Tangle - The UFOs we are shooting down.

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

In a matter of eight days, U.S. fighter jets have shot down four objects across North America. The first was the highly publicized downing of the purported Chinese spy balloon, which was downed off the coast of South Carolina.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here and today’s “Have a nice day” story here. If you're interested in a UFO newsletter by Isaac and his brother, sign up here.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (2:20), Today’s Story (4:17), Left’s Take (8:48), Right’s Take (13:39), Isaac’s Take (18:25), Your Questions Answered (20:54), Under the Radar (23:29), Numbers (24:10), Have A Nice Day (24:59)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about UFOs and more specifically, some of the UFOs that have been shot down over North America in the last eight or nine days. Before we jump in, a few notes.

First of all, as you can probably tell from listening, I'm a little bit sick, a little under the weather today. So I apologize for those of you that have to tolerate my semi-congested voice. Secondly, I want to thank many of you who reached out in the last 24 hours with kind comments about the podcast that we published yesterday, where I interviewed my wife, Phoebe, for Valentine's Day. Obviously not the typical Tango podcast, but I had a lot of fun doing it. There was some vulnerability and honesty, and

it was weird to be on the mic with your wife for the world to listen, but I was very moved by a lot of the positive feedback that we got. And also has me thinking a lot about ways to make this podcast more interesting and more engaging than just me reading the newsletter on a daily basis. So stay tuned about that because that's something we are kind of cooking up in the background. And finally, a reminder, I am still looking to interview folks from or near East Palestine, Ohio to talk about the recent events there for this week's Friday edition. If you or someone you know lives in the area is experiencing the, I think we should call it a

disaster that's happening there right now with the train derailment and toxic materials in the air and the water, please drop me a line by emailing me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com. I'm hoping to speak with some folks who have experienced things firsthand on the ground. All right, with that out of the way, we'll start off as always with our quick hits. First up, the consumer price index in January fell for the seventh consecutive month, indicating another slight decrease in inflation. However, the inflation numbers have remained higher than economists predicted, and food and gasoline prices both rose month over month. Number two, Senator Dianne Feinstein,

the Democrat from California at 89 years old, announced she will retire from the Senate in 2024. Three other Democrats have already announced plans to run for her seat. Number three, Tesla employees at a Buffalo, New York plant say they plan to unionize a first for the company. Separately, the White House announced that Tesla will open 7,500 charging stations to non-Tesla vehicles by 2024. Number four, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, the Democrat, underwent surgery for prostate cancer. Number five, Christine Wilson, the lone Republican commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, said she plans to resign and criticized the Democratic chair for an abuse of

power on her way out the door. This morning, questions after more unidentified objects are discovered over U.S. and Canadian airspace. According to a senior administration official, this latest object was in the shape of an octagon, unmanned, and traveling near sensitive sites at an altitude of 20,000 feet. I'm going to call the police. I don't really know what. I can't see anything that says hello. I can't really see it outside my eyes. It definitely looks like something, there's some kind of object that's suspended in the air. It's hard to tell. It's pretty small. I cannot see it

out there with my eyes. We've learned the first attempt at shooting down the object over Michigan was unsuccessful. The missile missed its target. In a matter of eight days, United States fighter jets have shot down four objects across North America. The first was the highly publicized downing of the purported Chinese spy balloon, which was downed off the coast of South Carolina. But in the wake of the fiasco of the Chinese balloon, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD, went into heightened alert. As a result, NORAD began spotting more unknown objects in the sky, and in three instances downed them. The first was a flying object brought down over

the remote northern coast of Alaska on Friday. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the object was flying at about 40,000 feet and was a threat to civilian flights. He described the object as being the size of a small car. The second object was shot down over Canada's Yukon Territory and was described as a balloon similar to but significantly smaller than the one taken out off the coast of South Carolina. It was initially reported as cylindrical and an airship, but in a memo to lawmakers, the unidentified object was ultimately described as a small metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it. Then, on Saturday, an object was detected on radar over

Montana and again on Sunday hovering over the upper peninsula of Michigan. As it moved over Lake Michigan, U.S. and Canadian authorities restricted airspace over the lake and deployed planes to identify it. A senior administration official said the object was octagonal and had strings hanging off but no discernible payload. It was flying at about 20,000 feet before two F-16 fighter jets shot it down. The first missile fired by one of the jets did not detect the airborne object, lost track of the target, and missed, a detail initially omitted by the Pentagon and first reported by Fox News. The missile, an AIM-96 Sidewinder that costs about $439,000, fell into Lake Michigan. Mystery and questions have surrounded the three sightings and shootings. American officials

