News: 01-30-2021 9AM ET
There is a long history of flying saucers later discovered to be cutting edge military technology.
audio/mpeg Issues in the News moderator Shayna Estulin discusses the top news stories of the week, including preparations for the Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump and the significance of the many executive orders and policy directives coming from the Biden administration, with panelists Molly Ball, National Political Correspondent for Time Magazine and Linda Feldmann, Washington Bureau Chief for the Christian Science Monitor.
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David Axe
Security, World
There is a long history of flying saucers later discovered to be cutting edge military technology.
Key point: Aliens sounds cool and mysterious, but so do flying stealth fighters and bombers. Here is why UFOs are actually just human war machines.
From 2007 to 2012, a small team of military investigators looked into sightings of unidentified flying objects—yes, UFOs—from an office deep inside the Pentagon. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, championed by former U.S. senator Harry Reid, paid contractors to analyze close encounters between military pilots and mysterious airborne objects.
This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.
Some of those close encounters probably involved secret military prototype front-line pilots didn’t know exist. Others, however, remain unexplained — and could be revolutionary for human civilization.
“Just because something’s unexplained doesn’t mean that it’s extraterrestrial, of course, but I never say never,” Nick Pope, who ran the British military’s own UFO investigative unit in the early 1990s, told me via email. “Extraterrestrial visitation might be unlikely, but if a single case turned out to be true, it would be a game-changer.”
One 2004 incident, in particular, has befuddled skeptics. Two U.S. Navy fighter pilots flying off the coast of southern California tracked an airliner-size, cigar-shaped object that appeared to hover and maneuver in ways that seem to exceed conventional aeronautics. “I have no idea what I saw,” David Fravor, one of the pilots, told The New York Times.
“There are still those observations that defy explanation—observations by highly trained individuals such as fighter or airline pilots who would recognize aircraft shapes and aircraft movements,” Luis Elizondo, the head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and related UFO efforts until his October resignation, told me via email.
“The basic instinct of intelligence personnel looking at the most convincing UFO sightings is to assume that they’re secret prototype aircraft or drones, developed either by another nation, or by another part of the government—but in a situation where the information is so compartmentalized nobody else can get access,” Pope said.
“Another theory is that some of these sightings are attributable to some sort of atmospheric plasma phenomenon that science doesn’t yet fully understand,” Pope added, using the scientific term for electrified air.
“Many UFO sightings in the southwest United States during the 1980s were actually secret advanced military aircraft such as the Lockheed F-117 and Northrop Grumman B-2,” Elizondo said.
There has been no shortage of rumored or confirmed, high-performance military prototypes in recent years that could account for UFO sightings. The U.S. Air Force secretly developed the RQ-170 stealth spy drone in the early 2000s, finally admitting to its existence only after a photographer spotted one at an airfield in Afghanistan in 2007. It’s unclear whether sightings of the RQ-170 explain any recent UFO reports.
More recently, the Air Force has been working on a bigger and ever stealthier spy drone called the RQ-180, along with the new radar-evading B-21 bomber. In 2014, a mysterious, wedge-shaped aircraft—possibly an early technology demonstrator for the B-21 program—was photographed flying over Kansas.
The military and the defense industry have also been hard at work on so-called “hypersonic” aircraft and space-planes capable of flying at speed exceeding Mach 5. Some of those efforts are public. Others, such as Lockheed Martin’s self-funded SR-72 hypersonic spy plane, remain cloaked in secrecy.
The abundance of secret prototypes plying American skies gives plenty of cover to government investigators and skeptical outsiders whose impulse is to dismiss possible evidence of alien life. “That said, there are those in government—including, clearly, some of the intelligence officials who worked in the AATIP—who are prepared to think the unthinkable, and say that some of these things might be extraterrestrial,” Pope said.
The 2004 video seems unexplainable now. But remember, many similarly mysterious UFO sightings in the past turned out to be military prototypes. Maybe aliens really are buzzing Planet Earth. But if history is any guide, it’s more likely the Pentagon’s own advanced aircraft that are making surprise appearances in front of baffled pilots.
This article first appeared in WarIsBoring here. This article first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.
Image: Reuters.
Rachel Bucchino
Politics, Americas
One thing is clear—Trump has divided the Republican Party into factions, propping his close allies against fellow colleagues who classified the former president’s role in the January 6 riots as “incitement of insurrection.”
Is the civil war that commentators have regularly been predicting for decades finally taking place in the GOP?
The commentator R. Emmett Tyrell wrote a book after the Reagan era called The Conservative Crackup, but it never happened. But the stakes are now much higher than they were in the aftermath of the Reagan era, when George. H.W. Bush antagonized conservatives by raising taxes after he had vowed he would not. In the aftermath of the Trump presidency, a battle over the future of the GOP is erupting.
On the one side are those aligned with Trump. On the other is the NeverTrump faction who want to target his allies. And then there are those who are trying to split the difference between the two camps.
Thus House minority leader Kevin McCarty made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to visit Donald Trump, where he tried to mend fences with the former president and persuade him to defer from attacking fellow Republicans. Trump himself seems to have cooled on the idea of establishing a third political party, but his own plans remain unclear, including whether or not he decides to run for a new term.
In Washington, however, tempers are rising. The ten House Republicans who backed Donald Trump’s impeachment are now facing brutal backlash from the former president’s supporters, putting members of the GOP into seething political combat in the post-Trump era. Pro-Trump Republicans launched a spate of 2022 primary challenges against the incumbents, state and local level political operatives condemned the voters on breaking with the former president and several major Trump-related donors cut monetary ties with the ten Members of Congress.
