“Foreign life forms inventory,
Suspended state of cryogenics,
Selective amnesia’s the story,
Believed foretold but who’d suspect,
The military intelligence,
Two words combined that can’t make sense.”
-“Hangar 18,” Megadeth
The Chinese weather balloon, it seems, was not the end of aerial incursions into U.S. airspace. Rather, it was just the beginning of a week of American firepower vs. “unidentified cylindrical objects with no visible means of propulsion” flying over Lake Huron, the Yukon territory, and Prudhoe Bay. In each instance, the objects were shot down by F-22 pilots, with no indication from the Pentagon as to what they might have been.
Speculations range from Chinese drones, to alien probes, to smaller balloons or drones that are only now being found because radar constraints have been tightened up after the original weather balloon incident. The prevailing theory, probably because it’s the most entertaining, is that 2023 is The Year We Make Contact. It’s the Year of the Unknown Object, apparently, if February is to be any indication.
Ever since, I’ve been walking to and from the Capitol, scanning the gray Juneau skies for strange lights or Chinese paratroopers, a la “Red Dawn,” with no luck so far. The narrative around these occurrences, from balloon to Prudhoe incursion, is oddly synced up with the East Palestine train crash in Ohio. It’s theorized, by a number of my favorite message board lunatics, that the feds are doing controlled opposition to divert our attention away from the train crash – which, depending on who you talk to, is either a nothingburger or the biggest industrial disaster since Bhopal.
Frankly, I don’t know – attributing the federal government with any kind of competency in service of cover-up seems a little generous, especially considering the ineptitude of the current administration. Maybe the incidents are linked, I don’t know, but at some point, believing everything is a psyop or controlled opposition becomes tiresome. At any rate, the Prudhoe shootdown is certainly troubling, in its proximity to the North Slope. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to conceive of attempted industrial sabotage by a rogue actor or a country by crippling Alaska oil production.
Allow your mind to wander, and imagine for a moment that the silliest theory is the most correct, and these unexplained objects really are extraterrestrials. Imagine that a spacecraft that can travel lightyears across space to reach us can’t, for whatever reason, break 40 miles an hour in the atmosphere or evade a Sidewinder missile. Imagine further that they’ve chosen some of the most hostile terrain in the world to make First Contact, at which point we paused the VHS copy of “Top Gun” that is legally mandated to be playing on a 24/7 loop at every air base, scramble fighter pilots, and demonstrate the persuasive power of American engineering. Get Biden blasted, motherfucker.
Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
Dunleavy’s press release response lent the situation a peculiar kind of gravity, in the sense that it critiqued what he perceived as larger systemic problems with the federal government’s response to the original Chinese balloon. “Alaska is truly on the front lines,” he said in a press release, citing our proximity to Russia, China, and the Korean peninsula. Milius was right.
The Pentagon hasn’t officially released a report of what any of the objects were. I tend to doubt we’ll ever know the full story, whether it was a couple of extraterrestrial tourists that got liquefied, or a weather balloon shot down for around $450,000 a missile.
A new development, however, seems to indicate that the object shot down over the Yukon might have been neither a spy drone nor a Martian conveyance – but instead, a hobbyist club’s pet project. It’s great that this is also an option, like the ending to some sort of rejected Thomas Pynchon short story. The American experience is spending millions of dollars on a jet, upwards of $450,000 on a missile, all to shoot down a homemade balloon sent up by a couple ham radio nerds from Illinois. God bless this great country.
A final note: This is one of the last Juneau Dispatches I’ll write for the time being before I go back to Anchorage, unless some anonymous rich Juneau middle-aged female donor wants to shell out some cash to keep God’s favorite columnist in town. Or, hell, if you particularly hate the stuff I’ve been cranking out, throw in a couple bucks to keep some columns flowing so you’ll have something to get mad at. Otherwise, friends, you won’t have Nixon to kick around any longer.