hesitated for days to explain what the objects were, which raised speculation that they could be anything from more spy balloons to alien aircraft. Late Tuesday, Biden administration officials said three unidentified objects served commercial purposes and were not related to espionage. Crews are still trying to recover debris from all three of the objects. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said two were in extremely remote areas, while the object shot down over Lake Huron is now under 200 feet of water. Meanwhile, the story that started the brouhaha over the incursions in the sky is also changing. On Tuesday, the Washington Post published

an exclusive report citing multiple administration officials saying the Chinese balloon shifted course abruptly over the Pacific as a cold front moved in, and analysts are now examining the possibility its flight over the continental United States might not have been intentional. That possibility would corroborate, at least in part, China's claim that the entire incident could have been an accident. While the sightings and downings have created a perception of a sudden glut of new things in the sky, there is very likely a more benign explanation. After the incursion of the Chinese balloon, NORAD adjusted its radar system to make its system more sensitive to smaller and slower moving aircraft. This has sharply

increased the number of objects it's detecting, which has in turn increased the number of military responses. Today, we're going to take a look at some opinions from the left and the right on the recent sightings and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the left is saying. Many on the left call for more transparency, which could reduce the level of panic and belief of conspiracies. Some explain that adjustments NORAD has made are why we are suddenly seeing a wave of UFOs. Others argue that Congress should hold hearings and clearly explain to the public what is happening. The Washington Post editorial board said answers, not panic, are needed about the strange objects in the sky. Unlike China's craft, the subsequent trio showed no signs of having propulsion systems and did not appear to target sensitive military

sites. Authorities said they really don't know the origin or purpose of the three, but did tell people not to worry that they were sent by aliens, the board said. That such reassurances was deemed necessary was a sign of the panic that these objects have the potential to generate and also of the imperative to get to the bottom of what is actually going on. As Representative Debbie Dingell, the Democrat from Michigan, put it, we need the facts about where they are originating from, what their purpose is, and why their frequency is increasing. The three objects that have been most recently shot down aren't necessarily cause for alarm. Officials say one reason so many

unidentified aerial vehicles are suddenly being identified is because the Pentagon has widened the aperture and search parameters. The objects could turn out to be companies or universities, for example. Not every balloon that appears in the sky over North America needs to be fired upon by a costly missile. It's harder still to see the need for an even costlier balloon defense program, although military contractors will certainly try to pitch them to lawmakers, the board said. To protect the American people, it's important to approach these incursions clear-eyed, calmly, and without partisan gamesmanship. In Slate, Fred Kaplan wrote about why there are suddenly so many UFOs. The reason U.S. radars weren't seeing balloons or

anything like balloons before, and are now seeing a lot of them, is that until this month, the radar operators weren't looking for them, Kaplan said. Many people assume that U.S. military intelligence gear picks up everything flying through our airspace, but this isn't true, and this fact is not necessarily a sign of incompetence. Thousands of objects are passing through the lower regions of outer space above American skies, meteors, private satellites, various debris, and if the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, tracked all of them, its officers would be overwhelmed, perhaps to the point of taking their eyes off the truly plausible dangers. So, they set filters on their scanning radar to look out for objects of certain shape

at certain altitudes and speeds. Balloons flying alone at a small fraction of the speed of sound don't fit the algorithm, Kaplan said. A retroactive analysis of the many UFOs in recent years that have been spotted but have gone unexplained will probably conclude that most, if not all of them, were spycraft of one sort or another. At the same time, an analysis in the coming weeks of the three most recent shootdowns might indicate that they weren't spy balloons at all. They might have just been space junk. NORAD might have reset its filters a bit too broadly. In CNN, Peter Bergen said past reports of UFOs indicate this might be a growing problem we have to deal with. January's UFO report had a striking finding.

The number of UFO sightings significantly increased between March 2021 and August 2022, during which time 247 new sightings were reported, mostly by U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots and personnel, he wrote. That's almost double the 144 UFO sightings reported in the 17-year period between 2004 to 2021. The report suggested that the increase may be because there is less stigma associated with reporting UFO sightings now that the Pentagon is actively pushing service personnel to report any anomalies in the sky. The report by the U.S. intelligence community found that a large number of those sightings, 163, were balloons or balloon-like entities, while 26 were unmanned aircraft systems, i.e. drones. An unspecified number of sightings were attributable to sensor irregularities or

variances, such as operator or equipment error. There were 171 unidentified object sightings, however, for which no explanation was found, and some of those objects demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities. The report also noted that UFO sightings continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight. It added that the sightings could point to adversary collection activity, suggesting that UFOs found around sensitive U.S. military installations could be a foreign power spying on them, he said.

