The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend against.

Before I move forward, I must state that just because I believe the evidence is compelling that many of the bizarre encounters with mysterious objects in the sky as of late, and especially those that the U.S. military is experiencing, emanate from peer-state competitors, not another dimension or another solar system, there are certainly well-documented cases of seemingly unexplainable events that have nothing to do with this type of capability. In other words, our conclusions do not come even close to answering the question of UAPs or UFOs as a whole, especially in terms of the many unexplained incidents in decades past. What they do is highlight an alarming new capability set and tactics that seem to have been allowed to be exploited with little response for years while the Pentagon scratched its head and shrugged, or even worse, turned largely a blind eye toward it. 

And that brings us to one of the biggest problems with this topic, as a whole—people expect one blanket and grand explanation for the entire UFO mystery to one day emerge. This is flawed thinking at its core. This issue is clearly one with multiple explanations due to the wide range of events that have occurred under a huge number of circumstances. This thinking must be changed as it limits our ability to solve some mysteries in the hopes of coming up with some fantastical monolithic explanation for every related mystery. So, accepting that there is likely a wide array of explanations to this notoriously abused topic will be absolutely key to successfully studying it and destigmatizing it in our culture, and especially within U.S. military and intelligence circles.

With that in mind, I also believe America's prevailing cultural issues and the general stigma surrounding UFOs was successfully targeted and leveraged by our adversaries, which helped these activities to persist far longer than they should have. In fact, I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.

A very enticing target

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a widely circulated piece that addressed my thoughts on the Pentagon's sudden willingness to talk about UFOs and its potential implications. I went through the possibilities as I saw them, but above all else, it was clear that this wasn't some over-hyped myth. Something strange was indeed going on.

Soon after, we were the first to connect key technologies that had emerged around the time that sightings of certain types of mysterious UAPs began to accelerate amongst military personnel—in particular, Navy fighter pilots. This was largely based around new air defense data-fusion and networking capabilities being installed on Navy warships and aircraft, as well as the proliferation of Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars on Navy fighters and airborne early warning and control planes. We also noted that the most remarkable appearances of these objects seemed to correlate with major Navy exercises where these advances in air defense capabilities were being fully integrated across a Carrier Strike Group. In other words, it seemed that these mysterious craft had a very keen interest in America's latest and greatest operational counter-air capabilities.

Harry S.Truman Carrier Strike Group

We then got clarification from pilot witnesses on key claims about what they and their squadron mates had experienced before pursuing what was an inconvenient hypothesis for many—that at least some of what these aircrews and vessels were encountering were not an exotic unexplained phenomenon at all, but were in fact adversary drones and lighter-than-air platforms (balloons) meant to stimulate America's most capable air defense systems and collect extremely high-quality electronic intelligence data on them. And this is critical data, incidentally, that is very hard to reliably obtain otherwise. 

These radar emissions, and the datalink communications that go along with them, underpin highly networked counter-air architectures that are unmatched anywhere on earth. By gathering comprehensive electronic intelligence information on these systems, countermeasures and electronic warfare tactics can be developed to disrupt or defeat them. Capabilities can also be accurately estimated and even cloned and tactics can be recorded and exploited. The very signatures of these waveforms alone can be used to identify, classify, and geolocate them by adversary platforms during a time of war, providing a big leg-up when it comes to battlespace awareness.

We are talking about everything from common operating frequencies to highly-sensitive low-probability of intercept emissions tactics, to datalink encryption, to distinct radar modes and employment procedures here. In other words, this is among the most critical intelligence a peer-state enemy can obtain and there aren't many easy ways of doing it. Even in a war zone, where aircraft and their systems are operating potentially in the same general area as adversary intelligence-collection systems, using their full combat capabilities may be restricted to maintain the secrets of those critical capabilities. Proximity to the emitters in question and how long their emissions are exposed to an intelligence-gathering system is a major limitation, as well. Traditional espionage is another way adversaries look to gain information on these critical systems, as well, but nothing beats going out and actually sucking up the electronic signatures as best you can. Actually becoming the target of their interest takes the quality of intelligence collected to a whole other level.

Historic precedent

The beginning of making the case for drones and balloons being the culprit for much of the recent UAP activity came when we posted an entire historical precedent for very similar operations dating back to the development of the A-12 Oxcart spy plane and the advent of modern electronic warfare itself. In essence, during the early 1960s, the CIA launched radar reflectors on balloons off Cuba's coastline via a U.S. Navy submarine and employed an electronic warfare system called PALLADIUM that would trick the latest Soviet radar systems into showing their operators that enemy aircraft were rushing toward Cuban shores or doing all types of crazy maneuvers. This coaxed the Cuban air defense system and its radars to light up and spurred rapid communications between air defenders on the island. 

