The UFO Controversy is Back, Thanks To the US Navy

After decades of denial, even the American government now admits that there is something, a lot of somethings, operating in its airspace that it simply cannot explain. They're tracking and logging intrusions by some sort of aerial vehicles that the cannot identify, craft that seem to defy conventional aeronautics.  Little green men? Nobody knows.

Pilots of the United States Navy are logging unidentified flying objects, UFOs, in American airspace several times a month. Now the navy brass are taking their reports seriously.

As first reported by POLITICO, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis since 2014. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. 

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.” 

He said, “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”

Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it “the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”

Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was less laudatory. 

“I don’t believe in safety through ignorance,” he said, scolding the intelligence community for a lack of “curiosity and courage” and a “failure to react” to a strong pattern of sightings. 

In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

Elizondo, who ran the AATIP, [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program], said the newly drafted guidelines were a culmination of many things, most notably that the Navy had enough credible evidence — including eyewitness accounts and corroborating radar information — to “know this is occurring.” 

“If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security,” Elizondo said. 

With the number of U.S. military personnel in the Air Force and Navy who described the same observations, the noise level could not be ignored. 

“This type of activity is very alarming,” Elizondo said, “and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”

The F-35 Also Comes Up Short in the Eyes of the US Navy

A few days ago it was the US Air Force Air Combat Command chief arguing that his air force needs to get working on a 6th-generation replacement before the 5th generation F-35 even enters operational service.  General Mike Hostage's complaint was that the troubled warplane's weapons bays were too "shallow" - were too small to hold an adequate amount of weaponry.

Now it's the US Navy complaining that getting stuck with only the F-35 could render America's mighty carrier fleet "irrelevant."  What's the navy's gripe?  It's that the F-35 is no longer very stealthy.  An article in the US Naval Institute News warns that the 35's intended targets, Russia and China, have made terrific progress on developing multi-band radars capable of seeing through and targeting the F-35.

The navy seems to believe it needs an "all-aspect" aircraft, a thinly veiled criticism of the F-35's stealth cloaking that is frontal aspect only.  Adversaries approaching from either side, above, below or behind can detect - and attack -  the F-35 just fine.

 "...given the proliferation of low frequency radars, there are serious questions about the ability of the F-35C’s survivability against the toughest of air defenses."  That's not pulling any punches, eh? 

"All-aspect is highly desirable against this sort of networked [anti-air] environment.”

"Fundamentally, the Navy's lack of an all-aspect broadband stealth jet on the carrier flight deck is giving fuel to advocates of a high-end Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft that can tackle the toughest enemy air defenses.

"Without such capability, the Navy's carrier fleet will fade into irrelevance." 

What is the message for Canada when America's two main customers for the F-35 - the US Air Force and the US Navy - are already voicing complaints about the inadequacies of the warplane and clamouring for another warplane to take its place?  Bear in mind that these latest complaints - the inadequate weapons load and the obsolescence of the F-35's stealth cloaking - are just two of the recognized drawbacks.  Add to that, when the F-35 does run into the opposition, its limited fuel load and lack of supercruise could leave it at the mercy of modern fighter interceptors except they're not likely to be very merciful.

I think the message is clear.  Let's not take the enormously expensive leap into unproven and dubious "5th generation" technology.  Remember that, while this is supposedly 5th generation, it's also "beta" technology.  If we're really of a mind to get into air wars with China and Russia in the next 20-years, let's invest in bargain-price cruise missiles.  Congress has the US military in a headlock that will force those admirals and generals to buy 2,400 F-35's.  Another 65 of them parked in Canadian hangars won't do much to improve or weaken either country's air defences. 

Bush Clears US Navy to Keep Blasting Sonars

US Weasel-in-Chief, George w. Bush, used his middle eastern tour to quietly sign an order exempting the US Navy from an environmental law that would have restricted it from using submarine sonars off the California coast.

From The Guardian:

The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, "are in the paramount interest of the United States'' and its national security, Bush said in a memorandum.

"This exemption will enable the Navy to train effectively and to certify carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment in support of worldwide operational and combat activities, which are essential to national security,'' the memo said.

The decision drew immediate criticism from environmentalists who had fought to stop the Navy's sonar training.

"The president's action is an attack on the rule of law,'' said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. ``By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court."

Showdown In The Gulf - Clumsy Propaganda?

The Bush/Cheney regime's contentions about a provocative charge against three US Navy, "armed to the teeth" warships by plainly gunless Iranian "gunboats" is beginning to spring a lot of leaks.

The US Navy's own video shows a small flotilla of speedboats, not gunboats, as is apparent from this Navy close-up of one of the boats released to the media. But the navy also released a video on which someone with a heavy accent is supposed to have threatened the US warships, saying "I am coming to you... you will explode ...after minutes."

From the New York Times:

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

A commentator who claimed to be a former US Navy officer with experience in the Gulf wrote to the paper warning against putting much reliance on anything heard in that region on Channel 16 UHF:

"But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)

"On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility."

This episode is beginning to sound an awful lot like the Bush/Cheney agitprop that has been the signature of this administration. We know Cheney is squirming in his pants to get at Iran and we know these charlatans are entirely willing to lie right into the faces of the American people to get their way.

Washington Sticking to its Guns

The United States is insisting that five "armed Iranian gunboats," one shown in the picture below taken by the US Navy during the incident, really did charge and threaten a flotilla of three, massively armed, state of the art warships in the Straits of Hormuz over the weekend.

Iran says the claims are a total hoax conjured up to coincide with US president George w. Bush's trip to the Middle East. The Iranians point out that the soundtrack on the video released by the US Navy doesn't match the images. That got the Navy and Pentagon backpeddling with the explanation that the audio and video were recorded separately and matched up later.

"We viewed it as a provocative act,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden on Tuesday, just hours before he left for the weeklong trip to the Middle East. “It is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple.”

The US has all but formally acknowledged overflying Iranian territory and actually deploying special forces teams into Iran. Fortunately those aren't provocative acts.

Showdown in the Gulf - Very, Very Scary

Okay, a little more information is coming out regarding the supposed Iranian provocation of US warships in the Persian Gulf yesterday. The incident involved what were described as Iranian gunboats that closed with three US Navy warships including the Ticonderoga-class, Aegis guided missile cruiser, USS Port Royal shown below.

Now the Port Royal, all 567 feet of her, is armed to the teeth with an unrivalled electronics warfare suite, all manner of missiles, deck guns and, for close-in defence, the Mk. 15 Phalanx gatling gun that can spew out 12.75 mm. depleted uranium rounds at the respectable rate of 4,500 rounds per minute. The Phalanx is designed to take out all manner of threats including supersonic, sea skimming anti-ship missiles.

So what about those lethal Iranian gunboats? Here's a picture of one of them taken with a telephoto lens from one of the US warships:

If you don't see any guns on this gunboat, maybe that's because there don't seem to be any. It's a speedboat and, given the lifejackets worn by the crew, it seems they weren't looking to die that day in a suicide attack either. Video released by the navy shows these tiny boats surfing about in the wakes of the US warships but always keeping a respectable distance away.