Congress should convene hearings to get to the bottom of this. The public has a right to understand why objects are flying around in American airspace that the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community can't identify. All right, that is it for the leftist saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. Many on the right also call for more transparency, saying the Biden administration is not offering enough information. Some are blaming the administration's lack of clear communication for increasing hysteria. unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and

help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. Others argue we need better guidelines with foreign nations like China about what kinds of incursions are acceptable. Michael Brendan Daugherty said we need answers. The publicly available data on these flying objects and their downing don't add up to a coherent story. Some of the news stories make the objects seem extremely low-tech and low-grade, but according to CNN, some pilots had reported that the objects

shown down over Alaska interfered with their sensors. What's more, the government has been clear that the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina was not really similar to the three subsequently downed objects, he wrote. A Washington Post report made the startling implication that the reason for the rash of sightings may be that, until recently, we'd set our radars and sensors to automatically filter out too much information. In other words, we'd been proceeding from a preconceived notion of what we should be seeing in the sky, and our systems therefore failed to see what was actually in the sky until someone in the Pacific Northwest saw it with their own eyes. Speculation among informed observers hasn't clarified the mysteries surrounding

this story. Some aeronautics reporters must be feeling vindicated, having previously warned of evidence that China was developing exotic airships, he said. But beyond that, it's impossible to know much of anything. Perhaps these objects are just a form of low-tech surveillance, taking advantage of our blindness to take the sub-satellite level pictures and video. Perhaps there's something more sinister, such as a test of a weapons delivery system that has proven itself useful at evading detection until now, or a first strike device designed to deliver an electromagnetic pulse attack. Or perhaps they're just an attempt to surveil our top secret planes outside of the

normal orbit schedule of satellites. In the New York Post, Rich Lowry said the White House can't even rule out an alien invasion. It's best never to take White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre's word for anything, but we can presumably believe her when she says the flying objects in the United States shot down in recent days aren't from an alien civilization. Although she left herself some wiggle room, quote, there is no indication of extraterrestrial activity, she said, displaying the weasel-word instincts of someone whose job involves dancing around the truth, Lowry wrote. If she's wrong, we are having close encounters of the most unwelcoming kind, as our alien visitors learn more than they presumably wanted to know about the business end of the F-22. We let a sophisticated Chinese surveillance

balloon fly over the length of the United States and now, in reaction to that embarrassment, are practically scrambling the jets every time a little girl lets go of her helium balloon at a birthday party, he said. Maybe the objects we've subsequently shot down were Chinese or Russian and deserve to be taken out with extreme prejudice. Maybe they were stray commercial or research objects that were minding their own business before having a very bad day. Who knows? Certainly, In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins argued the years of government secrets have left people believing Chinese spyware is actually aliens. The irritating delay in making sense of these events is a longer story than it might seem, Jenkins said. From a febrile debate about the U.S. military and UFOs that started five years ago,

we now find ourselves shooting unidentified objects out of the sky over the U.S. and Canada. From a U.S. Air Force general kibitzing about a war with China maybe as soon as 2025, China, maybe as soon as 2025, in early 2023 were using a Sidewinder missile to blast a Chinese military spy probe out of the stratosphere off the coast of South Carolina. The intervening variable? Apparently a decade-long campaign by intelligence officials to keep reality bottled up. They didn't think we could handle the truth about Chinese balloons and drones over America. The New York Times has fairly owned the story since it was a government-sponsored distraction about little green men, he said. Then the tone changed markedly last fall. Sources began leaking that a pending declassified UFO report would emphasize not

unexplained technology, but ordinary balloons, drones, and airborne clutter. The classified version of the same report, we were told, alluded plainly to Chinese spying. Our government official has indeed achieved something resembling hysteria, with the White House on Monday officially playing down the involvement of extraterrestrials in the recent showdowns, he said. But World War III is undesirable, so China and U.S. will need to reach a new consensus on what's legitimate spying and what constitutes an airspace intrusion. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So first of all, yes, I know what some of you longtime readers are thinking. Where is my UFO newsletter? My brother and I are going to fire it up to explore some of our more fun and outlandish theories. I hope by this weekend, I'll have Zosia drop that in the episode description. But for now, let me offer a

few serious and skeptical points. For starters, we should have far more information than we do. It's been nearly a week since the first of these recent objects was shot down over Alaska, and as far as we know, the government hasn't even reached the debris yet. There are obvious problems with shooting down something before you know what it is, and there are even more issues with using half a million dollar missiles funded by taxpayers to blow things out of the sky and then not tell us what they are. My best bet is that whatever we're taking down in the last week is some combination of domestic research vehicles and foreign spyware. I think Holman Jenkins is on to something when he notes that the government believes we can't handle the truth,

not about aliens, but about how chock full of foreign or unknown flying objects our skies are. The explanation that we are suddenly finding these car-sized objects in the sky because we've adjusted our radars is straightforward enough. It's also a little bit bonkers. What car-sized object is flying above Lake Michigan at 20,000 feet totally unbeknownst to NORAD? How many are there? How often have we known they were there and let them fly on? And if we don't think they pose any meaningful threat, why the hell are we blowing them up?