The balloon-borne radar reflectors of different sizes also showed up on the Soviet radars, and by monitoring the targets that the radar operators concentrated on, and thus could detect, it was determined how sensitive their Soviet radar systems actually were. This provided critical information on the survivability of the Mach 3+ and somewhat stealthy A-12, but beyond that, it set a precedent of how electronic warfare and airborne targets could be used to prod an enemy's air defenses so that critical intelligence as to their capabilities could be determined—all without actually putting a pilot in the air at risk.

A-12 Oxcart, the Skunk Works predecessor to the SR-71

That was just the start of these types of operations. As the decades went by, far more complex and capable integrated air defenses began proliferating throughout the globe, placing a greater need on collecting this type of critical information. From what we understand, PALLADIUM evolved and subsequently spiraled into a far wider electronic intelligence gathering ecosystem, much of which is still highly secretive in nature and exists to this day.

The U.S. has extremely capable standoff electronic intelligence-gathering aircraft, such as the U.S. Air Force's manned RC-135 Combat Sent and Rivet Joint, as well as the Navy's EP-3E Aries and P-8A Poseidon, not to mention U-2S Dragon Lady and unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk, that are all capable of building up a picture of the enemy's electronic order of battle from a distance. Even America's top fighter aircraft are increasingly equipped with digital electronic warfare suites including highly advanced electronic support measures (ESM)that can provide tactical electronic intelligence of very high quality. Other countries, such as Russia and China, possess electronic intelligence (ELINT) gathering aircraft types, as well, albeit without the same level of capabilities or, in some cases, the same international reach and persistence.

While the United States also has very advanced, stealthy assets that can penetrate into enemy airspace to collect electronic intelligence data of a totally different fidelity, right near the emitters themselves and over long periods, America's adversaries do not, at least not yet. They have also historically lagged behind the U.S. government in space-based ELINT systems, which offer another way to scoop up emissions coming out of denied areas, and do so discreetly. This leaves America's potential foes to have to get more creative in order to obtain this critical information.  

So, for the time being, even though exquisite stealth unmanned aircraft may be out of their reach, swarms of lower-end drones and other less-advanced unmanned airborne platforms certainly are not. And regardless of America's own stealth capabilities, one would be remiss if they were to believe that clandestine operations, such as the one using PALLADIUM 60 years ago, aren't still going on today. In fact, we know the use of balloons strapped with payloads to collect vital intelligence continued throughout the Cold War. 

While manned overflights of the Soviet Union ended with the U-2 crisis in May 1960, high-altitude balloons continued to float across Soviet and Warsaw Pact borders for decades to follow. Unsurprisingly, this activity was conducted covertly, but continued even after the advent of spy satellites. For the Soviet Air Defense Forces in particular, the balloons were a significant menace, proving especially hard to defeat. There is evidence that at least some Soviet fighter units maintained gun-armed interceptors at round-the-clock readiness specifically to shoot down the intruding balloons and one aircraft, the M-17 Mystic, was even developed to carry out this particular mission, although it never entered service in this role. The Russians surely took note of this unique intelligence-gathering application. 

Fast forward to the 21st Century, and revolution in lower-end unmanned aircraft has provided the perfect attritable platform—one robust enough to carry out the task, but low-cost enough so that it wouldn't matter if it got lost in the process—for just such a mission set. And, as we explained in great detail, so are balloons carrying radar reflectors and expendable electronic intelligence and even electronic warfare payloads. Whereas 60 years ago, electronic warfare systems may have required an entire plane or a large pod on a plane, today totally expendable electronic warfare systems that can wreak havoc on radars and other air defense nodes can be dropped out of a chaff and flare dispenser or be housed in the tip of a small missile—or flown on a balloon or lower-end drone.

Preconceived notions

In our investigative pieces on PALLADIUM, we also detailed how radar reflector balloons can be made in many configurations and we even discovered a patent dating back to well before PALLADIUM for a radar reflector balloon that is an exact visual match for the initially totally bizarre-sounding "cube inside a sphere" objects that Navy pilots had reported seeing off the east coast. We also discovered that initial reports that pilots visually saw these craft moving erratically were incorrect. In fact, when physically encountered, they were floating in the air and acting exactly as balloons would.   

While balloons can look like virtually anything, drones can also look very strange due to the huge amount of configurations that exist. When most people think of drones they picture a small fixed-wing airplane or quadcopter type setup. That may be true for the heart of the burgeoning civilian market, but there are far more configurations, some of which look downright alien and perform unlike a traditional fixed-wing aircraft or quadcopter. These include everything from triangle-shaped flying wings to hybrid rotor/fixed-wing aircraft or even a vertical tube with a rotor at each end. There are even drones that launch smaller parasite drones and act as their mothership.

