Science
UFO Or UAP: Pentagon Officials Aren't Telling Us Everything They Know

To keep yourself up to date on foreign and/or alien objects in the sky, you can buy a subscription to my column right here. I’m going to be on this story like a rat in heat.

It’s a story about UFO’s now. They’re not referring to the last three things they shot out of the sky as balloons, like the Chinese surveillance balloon the Air Force finally shot down off the coast of South Carolina last week. Now the Pentagon is calling them interchangeably UFO’s, or UAP’s – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena -- as well as “objects,” when they are calling them anything at all.

As we enter week two of Aerial Phenomenagate, the Pentagon – and the White House, for that matter – are releasing less information than they were previously. Last week, we knew (1) there was a big Chinese balloon and it was 200 feet tall, (2) that it was carrying something beneath it that was about the size of two school buses, (3) that the two-school bus thing was capable of intercepting what they called “signals,” and (4) that it wasn’t shot down until it had transited a good portion of the country and reached the Atlantic Ocean for “safety reasons.”

Now we’re told that the object shot down over the Canadian Yukon territory was “cylindrical” in shape, and its remains have fallen into land that is difficult to reach. The object shot down over Lake Huron was “octagonal” in structure “with strings attached to it,” and attempts to recover its remains are difficult because of weather conditions over the lake. Both objects were said to be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

The fourth object, shot down yesterday, seems to me the most interesting of them all. According to the Washington Post, it was first picked up on radar about 70 miles north of the U.S. border in Canada. As the object reached U.S. airspace over Montana, U.S. F-15 fighters out of Portland, Oregon, were scrambled to “investigate” the object over Montana, according to the Post, but it was lost by the F-15’s in the darkness of Saturday night. Air Force radar also lost the object somewhere over Montana, and it was not picked up again until Sunday, when it crossed Wisconsin and Michigan.

Let’s stop right there. The fact that U.S. radar lost the object as it crossed several hundred miles of U.S. territory seems fairly extraordinary to me, as does the fact that the F-15’s “lost” the object over Montana because it got dark. U.S. fighters are equipped with all kinds of radar that makes them capable of being used in bad weather conditions, not to mention at nighttime. All of the air-attacks on Iraqi positions in Kuwait in the first Gulf War, and all of the attacks by air when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, were made at night. Neither the Air Force nor the Navy would have committed its jets at night unless they were capable of detecting Iraqi jets and shooting them down.

So why did the highly sophisticated, not to mention very expensive, F-15 lose the object at night over Montana? A hint might be in the object’s shape – octagonal. If the object was octagonal and its sides were slanted, it would resemble some of the early U.S. jet aircraft that were designed to be invisible to radar. The F-17 Nighthawk, pictured below, used slanted surfaces for the body of the aircraft to deflect enemy radar, making it effectively invisible.

F-17 Nighthawk


The Pentagon did describe the object shot down over Lake Huron as “unmanned,” but that’s about as far as they’ve gone.

What they’re not telling us is what else they know about the objects shot down in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron, and my supposition is they know plenty. They didn’t put an F-22 into the sky over Canada and an F-16 over Lake Huron all by themselves. When the Air Force scrambles combat aircraft, they send a whole lot of other stuff aloft. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had an E3 Sentry AWACS, or Airborne Warning and Control System plane up there. It’s a modified Boeing 707 aircraft with a gigantic rotating radar dome mounted on it.

AWACS radar aircraft


An AWACS is said to be capable of detecting objects from the earth’s surface up to the stratosphere 250 miles away. It’s got active and passive detection systems, meaning that active radar sends out signals that are reflected back to its antenna, and passive sends out no signals, meaning that it cannot be detected by aircraft (or objects) with radar detecting technology.

They could have also sent up a Navy P-C3 Orion, a prop-airplane made by Lockheed normally used for anti-submarine warfare.

