White House taking second look at UFO response after spate of shoot-downs

The Biden administration is revisiting how it handles UFOs after a Chinese spy balloon and three smaller objects were shot down over North America in a span of eight days earlier this month.

The White House on Monday announced the creation of an “interagency team” to include officials from the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and other parts of the executive branch.

The group, headed by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, would “help us revisit and look at the protocols and the policy implications for these kinds of objects going forward,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

“As a matter of fact, we expect that by the end of this week, we should be able to have laid out for the interagency a set of parameters for how we will treat these sorts of objects going forward,” he added.

On Feb. 4, President Biden ordered a US Air Force F-22 to take down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean after it traversed the entire country.

He later ordered the military to shoot down three additional UFOs — one over Alaska on Friday, a “small, metallic balloon” over northwestern Canada on Saturday and a third over Lake Huron on Sunday.

The latter three objects have not been linked to China or any other country.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that the US has “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity” tied to the shoot-downs.

She decided to make the public pronouncement a day after Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of US North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Northern Command (NORTHCOM), said he couldn’t rule out aliens.

“I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out.” he told reporters Sunday night.

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“At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threats unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it,” VanHerck added.

Kirby slightly contradicted VanHerck on Tuesday, saying: “The NORTHCOM commander has also said that there are established protocols and procedures that we used in the decision-making process that led to the takedown of these three objects, about the potential threat that they pose to civilian air traffic as well as the potential surveillance threat that they pose.

“There was a very deliberate process by which that context was shared and understood and contributed to the president’s decision at the recommendation of the military to take those down. So I never said there’s a blanket policy. In fact, I’ve pushed back hard on that idea.”

The creation of the working group comes as the Pentagon has undertaken a new push in recent years to further investigate UFOs — rebranded by the government as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAPs.

Last summer, the Pentagon formed the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which has reviewed 366 reports of UAPs, finding them to be mostly items like balloons, drones, birds or aerial clutter.

However, 171 sightings remain officially unexplained.