Drones can also be networked together and fly in formation. They may not all look the same, either. For instance, smaller drones may be accompanied by a larger drone that carries computing hardware and communications gear, such as a basic satcom terminal or line-of-sight data-link, working as the command and control and communications router for the swarm. Or they may not have any man-in-the-loop communications at all, instead, they can be programmed to fly a pre-planned course or be equipped with programming for them to seek out certain stimuli in their environment, such as particular radar emissions, and to fly certain preplanned programs near those emitters. In fact, some of the biggest leaps in lower-drone technology came from Israel decades ago when they developed drone systems suited for seeking radar emitters and confusing or destroying them. 

They can also have surprisingly long range. Iran has many small and relatively cheap fixed-wing drones that can fly very long distances running on efficient, small gasoline motors, for instance. These drones can travel hundreds of miles and loiter for hours while still carrying a relevant payload and have been thoroughly weaponized and used repeatedly in offensive operations. This has led to dystopian warnings to Americans visiting or living in one of the world's most highly defended capital cities. 

These are just some general parameters that are the actual reality when it comes to unmanned systems, and they differ drastically from the assumptions most people make about smaller drones in general. I often hear "oh they can't fly that way" or "they can't fly that long, the battery would run out" or "they couldn't be jammed so there is no way they are drones." These statements are blatantly wrong, not just when it comes to the capabilities of a peer competitor, but even a less capable country or even a non-state actor.

Small weaponized drones, especially those that carry an explosive charge, have become a cheap asymmetric linchpin capability and, just as I predicted years ago, are rapidly evolving into becoming game-changers on the modern battlefield. They are also becoming a big business and their use as assassination tools has migrated to drug cartels and other organized crime syndicates. Even their development has devolved down to individuals and small rogue groups operating far from war zones. 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGU8ATz_pY&t=78s

Simply put, when it comes to lower-end drones, most people's assumptions seem to be pulled out of thin air or from what they have seen at the electronics section at big box stores. As such, these preconceived notions are indicators of why relatively simple drones and their unique configurations and performance characteristics can seem unfamiliar, even to experienced fighter pilots or observers on the ground that have never been really trained on these threats and all the different ways that can manifest themselves.

The swarm is not science fiction

When it comes to the U.S. Navy, it is using swarms of lower-end networked drones, submarines, ships, unmanned underwater vehicles, and more, to convince the enemy to think they are seeing ghost fleets and aerial armadas that aren't really there. You don't have to take our word for it, the Navy has a program of record for just this—that being Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors, or NEMESIS. 

The War Zone was the first to report on this program, which you can read all about here, but, suffice to say, it lays out an architecture that represents a quantum leap in electronic warfare. Yet none of its components are all that exquisite; it's just the networking of them together and being able to combine their effects cooperatively with highly agile computing and software that is. Swarming drones working together to decoy, jam, and distract the enemy? That is not a high-end capability. Unifying those effects with ships, other aircraft, submarines, and more in real-time to make multiple enemy sensors in disparate locations see the same thing? That is revolutionary. 

After we posted the NEMESIS piece, many were asking our opinion if it was what Navy pilots had encountered off America's eastern seaboard. I am comfortable stating that I don't believe those incidents were all secret American tests of elements of what could be incorporated into NEMESIS. Quite the contrary, I believe it was largely a foreign power actively using what could be described as some components similar to what could be found in the NEMESIS ecosystem to collect critical intelligence on America's most advanced sensor systems and more. Once again, this doesn't mean everything aircrews saw off the east coast during this period were these capabilities, but it seems like a glaringly obvious explanation for most of them, and it is far more so now than it was when we first reported on those incidents.

Also, many of the strange high-performance characteristics ships and planes sometimes detect by radar at beyond visual range during these incidents can and likely are the result of electronic warfare. In fact, things like rapid accelerations in speed and sudden drops in altitude on radar represent very basic tenets of electronic warfare tactics. In the case of the east coast events, for instance, as far as we have been told, the high-performance capabilities of these objects were never visually observed, but they were seen on radar. The visual encounters describe balloon-like objects doing balloon-like things—not moving fast at all—while other objects feature performance more similar to drones than anything else.

Months after reporting on NEMESIS, we acquired the Naval Safety Center incident reports spanning most of the 2010s regarding anomalous objects that fighter pilots encountered off the eastern seaboard of the United States. What we found was stunning. While there were only a limited number of reports, and there were very likely other reports never filed with the safety center and instead filed as classified intelligence events, the ones that were there didn't describe alien craft at all. Instead, they described jet-powered, missile-like drones and other unmanned fixed-wing aircraft flying up in the flight levels, as well as multi-rotor drones hovering at very high altitudes far out to sea. There there are balloon-like objects, the origins of which were all unexplained even after official investigations.