This isn't remotely close to my area of expertise, but my interest has certainly been piqued. You don't have to watch a lot of X-Files, which I do, in order to understand that our federal government is now gigantic and shrouded in secrecy. Many corners of the military and our spy agencies are damn near inaccessible to the rest of us, and the engaging and startling thing about this fiasco is just how plainly we can now see that. Surely there are a few people who know what we shot down and why we shot them down, but for now, us normal folk, even the journalists, are left scouring over anonymous sources and contradictory accounts. If Biden wants to stem the hysteria, which he should, the best course of action is a straightforward briefing on what we saw, why we suddenly saw so many of them in such a short period of time, and what factors were weighed when we decided to shoot these things down. The longer this current dance goes on, the crazier

the theories will get, and the less clarity we'll ever be able to have. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your question's answer. Today's question is from Glenn in Tacoma, Washington. Glenn said, Has any government entity ever asked you to kill or downplay a story? Seems like this happens in social media frequently. How often does it happen in traditional media? So no, Glenn, I've never personally had that happen. I think there are a few reasons for that. One, it's not that common for a government entity to ever try and kill or downplay a story. Two, I've never worked full-time in a major publication like Fox News or

CNN or The New York Times where your work might be seen by millions of people. And three, most people in government just know that strong-arming a reporter is generally a bad idea. If a journalist is reporting on a story that makes you look bad and you go to them to try to get a comment on that story and they respond by trying to kill the story, that is almost certainly going to end up being reported in the piece or by another journalist. That being said, the place where this occurs most often is definitely in national security reporting. Government officials will sometimes ask papers to remove certain details or refrain from publishing stories if they believe the piece may risk someone's life, like an informant or a spy. Papers will often satisfy those requests,

since their threat to the source can be very real. More often than not, though, if the government wants to downplay or silence a story, they'll do so using other means. They'll lie, they'll obfuscate, they'll delay or distract. Or, as what has happened to me, and what is increasingly common, they'll go off the record. In 2020, I wrote a whole piece about how anonymous sourcing works and some of the wilder things I have been told off the record. This is usually how it goes. An official will share with you the narrative that they want out in the media. Then they will ask to go off the record and become more forthright, maybe even contradicting what they just said. They'll do this in an attempt to either force hedges into the story, like however anonymous officials caution, dot dot dot, or they'll do it

in an effort to get you to back off. Like, off the record, I think you're chasing a nothing burger with this story. In the end, it's often up to the reporters themselves to use their best instincts and judgment on what to print and what to keep chasing. All right, that is it for our reader question today, which brings us to our under the radar section. The next generation is a lot less interested in cars. Generation Z, loosely defined as anyone born between 1996 and 2012, are getting their licenses at lower rates than their predecessors, and many of them just don't seem particularly interested in having their own

licenses. I haven't needed one to this point, one 24-year-old told the Washington Post. If there's an emergency, I'll call Uber or 911. In 1997, 43% of all 16-year-olds had licenses. By 2020, it had fallen to 25%. The number of 17-year-olds with licenses has gone from over 60% to less than half. According to the Washington Post, members of Gen Z cite anxiety, finances, and environmental concerns for their decreased car enthusiasm. You can read the story with a link in today's episode description. All right, that is it for our under the radar section, which brings us to our numbers section. The number of U.S. sightings made by U.S. government personnel between March 2021 and August 2022, mostly by U.S. Navy and Air Force

pilots, was 247. The number of sightings reported in the 17 years before that was 144. The percentage of U.S. adults who say their best guess is intelligent life does exist on other planets is 65%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say that UFOs reported by people in the military are definitely evidence of intelligent life outside of Earth is just 11%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say that UFOs reported by people in the military are probably evidence of intelligent life outside of Earth is 40%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say UFOs are a major threat to U.S. national security is just 10%. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day section. Sometimes tragedy breeds something special. Yesterday, we wrote about the baby girl born in the rubble of Syria's earthquake who miraculously survived despite her mother dying.

Another powerful story has come from this tragedy. An anonymous man in the United States reportedly walked into the Turkish embassy and donated $30 million to earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria, according to Pakistan's prime minister. The anonymous man, who is Pakistani, was praised by the prime minister on Twitter. Deeply moved by the example of an anonymous Pakistani who walked into the was praised by the prime minister on Twitter. Deeply moved by the example

of an anonymous Pakistani who walked into the Turkish embassy in the US and donated $30 million for earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria. These are such glorious acts of philanthropy that enable humanity to triumph over the seemingly insurmountable odds. CNN has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. CNN has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, don't forget to give us a five-star rating or share this podcast with friends. And yeah, if you missed it, be sure to go back and check out yesterday's podcast interview with my wife.

I think a lot of people liked it. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Moorhead and Watkins Kelly and our social media manager, Magdalena Vakova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.tangle.com. We'll see you next time. character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases.

What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.