Opinion | Is the US about to blame UFO phenomena on China?

Americans like to blame China for everything. But UFOs? Seriously, this is no joke.

China may be behind at least some UFO sightings, Dr Thomas Zurbuchen claimed, according to a report in The Telegraph newspaper.

The retired Nasa chief, who was responsible for some of the agency’s biggest space projects in the past decade, said “unidentified flying objects are real and may be ‘unfriendly’ advanced technology”.

Zurbuchen said it was important to question whether Chinese spy balloons might be to blame, after one was shot down by a US fighter jet in February as it crossed the Atlantic.

“The whole balloon phenomena we cannot ignore because if we ignore what we see then we will suddenly get surprised,” he said.

So, rather than little green men, it was nasty people from China who were behind the space-age mystery. Well, at least that’s a more natural rather than extraterritorial explanation.

As Nasa’s longest-serving associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Zurbuchen was asked to head the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) panel last year. To distinguish themselves from cranks and conspiracy theorists, respectable experts investigating such phenomena call them UAP, rather than UFOs.

UAP are apparently a real thing, so much so that the US Congress has just held hearings on them.

David Grusch, a 36-year-old retired US Air Force intelligence officer, recently blew the whistle on an allegedly secretive X-Files-like government programme dedicated to UAP recovery, analysis and reverse-engineering.

Grusch had a closed-door meeting last month with the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs. Since his testimony, the House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation because he claimed the deep state had retaliated against him for his exposure.

His security clearance was among the highest, which enabled him to access some of the most classified information, and he claims that the covert UAP programme held troves of secrets including non-human biological material recovered from an UAP crash site, reverse-engineered alien craft built by the US government and “administrative terrorism” to cover up the phenomena and to intimidate and silence people like him.

You are already rolling your eyes? Well, not some very important people in Congress. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and Republican senators Mike Rounds and Marco Rubio have sponsored legislation that would force the Pentagon to declassify records related to UAP sightings. The bill was proposed as an amendment to the annual defence policy bill. If passed, it would compel US President Joe Biden to convene a nine-person commission, subject to Senate confirmation, to vet which relevant UFO records to be released to the public.

According to the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, 144 UFO incidents were investigated between 2004 and 2021, many of them witnessed by military pilots. Its report concluded any of the objects sighted were from outer space or a foreign enemy. But some UFO connoisseurs have criticised it as a whitewash, because even the report’s authors admitted most of the recorded phenomena could not be explained. The report also acknowledged that mysterious objects sighted were unlikely to be optical illusions caused by weather conditions or sensor malfunctions aboard military aircraft. They even admitted that 18 objects could have had propulsion systems involving advanced technologies. So how did they know those objects were not from ETs? It’s probably because of questions like that that led Grusch to decide to blow the whistle.

Chinese ‘spy balloon’ is featured in US congressional hearing about UFOs

But could it be the Chinese? Who knows? But if so, Washington’s tech war and its restrictions of sales of “advanced” computer chips to China may just be a complete waste of time. Maybe the Chinese have gone beyond silicon-based chip-making technology. Maybe the Chinese are the real aliens!

If so, the much-touted “China threat” may indeed be very real. In future, to streamline operations and national security, any future congressional committee or commission on UAP should be merged with the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly, this House committee loves propagating fictions, including sci-fi.

On the other hand, psychology may provide a better explanation. Prominent US political commentator Fareed Zakaria recently wrote that US China-related foreign policy was “forged out of paranoia, hysteria”. Well, what can be more symptomatic of mass hysteria than UFO paranoia?