Navy PC-3 Orion surveillance aircraft


Orion surveillance aircraft were retrofitted with high-resolution cameras and were used in Afghanistan for surveillance along the Afghan-Pakistan border during the war. They were capable of photographing from high altitude Taliban fighters infiltrating into Afghanistan with a high degree of detail during daylight hours or at night. The Orion could have been used to photograph the “objects” over Canada and Lake Huron.

In fact, my speculation is that the Pentagon has an entire album of photos of these things. They know exactly what they look like. High resolution images could show what material or materials they were made of. The fact that the Lake Huron object is being described as having “strings” hanging below it gives us a good hint as to how close U.S. aircraft got to the object and how detailed are the photographs they no doubt took. Not only that, pilots who were scrambled and sent up to shoot down the objects probably flew fairly close to them before they engaged the objects with missiles that cost $500,000 apiece.

It’s going to come out eventually what the “cylindrical” and “octagonal” objects are and who they belonged to and what they were doing over Canadian and U.S. airspace. The fact that the Pentagon has not provided any photographs they doubtlessly took of the objects before shooting them out of the sky is suspicious at best, even a little scary at worst.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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It Is Fauci's Accusers -- Not The Good Doctor -- Who Are Guilty

Dr. Anthony Fauci

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Good-bye, Dr. Fauci. You did your job while under attack from the worst sort of people.

You devoted more than 50 years to public health. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, you led us through HIV/AIDS, Ebola, COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and, every year, seasonal flu.

You say your "proudest moment" was your work with President George W. Bush on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is credited with having saved 20 million lives. (START ITAL)Twenty million lives.

That doesn't include the lives saved from your work in the late '70s and early '80s developing treatments for inflammatory and autoimmune-related diseases. Several that would have previously been death sentences are now in high remission.

And there was, of course, your guidance on dealing with COVID-19. Many who followed your advice during the initial outbreak with hand-washing, mask-wearing and social distancing are alive because of it. Many who mocked you are not.

When the COVID vaccine came along, you never tired of urging Americans to obtain it. Over a million Americans died from COVID, but an estimated 234,000 of those deaths could have been prevented if everyone had gotten their shots.

We wonder how many people died because Donald Trump and assorted lowlifes downplayed the disease, peddled phony cures and cast doubts on the vaccine. They may have had fun owning the libs, but they were also killing many of their followers. Why was never clear.

The sickest abuse came from the senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, who perversely accused you of being responsible for millions of deaths. When you told a Senate hearing that this claim led to threats against you and your family, Paul looked back blankly.

Brooklyn tough, you never backed down. That you served seven presidents from both parties didn't impress the jerks. You let the barrage of boobery splatter all around you as you went about your mission.

But let's give a respectful hearing to the argument that your recommendations caused harm by hurting the economy. Certainly, the social isolation tied to the shutdowns created its own problems.

I, for one, thought that once a vaccine became widely available, many places stayed closed longer than necessary. Schools, especially, could have resumed in-person learning sooner than they did.

But these decisions were made mostly by state and local governments, not you. Meanwhile, fear of a disease that spread easily, clogged emergency rooms with dying patients and left many of those afflicted with long-time illness was itself enough to empty stores, theaters and libraries.

Your harshest critics clearly didn't share the value you place on life. You said your saddest period was back in the '80s when you were treating people with HIV/AIDS and there was no effective therapy.

"We were taking care of very sick, mostly young gay men who were healthy," you said in a recent interview. "You see every single one of them dying or going to die soon." All medicine could offer back then was comfort.

Approaching your 82nd birthday and about to leave public service, you still can't take your eyes off current and new threats.

"We can do things that are very important to mitigate against at least two of them," you said. That would be COVID and seasonal flu. As we know, there are vaccines for both of them.

We know your first name is Anthony, but you can't blame us for thinking it's "Doctor." And, by the way, you looked great on your farewell interviews.

When the documentaries, movies and operas are written about the COVID era, you will be portrayed as the hero and those who attacked you as creeps. Where should we put your monument?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.