Those energized for revenge against pro-impeachment Republicans signals a larger test of Trump’s pinnacle of power over the GOP and whether it can last until next year, considering his exclusion from social media platforms and upcoming impeachment trial.
“The stance taken by Liz was very contentious here in Wyoming,” Bryan Miller told Politico, a retired Air Force officer and Republican chairman in Wyoming’s Sheridan County who said he plans to run against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), an impeachment backer, in the 2022 primary. “This isn’t going to be a passing thing that just goes away. It’s growing and growing and growing every day across the state. People are unhappy.”
Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, will also face another primary battle, as state Sen. Anthony Bouchard plans to join the race for her chamber seat.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have condemned Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, pushing for the congresswoman to resign from her leadership post. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) held a rally with local Wyoming Republicans to urge her to step down from leadership but Gaetz pressed that he does “not want her job.”
“I unequivocally am not seeking a position in House Leadership. I also know Wyoming can do better,” Gaetz added.
Washington Reps. Dan Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler faced disapproval from the state’s Republican Central Committee when it passed a resolution blasting the duo for voting to impeach Trump and expressed “particular disappointment” in them. And Hossein Khorram, a Washington-state based former finance committee official under the Trump administration, said he was cutting off funds to the two lawmakers, as he’s previously donated to Newhouse.
The Clark County Republican Women’s Group wrote to Herrera Beutler on January 13 that she would never see support from the group again and that it would be recruiting a primary challenger.
“We will do everything in our power as the largest Republican Women’s organization in Washington state to recruit and elect a conservative candidate who will represent our values,” the group wrote.
The early initiatives to oust the ten lawmakers from the Hill indicates a devoted loyalty that Republicans still have for the former president and urgency to seek vengeance over members of the GOP who voted for impeachment.
“I’m not surprised that the Republicans who voted for impeachment are facing significant blowback. The loudest, most active part of the GOP base remains staunchly supportive of [President] Trump,” Jonathan Krasno, political science professor at Binghamton University, said. “I don’t expect that change by 2022.”
It’s also too early to tell how much of a role Trump and his close allies will play in the widespread effort to scatter Trump-like lawmakers across the country. The New York Times reported that the former president’s main target is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who rejected Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s election results since they were based on false claims of voter fraud. Trump reportedly wants to replace Kemp in a primary contest with former Rep. Doug Collins (R).
Newly elected Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who was one of the ten House members to vote to impeach, is also confronting a primary challenge next year against Afghanistan war veteran Tom Norton, a 2020 primary race contender. Norton was recently featured on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast to advertise his new candidacy. Michigan’s Allegan County Republican Party censured longtime Rep. Fred Upton (Mich.) for his impeachment vote, noting in the resolution that his decision was “a betrayal of his oath of office.”
Gene Koprowski launched a primary bid against Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a frequent Trump critic, and named the campaign committee, “Impeach Adam Kinzinger 2022”
In Ohio, former state Rep. Christina Hagan, who lost the 2018 primaries for a House seat, is considering a primary run against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio.).
“I have never seen a greater amount of backlash for any one single vote taken by any one single member of our Republican congressional delegation in Ohio,” Hagan said. “I have heard from Republicans in positions of power, within party leadership and all the way across the spectrum to faithful volunteers and business leaders throughout the region who are expressing serious frustration and distaste.”
And perhaps one of the most surprising House conservatives to break with Trump and vote to impeach him, was Tom Rice (R-S.C.).
While the five-term South Carolina congressman said he’s heard sheer disapproval from constituents over his vote, Rice also noted that he’s rallied considerable support for distancing himself from the former president.
“There are a number of people who have expressed their displeasure obviously and others who are happy with a vote of principle. I didn’t swear an oath to Donald Trump, I didn’t swear an oath to the Republican Party, I swore an oath to defend the Constitution. That’s what I intend to do,” Rice said.
Whether the vexation towards the pro-impeachment backers will last is unclear, as it’s significantly difficult to strip incumbents of their seats due to their advantageous political resources and funds. Another matter of uncertainty over the 2022 primary results is the once-in-a-decade process of redrawing congressional lines, which will change where House candidates seek support from.
“The real question is what happens to less active Republicans who still vote in party primaries. There is some evidence of Trump’s weakening in polls—such as in questions about whether he should run again or how large a role he should play in the party. Those less active GOP voters might find themselves drifting more from Trump as time passes, especially if there is a cascade of bad news about him,” Krasno said. “But it is hard to tell because his support has been so stable despite a fair amount of bad news.”
But one thing is clear—Trump has divided the Republican Party into factions, propping his close allies against fellow colleagues who classified the former president’s role in the January 6 riots as “incitement of insurrection.”
Rachel Bucchino is a reporter at the National Interest. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Hill.
Image: Reuters.
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Robert Farley
Technology, Middle East
Tehran’s worst nightmare?
Of course, Israel hasn’t operated a strategic bomber since it retired a few B-17 Flying Fortresses in the 1950s. Nevertheless, the perceived need for an option that could penetrate Iranian air defenses and deliver heavy payloads might make the IDF reconsider its commitment to fighter-bombers. Whether the United States would ever consider exporting the bomber (which will likely fall under a variety of legal restriction associated with nuclear-delivery systems) is a different question entirely.
With only a few notable exceptions, Israel can buy whatever it wants from the United States, generally on very generous terms associated with U.S. aid packages. Notwithstanding the availability of weapons, however, Israel must still make careful decisions regarding how to spend money. Consequently, Israel can’t have quite everything that it would like, despite the continued good relationship with the United States and its arms industry. Here are a few US military systems that the Israelis could use:
Littoral Combat Ship:
For a long time, the sea arm of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has examined the potential for warships
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