Are We Shooting Down the Visitors? Includes an Excerpt from Whitley Strieber’s Upcoming Book “Them”

In 2022 the United States deployed a still classified system that, for the first time, enabled it to track slow, high-flying objects such as the Chinese spy balloon which was shot down off the East Coast on February 4. Spy balloons had crossed the country at least three times during the Trump administration, but no system existed at that time that would enable them to be successfully located and targeted.

Since then, three more objects have been shot down. They have all been motionless or slow moving and reflect this new found ability to destroy such targets. It is unlikely that they are UAP such as have been recorded by military and civilian cameras for over seventy years. This is because these were generally, like the Gimbal and Tic-Tac objects, moving at high speed. High speed targets have been able to be automatically acquired with ever increasing degrees of accuracy since the 1950s. While UAP believed to be of unknown origin are sometimes seen to be slow-moving close to the ground, or even stationary for brief periods, they are not observed to be stationary or moving in wind drift at high altitude. An exception to this was the Camarillo, California UFO which appeared stationary in the sky over that community for six years running during the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The Biden Administration has made a statement that the objects are not thought to be extraterrestrial in origin.

So far, the Department of Defense has given no reason for shooting down these objects beyond the fact that they are being found in sovereign airspace and are at altitudes where they could be a hazard to aircraft. If one were to be ingested by a jet engine, the engine could be damaged or destroyed, so the objects are dangerous and should be removed when found. 

They could be acts of asymmetric warfare, because if large numbers appear in flight paths, they could pose an aviation hazard serious enough to disrupt the airline industry. The are many state and private actors with motives to do this. Russia is an obvious state actor, and well funded environmental activist groups would be another. Even so, there is evidence that the US has a past history of shooting at objects believed to be of extraterrestrial origin.

Excerpt from Whitley Strieber’s “Them” Chapter 12: “Shoot Them Down”

Copyright 2023, Walker & Collier, Inc.

“Them” is scheduled for publication in late March, 2032

There is evidence that the U.S. military shot at UAP during the summer of 1952, which leads to the chilling thought that this may still be happening. That would certainly be a reason for keeping more than a few secrets, especially given some evidence that there have been pilot injuries, and worse, which I will be discussing in the next chapter.

If there is a conflict situation, why it started must be the first question asked. The military would have had to have a motive to attack unknown objects. In other words, the objects or their behavior would need to have fulfilled the definition of a threat.

At 10:58 p.m. on June 20, 1952, a U.S. Air Force F-86 attempted to intercept an unknown light that had entered the protected airspace of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The plane was on “combat air patrol,” which requires confrontation with any unidentified or hostile aircraft that are located. As soon as the light was discovered in prohibited airspace, the F-86 pilot was alerted and did locate the object. When the pilot confronted it, the object responded by making what are described in Captain Edward Ruppelt’s book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, originally published in 1956, as “ramming attacks.” To the pilot, it appeared to be quite small, just a light less than a foot in diameter, but it was obviously aggressive. Whether or not the pilot shot at it is not recorded.

This was not the first confrontation at Oak Ridge. In the declassified FBI UFO files is an account of a series of events that had taken place at Oak Ridge in October of 1950. On October 12, “USAF radar installation at Knoxville … picked up indications of eleven objects and perhaps more traveling across controlled area of Atomic Energy installation at Oak Ridge.” Over the next few months and into 1951, there were dozens of incursions into Oak Ridge restricted airspace. “The opinions of the Security Division, AEC Oak Ridge; Security Branch, NEPA Division, Oak Ridge; AEC Security Patrol, Oak Ridge; FBI Knoxville; and the OSI, Knoxville, Tennessee, fail to evolve an adequate explanation for objects sighted over Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

There is no record of any of these incursions resulting in the scrambling of fighters. However, it is possible that this information is classified, and if there are still such confrontations, would probably still be.

The FBI report from 1951 offers numerous possible explanations, but specifically rules out “the fantastic,” which, given the tenor of the times, was intended to mean UAPs. What else the FBI might have thought was involved they don’t say. They were trying to avoid ridicule while still communicating the facts as reported to them.

By the next year, an apparent non-confrontational policy had obviously changed, or there would never have been a dogfight with, of all things, a tiny light. What had happened between October of 1950 and June of 1952 to cause that change is unknown. Given the unstable record-keeping that has been associated with extreme secrecy, that may never be known.

Even a close read reveals no indication of how the pilot responded to the aggression that the light displayed. But I do see, from 1950 until June of 1952, a number of what look like escalating provocations on the part of our visitors.

Were they looking for a fight?