By Bob Gaydos

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
… holds hearing on AARO

What with all the news all the time being all things Trump these days, it has been easy to lose track of some of our elected representatives not directly involved in that slog through history.

For example, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, always an active, outspoken member of the upper chamber of Congress, had fallen completely off my radar. As a New Yorker, I assumed she was working diligently and, well, no news is good news, right?

       Then she recently reappeared in as unlikely a place as I could imagine and, almost literally, back on the radar.

        Remember those “Chinese” balloons flying over the United States a few months back? Perhaps you’ve seen on TV recently released Navy videos of strange objects their pilots couldn’t identify. UFOs. Or, as the government prefers to call them today, UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

      They’re on Gillibrand’s radar. She is chairman of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. As such, she is charged with overseeing that government agencies charged with identifying, assessing, protecting against and notifying Americans about any emerging threats — identifiable, flying or not — are doing their jobs. Especially that notifying part.

     Those balloon sightings and recent public comments by a recently retired high-level intelligence officer that the government has had a long-standing secret program of crash retrieval and reverse engineering of unidentified spacecraft of “non-human origin,” have given sudden urgency and immediacy to Gillibrand’s Senate post. And she’s taking it seriously.

     She and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, succeeded in adding an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill requiring that any private enterprise which has been given a contract to retrieve, research or re-engineer anything discovered from unidentified, non-human phenomena make that information known to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

     That mouthful of an office was established in 2022 for the express purpose of resolving decades of UFO reports … and non-reports. Its report, due in June of next year, is supposed to include “any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress,” and “any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.”

      Any coverups.

      Typically serious about her responsibilities, Gillibrand fought for and gained additional funding for AARO, so that it could actually perform the function for which it was ostensibly established. Previously, it just had enough funding to cover office expenses. A front.

     Gillibrand wants any private businesses to report to AARO about any involvement in such retrievals and reverse engineering efforts and the requirement includes substantial financial penalties for anyone refusing to do so or hiding such information.

     The interesting thing about the claims made by the whistleblower, David Grusch, is that nobody in the government tried to quickly shut him up.

     Gillibrand’s subcommittee held both a classified closed hearing and an open hearing on AARO in April. Its director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick was the sole witness. He testified: “I should state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. government’s leadership of its findings.”

   Does Gillibrand believe Grusch or others who have reported witnessing non-human vehicles or other phenomena for decades?

     “I have no idea,” she recently told a reporter who asked her. “So I’m going to do the work and analyze it and figure it out.”

     She’s back on the radar.

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.