Have you ever seen a UFO? Maybe you have: quite recently, in fact, and live on national television. Even odder, maybe you were supposed to have done so.

There has been much excited reporting this summer about the recent Congressional hearings in which US ex-intelligence officers and pilots gave breathless testimony about their supposed knowledge of a top-secret US government conspiracy to cover-up the truth about flying saucer sightings down the decades, even up to and including the recovery and spiriting away of “biologics” (i.e, ET corpses) retrieved from alleged UFO crash-sites. But what if the correct lens through which to examine UFOs is not always one of secrecy, but of publicity?

The “hullaballoon“ about the enigmatic Chinese spy-balloon shot down over America on 4 February has long since deflated, but the balloons are now back: a BBC Panorama documentary-strand investigation broadcast in Britain on 26 June has used satellite data to reveal how such devices are also present in large numbers right the way across South-East Asia, from Japan to Taiwan, and have been for at least five years now.

The BBC’s initial method of investigation was an interesting one: to identify areas where balloons might have been present, they first combed through social media and press reports from the region of supposed “UFO” sightings, reasoning these may actually have been misinterpretations of Chinese spy-balloons, and then worked the situation out further from there. Photos of such balloons looking like circular blobs of light do indeed strongly resemble classical photos of alleged flying saucers from years gone by. But is the link between the balloons and the saucers a more substantial one?

Illegal aliens

You would think spy-balloons are supposed to remain an unobserved secret, so people misinterpreting them for UFOs over Asia would appear an excellent diversionary cover for whatever their true intelligence-gathering mission may have been.

The Chinese balloon over America which produced much excited mystery-mongering amongst the general populace back in February may have been a different matter, however – here, the media panic unleashed might well have been Beijing’s true desire all along, or at least a secondary positive result for Beijing, once their device was successfully spotted. If, when you see strange flying objects in the sky, you become intellectually groomed to automatically see Red China as being responsible, not Red Mars, that may be just what Beijing wants.

Following the subsequent rapid downing of three other initially unidentified objects in North American skies, General Glen VanHerck, the USAF official in charge of domestic air-security, was specifically asked by journalists if he could rule out an extraterrestrial origin for such strange aerial invaders. “I haven’t ruled out anything,” he replied. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason.” The actual reason for calling them by this highly generic word, however, was simply because the USAF didn’t actually yet know what they were, not because they were craft from another world.

Whilst ultimately probably mundane, the items were flying, they were objects, and they remained initially unidentified – hence, they were Unidentified Flying Objects in the literal sense of that term, not the popularly understood one of “alien spacecraft”.  By 13 February, White House Press Secretary Karen Jean-Pierre felt compelled to clarify there was “no indication” of “aliens or extraterrestrials” being behind the panic, thereby ending the affair for most.

Yet a key question remained: what did the Chinese actually want? Rather than simply spying on American military installations, some commentators plausibly presumed the balloon was more truly some floating psy-ops probe intended to tease out the likely psychological reaction of both America’s generals and her general public to the unsettling presence of invading enemy air-assets.

The balloon was as large as three buses, and thus highly visible even to untrained, non-military observers. Far from a design-flaw, as might initially have been presumed, its colossal size may thus actually have been a deliberate design-feature – unlike most alien invaders, who usually prove strangely immune to being clearly photographed by purported witnesses on the ground, it looked disturbingly as if it was actively begging to be seen, by as many persons as possible.

China saucers

Although the other three much smaller objects later shot down were apparently not Chinese assets, but domestically operated scientific or commercial items, the fact they were seen at all, let alone intercepted, was a direct consequence of the first vehicle’s appearance. According to US National Security spokesman John Kirby, the main reason the USAF was now seeing more such objects was simply because “we are now looking for them”. Domestic defenders of the skies had “modified the filters” to scan more specifically for such “high altitude, small radar cross-section and low-speed objects” rather than just enemy fighter-jets or ballistic missiles as usual.

This was supposed to reassure listeners, yet Kirby’s bromides could surely have been taken contrariwise. After all, this sounded to non-specialist ears like an open admission the authorities didn’t really know what was buzzing around up there in US airspace, and had not even been bothering to fully monitor this sphere properly. That makes the USAF sound a little remiss, doubtless making some citizens feel more nervous, not less – an easy win for Beijing.

Compare this to what happened the last time the continental United States was invaded by balloons from Asia, when Imperial Japan launched around 9,000 rather useless “Fu-Go” fire-bomb balloons, a variety of incendiary paper-lantern, towards the West Coast in 1944 and 1945, during WWII. This mass assault proved ineffective for a number of reasons (for one thing, pesky winds kept blowing them badly off course) and there was only one known case of them actually causing any fatalities, after a group of picknickers in Oregon accidentally triggered one.

Japan’s aerial armada caused zero mass panic among the general public, however – as, due to a Washington-mandated media blackout, nobody outside the intelligence services actually knew about them. Hence, Tokyo’s media-monitors had no way to gauge the public’s reaction to their invasion of US airspace, something which stands in direct contrast to this February’s hyper-public panic about a single (wholly non-explosive) Beijing balloon on TV, in print and online.