Flying Things

I’ve never written a screenplay, but I have a great idea for one that I’d like to try out on my readers this week. The scene opens in the Situation Room at the White House. The President is sitting at the end of a long couch deep in thought with a sheaf of papers of different sizes and colors in her lap. Most of the Cabinet is present, including especially the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, but the President’s full team of personal advisors and consultants is there as well. And the First Gentleman is there too, standing in a corner and trying to look unobtrusive.

“So,” the President says, “how are we going to handle this?”

For a long moment, no one responds. But then the Secretary of Defense finds his voice. “I have an idea,” he says tentatively. “Let’s just tell them it was a stealth balloon the Chinese sent over to check out the ICBM silos in Montana.”

The room explodes in derisive snickering. “A stealth balloon!” the President responds. “A giant bright-white spherical stealth balloon the size of three busses end-to-end that we’re going to ask the American people to believe the Chinese just hoped no one would notice floating low against the bright blue Montanan Big Sky? Who in the world would believe that? The American people aren’t complete idiots. Well, some maybe. But surely not all!”

The Secretary of Defense stands up in a clear attempt to regain command of the room. “Yes, of course they won’t believe it at first. But if we just say it over and over, we’ll wear them down. And, besides, what’s the alternative? Telling them the truth? I don’t think the American people is quite ready for that! Not just quite yet.”

The President nods slowly. “Okay,” she finally says, catching the First Gentleman’s eye before continuing. “We’ll go with the Chinese Balloon story. They’ll find out how things are soon enough anyway, won’t they?” The President then turns to face the Secretary of Defense directly. “When exactly do our people expect the Mother Ship to arrive? Our best estimate, I mean.”

The Secretary of Defense looks thoughtfully as he looks down at his telephone and touches a few buttons before responding. “Three days, eight hours, and seventeen minutes, Madame President. That’s our best estimate.”

“Oy,” President Goldfarb says quietly. “This is nisht git.”

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So what do you think? Should I keep writing? What’s that? Yes, you all know perfectly well that I have a day job. Okay, okay. But I won’t delete the file either. Not just quite yet!

And now we return to reality. A bright white balloon the size of three busses end-to-end was spotted floating over Montana by eagle-eyed locals about two weeks ago. For reasons as yet undisclosed, the balloon was allowed to float over more or less the entire country until it was finally shot down by our Air Force on February 4 over the Atlantic near the coast of South Carolina. The government has identified the balloon as something connected with Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts, but has left unexplained how the Chinese could possibly have imagined no one would notice such a thing. Did they just not care? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. (Aren’t covert surveillance efforts supposed to be undertaken in a, well, covert manner?) But neither does the argument that we tolerate this kind of low-tech surveillance over our nation because we do the same thing over China convince especially. (That accusation was one the Chinese actually did make in response to the downing of the balloon, insisting that we have flown similar balloons over China more than ten times in recent years. This was categorically denied by our government. For a summary of that set of traded-off accusations, click here.)  No further information has been forthcoming, almost at all. Or at least not any information we could reasonably call definitive.

But Montana was only the beginning. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of last week, the Air Force located and downed three different unidentified objects flying low over North America, one over Alaska, one over the Yukon, and one over Lake Huron, the giant body of water between Ontario and Michigan. (Our Air Force was acting in concert with the Canadian Military and did not enter Canadian air space uninvited.) No real information has been released about any of these incidents either, prompting a firestorm of anger-tinged curiosity in the media and in the blogosphere.

The White House went so far earlier this week as to make the specific point that there is no evidence that these flying objects, the balloon and the other three, constitute evidence that E.T.s are on their way and were simply reconnoitering possible landing sites for the Mother Ship when it finally arrives. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went so far as to laugh out loud at the very thought of these flying things having their origins in outer space. “There is,” she said, chuckling, “no indication of aliens of extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Then, as though she was worried that someone may not have been listening, she repeated herself: “Again,” she said again, “there is no indication of aliens or extra-terrestrial activity with these recent take-downs.” Is the lady protesting too much? Me isn’t sure what methinks. “I loved E.T. the movie,” she concluded even more jocularly, “but I’m just gonna leave it there.” Which she did, putting her amused self in direct conflict with General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD and the United States Northern Command, who, when asked about the possibility of any or all of these flying objects originating in outer space, said clearly that he personally hadn’t ruled that possibility out entirely. Or at all. (What he said specifically in response to the question was “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”)

Then, just last Monday, the administration announced that it was forming an interagency group to address the question of all four incidents. (It’s a good example of where my head is at that when I saw that headline, I misread “interagency” as “intransigency,” which I at first found amusing.) The formation of that group, however, really does suggest that the government is taking this all very seriously, as was evidenced by the remarks by National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who explained that the creation of this interagency group will be “to study the broader implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.” That sounds like a good idea to me! But it still doesn’t go anywhere close to saying what any or all of these flying objects were or weren’t.

I suppose we’ll eventually find out what’s going on. If the Montana balloon was a reconnaissance device, it couldn’t have been more noticeable. Did the Chinese—or whoever—think that Montanans would just suppose that the Earth had acquired a second moon like in Haruki Murakami’s great novel, 1Q84 ? I know at least one Montanan very, very well…and I can assure you he is not the type to be won over easily by the “it’s just a second moon, nothing important” argument. Nor, I suspect, are many—or any—of his neighbors.

So, bottom line, I have no idea what these things in the sky were or are. Will there be more? Who can say? Is the truth that they’ve always been there but we haven’t been looking carefully in any of the right places up to now? I guess…but the notion that they’ve always been floating around but we just didn’t notice them up until now sounds remarkably unlikely. Even the China connection isn’t that certain in my mind. Yes, the Chinese claim now that it was a mere weather balloon that drifted off course. But if that were the case, then why wouldn’t they have notified the Canadians and ourselves that a rogue balloon was about to float into Canadian and/or American air space? The whole story, as Churchill said of Russia, is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.

Myself, I’d like to think it’s a save-the-date kind of thing from Alpha Centauri. Or from somewhere. My faith in God the Creator doesn’t turn me away from imagining life on any of the countless planets out there circling the innumerable stars that exist. (And innumerable is precisely the right word: astronomers estimate that there are something like 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each with an average of about 100 million stars. For more, click here.) When the psalmist wrote millennia ago that the heavens alone are able truly to tell of the glory of God, he was thinking along the same lines. And, if that is so, then it really is inevitable that, somewhere along the way, the residents of one of those planets will find a way to send a note—perhaps in the form of a balloon, perhaps a radio signal, perhaps a gift-comet—inviting us to meet the neighbors and, in so doing, to find out more (and probably much, much more) about ourselves in the process.

Stay tuned on the secret-objects-in-the-sky thing! And if you notice two moons in the nighttime sky, definitely phone General VanHerck and let him know.