'I Wouldn't Really Call it a Balloon': Cockpit Audio from the F-16s Over Lake Huron Deepen the UFO Mystery

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Yesterday I discussed the biggest questions still swirling around the takedowns of UFOs in separate encounters last week. And added my opinion that what little information we're getting from the authorities just keeps raising new and deeper questions:

It's a Pee Wee's Big Adventure scenario, where questions get answered, others spring up. The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting. 

Chief among the questions is where is all the evidence? Namely the video, photos, and tangible remains of these craft? If the US and Canadian governments were truly invested in leveling with the people who elect the leaders and pay for these $400,000 missiles, we'd be getting more than people in suits standing behind podiums and giving evasive answers to questions. 

But what they do seem to be willing to do is follow the shady government coverup playbook by releasing some audio. Namely cockpit audio from the encounter over Lake Huron. It's not the first time they've handled these verifiable incidents this way. Just last fall we got a similar release of audio from a pilot spotting a dozen UFOs over Brazil. And pretty much never heard a word about it after. 

It's the best we can do at this point. So we work with what we have. And here is what we have from the Lake Huron close encounter:

War Zone - In the wake of the latest shootdown of an unidentified object over North American airspace, we now have audio recordings of the in-cockpit communications from the two F-16 fighter jets involved in yesterday afternoon’s intercept over Lake Huron. What’s immediately striking on listening to them, is that the pilots in question also seem to be perplexed as to what they are actually observing and the precise nature of the craft that they ultimately dispatched. …

The object that one of the F-16s shot down using an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, at an altitude of approximately 20,000 feet, has been described by U.S. officials as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it.

According to the Pentagon, the object’s “path and altitude raised concerns, including that it could be a hazard to civil aviation. …

It’s also important to note that the quality of the audio recordings is such that it’s currently not possible to determine everything that is being said with total accuracy and the following quotes should be treated as provisional. 

Most interesting is the fact that the Viper pilots had a tough time definitively describing the object.

“I wouldn’t really call it a balloon … I don’t know what … I can see it outside with my eyes,” one of the pilots says. “Looks like something … there’s some kind of object that’s distended… it’s hard to tell, it’s pretty small.”

“I’m gonna call it a balloon,” one of the pilots later adds. …

“The size of it, that would be challenging, it’s so slow and so small, I just can’t see it,” one of the pilots says. “Definitely smaller than a car,” is the judgment of one of the pilots. At one point, one Viper pilot seems to say it was about the size of a “four-wheeler,” likely referring to a recreational all-terrain vehicle. There is also an indication that the pilots were worried about a possible collision with the mystery craft as it could only be seen at very close range.

There are, however, repeated mentions of strings, or something that looks like strings, hanging from below the object.

“In the targeting pod, I can’t tell if it’s metallic or what, but I can see like lines coming down below it, but I can’t see anything below it,” one pilot says.

“You can definitely see strings below but don’t see anything hanging below.” This paints a picture of something balloon-like, at least in the sense that there is a larger structure, with strings hanging down from which you might expect to see some sort of payload attached. 

As to the color of the object, it sounds as though it may have been a metallic black and it was clearly shiny enough to reflect the sun’s rays – adding to the difficulty in working out its overall shape.

“Looking outside it’s like a black-ish, I’m gonna call it like a container, can’t really tell though what the shape is,” one pilot says. “I’ve got a tone,” he adds, indicating that the AIM-9X locked on and that he had a “good track but can’t see through the glare of the cockpit.”

“It looks dark, but I can get a pretty good sun glint off of it,” the other pilot remarks.

This sequence broadly matches accounts from pilots off the U.S. east coast in the mid-2010s, when mystery aerial objects could be detected intermittently, although they had trouble seeing them in any detail even when approaching them closely.

The article also suggests that the Vipers were "carrying Sniper targeting pods, their electro-optical and infrared sensors should also have gathered video showing the object."

But apparently no one in possession of the data from these is inclined to share them with the people they actually belong to, namely you and me. All we're entitled to is scratchy, hard-to-discern audio from the pilots trying to figure out what on Earth (or off) they'd been scrambled to intercept. And I'll add that the one pilot deciding he's just going to call it a balloon is eerily reminiscent of the Air Traffic Control scene from Close Encounters:

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The report also quotes a US Congressman who is demanding the public start getting some answers:

Nice try. But fat lot of good that's going to do. Unless the people who make the laws start doing something to compel the people who order these military operations to come clean, Tweeting about it is just shouting into the void. We deserve better. The pilots who risk their lives every time they climb into the cockpit - never mind actually engaging these unknown objects with weapons - certainly deserve better. But it seems like the powers that be are determined to just give out little crumbs of information as we go along here. In whatever way that suits them. Until the public gets distracted with the next thing, like a natural disaster, a celebrity scandal, some royal writing a book, or whatever. 

It's possible that Chinese balloon last week started WWIII or set off a War of the Worlds. The people who know won't tell the rest of us until it's too late.