#spy balloons

[trekkiesagainstchastity]

Truly one of us

[ID] A cropped tweet from Edward Snowden @Snowden reads It's not aliens. I wish it were aliens. [End ID]

[wumingfoundation]

UFOs And The Longing For The Unidentified

During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 there was an exponential increase in UFO sightings throughout the West. Then, in February 2023, the concept of “Unidentified aerial phenomena” became central to the dispute between the US and China over alleged spy-balloons.

The Italian writing collective Wu Ming recently published UFO 78, a novel whose principal plot is set between March and May 1978. In it, the kidnapping of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades is intertwined with the great wave of UFO sightings that occurred in Italy that year. The novel closely follows another book, La Q di Qomplotto [The Q of Qonspiracy] (2021), in which a member of the Wu Ming collective developed an anticapitalist take on conspiratorial thinking, taking Qanon as his case study.

In the following essay, which appeared on Wu Ming’s blog Giap on February 24th, 2023 before being expanded for publication on Ill Will, the Italian collective interprets the return of UFOs into our collective imagination and the “longing for the unidentified” not only as a symptom of climate anxiety and our  post-pandemic predicament, but also as the manifestation of a "utopian impulse," an attempt to escape a system that forces us to continuously identify ourselves while suffocating any future perspective of radical change.

https://illwill.com/ufos

[arc-alpha-louie]

"Watch those wrist rockets!"

Kriffin' spy balloons. This one's about to get blasted by a wrist rocket.

[parttimereporter]

Mysterious 'spy' balloons in US spark fears of a covert invasion

Strange white balloons have appeared over multiple US states, stirring fresh fears of surveillance from above.

[biglisbonnews]

Government agencies have 30 days to purge devices of Tik Tok Civil servants! Delete your Tik Tok! You've got 30 days, says the White House. In a bid to keep U.S. data safe, all federal agencies must eliminate TikTok from phones and systems and prohibit internet traffic from reaching the company, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told agencies in a guidance memorandum seen by Reuters. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2023/02/28/government-agencies-have-30-days-to-purge-devices-of-tik-tok.html

[baglieg]

This whole "Chinese spy balloon thing" looks like a comedy of errors 78 years in the making.

In 1947, the US was secretly working on Project Mogul, an attempt to invent high altitude spy balloons to monitor the USSR's nuclear weapon test program.

One of their prototypes crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. The army quickly hid all the evidence and said it was "a scientific weather balloon" and everyone knew they were lying but nobody knew why they were lying. This, naturally, led a lot of people who are collectively somewhat difficult to take seriously to the obvious conclusion that it was space aliens.

Fast forward to the 2000s and 2010s. Over and over, video footage from fighter pilot training exercises leaked that shows unidentified flying objects. Now perhaps some of these flying blobs were just sensor glitches, because of dust on a lens, or because the early versions of their new plane's software were a buggy mess. And, of course, there's the ever popular "I’m not saying it was aliens… but it was aliens" theory. Consider, though, that in one of the videos you can hear the pilot say, "it's a drone bro!"

Fast forward again to 2023, and a bunch of very real unidentified high-altitude balloons have turned up in North American airspace. China said, "it's a scientific weather balloon," because of course they did, and then accused the USA of flying spy balloons over Tibet, because why the fuck not, eh.

Now perhaps the US military is slowly starting to realise that some other entity - maybe China, maybe Russia, maybe not aliens - has been using drones and balloons to test and examine US military radar and weapons systems for the last 20 years but nobody wanted to look into it too hard because they didn't want to be known around the Pentagon as The Crazy UFO Guy.

How embarrassing for them.

[biglisbonnews]

White House says it was probably weather balloons Multiple government agencies, including the White House, have assured the public that whatever we've been shooting down is probably just weather balloons conducting research. It seems this is just conjecture as they have not yet recovered the debris and the people rooting for Aliens aren't out yet. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2023/02/14/white-house-says-it-was-probably-weather-balloons.html

[ivovynckier]

There are no UFOs, only spy balloons. If there were, François Truffaut would be there, making hand gestures at them.