After the overblown reactions of the highest US authorities to the overflight of a Chinese hot air balloon, which Beijing claims was a weather observation balloon and which Washington claims was spying, the government headed by Joe Biden has been reporting similar episodes, fuelling mass hysteria.
Following the downing of that device by a US fighter jet on 4 February over Atlantic waters, military aircraft did the same on Friday in Alaska and last weekend shot down two other high-altitude flying objects in areas bordering Canada, without specifying if they were attributed to China or not.
Perhaps to divert attention from the war in Ukraine and new US and European funding to continue killing civilians, the first of these incidents sparked a diplomatic crisis between the Chinese and US governments and heightened tensions between the major powers in an already volatile global environment against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and growing hostility between Taipei and Beijing, encouraged by Washington.
Instead of explaining and reassuring the population, Washington is scaring the public at home with so-called threats from the sky. China claimed that at least 10 US balloons have entered its airspace since January 2022, accusations that the White House denied and replied that it is the Asian country that has a surveillance balloon programme for intelligence gathering.
The goal of diverting attention from the war in Ukraine, acts of sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines, the huge domestic crisis and the loss of credibility of Joe Biden’s administration was being fulfilled; US-China relations have worsened after Washington shot down the first balloon, which Beijing claimed was for civilian purposes.
The US has since shot down three other balloons flying over the United States and Canada, although Beijing has only admitted that the first was its own and that it was a weather device. But the Chinese government did accuse Washington of sending a dozen balloons into its airspace since January 2022. It is not uncommon for the United States to illegally enter other countries’ airspace, said foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.
According to the US Department of Defense, an F-22 Raptor aircraft from an air base in Virginia, which fired an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, was used to accomplish the objective ordered by Biden. The operation was completed in a matter of minutes, but the total cost of the mission was $500,000, since, one hour of flying the F-22 Raptor is valued at almost $85,325, while a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile is worth $380,000.
Meanwhile, White House National Security Council chief John Kirby linked the recent downing of three unidentified objects over North America to the existence of a Chinese military balloon programme, saying, “we’re not sure if the downed devices had surveillance capability, but we can’t rule it out, and we don’t know where they came from”.
Other Western countries dependent on Washington did their bit to divert attention from the massacre in Ukraine. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the government would do whatever was necessary to protect the country while announcing a security review. And his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, considered that there is some kind of pattern to the balloon and the other three objects.
Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden tweeted that the appearance of the balloons is intended to distract attention from the investigation into acts of sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines, which journalist Seymour Hersh recently linked to the US government,
On the other hand, the appearance of the devices and their destruction by Washington’s air force gave rise to an epidemic of sightings of unidentified flying objects that spread across South America, Spain and China itself.
The uncertainty is such that White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre felt it necessary to clarify at the start of her daily press briefing that they have no indication of the existence of extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial activity. Could it be aliens disguised as Chinese?
For several days, the news from the United States has been dominated by the sighting or shooting down of Chinese balloons or unidentified flying objects, and conceals, for example, an ecological disaster in the state of Ohio where a train derailed in East Palestine, a town of five thousand inhabitants, and spilled thousands of litres of vinyl chloride, a highly toxic chemical used in the manufacture of PVC.
The population had to be evacuated while a “controlled explosion” was implemented to prevent the spread of further damage. However, the release also generated dangerous by-products such as hydrogen chloride and phosgene, a gas that was used as a chemical weapon during the First World War.
There is now a risk of developing cancer of the liver and other organs for those exposed to the “acid mist”. To make matters worse, hundreds of photos of animals killed by poisoning have appeared on social media.
While ufologists have seized the opportunity to feast on sensationalism, the US institutional sphere and media have exhibited their proclivity to turn almost anything into a threat to national security and have shown the extent to which official propaganda and Hollywood stories are capable of feeding back on visions as apocalyptic as they are false.
Indeed, the affair of the Chinese balloon and the flying objects that followed it seems like the prologue to one of those catastrophe films, so popular in the US, in which a sudden and unknown threat suddenly bursts into the peaceful lives of Americans, upends them all at once and places their country – and, incidentally, the rest of the world – before the prospect of imminent destruction.
As far as can be concluded from statements by senior Biden administration officials, the object shot down on 4 February, whether scientific or spying, never posed a significant threat to US security. But the very act of destroying it from a military aircraft was an act of unconscionability accompanied by unconscionable paranoid talk.
Unfortunately, because of the terrorist media, hyperbole of this kind is taken at face value, and then magnified, by sectors of US society that already live in a state of permanent agitation and fear of fictitious foreign threats and even of what they perceive as tyranny by their own government, as in the case of survivalist groups, who live in preparation for one of the many possible ends of the world.
