretly buy weapons from Iran to arm Nicaraguan rebels and it’s still a bit sketchy on whether North Vietnamese ships really attacked U.S. Navy warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, thrusting the U.S. fully into the war in Vietnam.

    The point? The Defense Department investigating the Defense Department on a matter of wide public interest and controversy is probably not the best way to resolve long-standing questions.

      The mere fact that the government stopped referring to UFOs as UFOs and started calling them UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, suggests an effort to distance from easier public understanding of the topic. Give it a serious sounding name, suggesting all the other UFO stuff is just Hollywood making money. Most of the world will probably still refer to the balloons, satellites and other objects as UFOs, regardless.

     The report was requested by Congress after numerous reports by Navy pilots and other military personnel regarding the sighting of strange objects in the sky and reports from former Defense Department employees of some technology, not of this planet, being secretly reverse-engineered by  the government and private companies.

     A congressional committee held a closed-door meeting with the inspector general of the Intelligence community on such reports a while back and several members emerged thinking that, at the very least, the reports were credible enough for further investigation.

      AARO was given full funding by Congress to do so, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, being one of the senators pushing for the full funding. Haven’t heard any response from the senator yet to the AARO report.

       Most of the mainstream media simply reported the facts straight out of the report as presented: No UFOs, no little green men, nothing being hidden, ever, in the desert, or anywhere else regarding alien life. Just people repeating the same stories to each other, misidentified stuff, some references to other secret government programs and, well, maybe a few things there’s too little information on to draw a conclusion.

     Not good enough. Many of the recent reports, based on advanced technology, were made by credible witnesses. In fact, so were some of the older reports, many of which described objects similar to recent reports. Some older reports apparently were not even included in the AARO report.

   Instead of the Executive Department investigating the Executive Department, Congress, as an equal member of government, the funding member, should do so. There are reports that legislation is being prepared for just that purpose.

      People are unlikely to stop believing in UFOS or at least the possibility of them, especially when they’re dismissed as engaging in a game of phone tag. In fact, that’s the kind of response some bad Hollywood scriptwriters would come up with  

                                     ******

PS: The AARO report is unlikely to dampen the annual UFO parade and celebration in the Hamlet of Pine Bush in upstate New York. The UFO capital of the Northeast will hold its annual festivities June 1 and, yes, there will be little and big green men, robots, other strange creatures, lots of good food, music, goods to be bought and fun to be had. There will also be some serious discussion by serious people about UAPs, etc. I’d venture to say the AARO report will come up. A fun day for believers, non-believers and everyone in-between. Maybe Senator Gillibrand will stop by.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

By Bob Gaydos

U.S. fighter jet approaches the first balloon over Alaska.

  Remember those “balloons“ that were shot down in rapidfire order, bang, bang, bang, a couple of weeks ago? Whatever happened to them? Anybody hear anything more about them?

    I’m not talking about that Chinese spy balloon, OK? They said it was theirs, but that it was just a runaway weather balloon so why’d we have to make such a big deal and shoot it down? We said we didn’t believe them so our Secretary of State canceled his trip to Beijing. Navy divers are still looking for the hardware at the bottom of the ocean off South Carolina. Not that one.

    The other three.

    No sooner had the bus-sized balloon become a political balloon in the U.S. (“Shoot it down! Don’t shoot it down! Why’d you wait to shoot it down? Our air space has been violated! Biden’s too old!”), than U.S. fighter jets shot down three smaller unidentified flying objects over Canada and the U.S. in the following week.

     All the Defense Department said was that a balloon the size of a small car was shot down over Alaskan waters on a Friday, a cylindrical object was shot down over the Yukon Territory in Canada on Saturday and an octagonal object with strings dangling off it was shot down over Lake Huron on Michigan on Sunday.

    A busy weekend for the Air Force and UFO enthusiasts.

    Of course, today, UFOs are called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) by the Pentagon because, god  forbid, people would have a familiar reference point to know they were talking about stuff flying around out there and the government had no clue about its purpose or its origin. You know, Unidentified Flying Objects.

      The idea, of course, is to discourage talk and speculation about aliens being involved in these sightings, which the Pentagon recently acknowledged publicly were common enough to our pilots that further study was warranted. So the UAPs/UFOs are out there. And sometimes, apparently, we shoot them down and sometimes we don’t. Usually, apparently, because they’re too fast.

    Following the weekend string of UFO shootdowns, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean/Pierre told gathered reporters, “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again no indication — of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that and it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”

     Well, yeah, but what do you expect when you scramble fighter jets to shoot down objects in the sky that you can’t identify (UFOs) and don’t tell people anything about what you just shot down except that they were comparatively small and posed a flight risk to commercial aircraft.

      People tend to start speculating about stuff like this when the government doesn’t tell them anything more about it. What else is floating around out there? If they weren’t extra terrestrial, who sent them up there and what were they for? What was their source of propulsion? How can you be sure that they weren’t alien?

     The three shootdowns occurred a week after that Chinese spy meandered across the United States.

     NORAD, the military radar command center housed deep in the mountains in Colorado, rejiggered its settings after the Chinese balloon incident, to be more sensitive to, umm, aerial phenomena. That means it’s now picking up more objects, including lower-flying unidentified objects, than before.

     Which begs the question, why weren’t we looking for these objects before? Did we not think they were there? Why not, when the sky seems to be full of them? And why do we automatically rule out alien civilizations clever enough to send an apparently harmless octagonal-shaped thing with stuff dangling off it as a way to check us out?

     Look, l’m not a conspiracy fan and I don’t see ET lurking around every galaxy, but I also believe it’s possible that there is intelligent civilization elsewhere in the universe and we should be open to that possibility.

     I also live next door to a community known as the UFO center of the Northeast — Pine Bush, N.Y. People here take UFO sightings seriously because there have been enough of them to warrant it. There’s even a museum downtown dedicated to such phenomena and a UFO-themed parade every spring.  

      Bottom line for the Pentagon? Don’t patronize people who want to know what the heck is roaming around our atmosphere and don’t act as if shooting down, never mind just seeing, a few UAPs or UFOs is no big deal. Local or interstellar, tell us what’s going on out there and get NORAD to fine tune its radar.

      Oh, and we still need to hear what you’ve learned about those three mysterious balloons, the ones not made in China.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.