 

Certainly no civilian is flying cruise missile-like aircraft at high altitude dozens of miles off the east coast. And flying a multi-rotor drone far out to sea at bizarrely high altitudes isn't normal. So, who do these belong to? Well if not us, and they are clearly not of an alien origin, then someone else. And who would want to be flying around in these specific chunks of airspace that are literally designated for use by America's top military aircraft, with the Navy's most capable warships often operating below? America's preeminent adversaries—China and Russia—that's who.

The motive and the opportunity

Those warning areas—airspace that can be set aside for military training—are where America's most advanced sensors blare their powerful radio-frequency communications and sensor systems day in and day out. F-22s, F-35s, F/A-18E/Fs, F-15Es, E-2Ds, and much more, fill those training areas daily. Below them, Aegis Combat System-equipped cruisers and destroyers, and America's supercarriers and amphibious assault ships, push their radar and networking systems to the limit to keep their skills sharp and to train for upcoming deployments. We are talking about the most advanced air defense sensor and networking technology on planet earth all operating in one region (the counterpart being off the coast of Southern California) as reliably as the office hours at your local bank. 

And they are doing so while at home, in areas where, unless intelligence warns them of spy ship activity nearby, their systems are largely being used to their maximum potential. All that potential intelligence zapping through the air, operating as if it is far from prying eyes. Simply put, it is the biggest electronic intelligence target on earth and the lowly drone and balloon, paired with America's strange aversion to taking unusual things in the sky seriously, have provided the perfect medium for which to gobble it up with little to no chance of major repercussions. 

In fact, the Navy fighter pilot who has spoken about recent experiences with the UAP issue the most, Ryan Graves, seemed to have inadvertently summed up what I believe has been going on, and not as a secondary 'worst case' possibility as he describes it. Graves stated the following on the Kevin Rose Show:  

"If we do have what we would call a 'red threat,' one of our traditional enemies that are using some type of perhaps new technology, or hard to identify technology that is out there in our working areas soaking up our waveforms and our radar and our sensor and our comms, watching our tactics on a daily basis, it's a major, major intelligence failure to have these things out there. And because they look slightly different than what our average threat would look like, everyone wants to ignore it. So if we had a Chinese or Russian fighter jet flying out there watching us it would be a major deal. But because it looks slightly different we want to ignore it."

Once again, it is a hard pill to swallow, but, nevertheless, bingo!

Robots in disguise

As we noted earlier, these drones and the balloons, in particular, could also look very strange to pretty much anyone who encounters them, even like a cube inside a sphere, or a metallic blimp with strange appendages. In fact, the odder they look, the better the cover for ongoing operations. Putting infrared bricks on drones giving them huge IR signatures or making radar reflector balloons look alien in shape would not only confuse the targeted adversary and likely allow for these operations to go on for far longer unchecked than they would otherwise, but they would also massively increase the quality of intelligence data they receive.

With this in mind, making things appear stranger and less threatening than they actually are is likely one tactic the enemy has used for these operations, and this can often come at a very cheap price. We have discussed how sometimes the simplest measures can make the most impactful illusions, and how even similar tricks that Disney uses to skew theme park goers' perceptionscould be employed in a guileful manner to confuse an adversary. That seems to be part of the playbook being executed here, and what better passively-reinforced cover story is there in America than UFOs and all the stigma that goes along with it? The fact that pilots have historically refrained from reporting unexplained craft in the skies due to fear of their careers being impacted is all you really need to know when quantifying how relevant and effective such a tactic can be. 

With that being said, not only could these things, or other platforms nearby, passively suck up electronic intelligence that presents itself in their vicinity, but the genius of their employment is that they themselves are the targets, and they are not necessarily friend or foe. This makes them flying intelligence 'honey traps' in their own regard. They get aircraft and ships to lock them up directly, likely running through multiple radar modes in the process as they get fully interrogated by various platforms, even at close range. This provides otherwise unthinkable opportunities to record all those signatures and tactics, even ones that may not be used otherwise if there was a known intelligence-gathering threat present.

To put it another way, their ambiguous origins and the curiosity surrounding their presence sets up a situation in which they can make radar systems work directly against them without restrictions. Their small radar cross-sections and potentially elusive electronic warfare tactics would push those sensor systems and their operators even harder in order to lock them up, thus giving up even more valuable information.

Once again, the operation involving PALLADIUM during the A-12's development worked not just because they could get radar operators searching for something that wasn't there, but because they gave them hard targets to lock up. It seems that we are seeing history repeat itself, but this time it's the other guys putting on the magic show.

It's also worth saying that a campaign like this also has huge information and psychological warfare aspects. Eventually, if it is officially disclosed or outed, it makes the targeted country look horribly impotent in that they couldn't even defend their own airspace or even define a threat to it. Even more embarrassing, they let hollow cultural stigmas provide an open door to enemy intelligence operations. Beyond that, these activities cause confusion and muddy the waters as to what is a threat and what isn't. They can also cause fissures between those in uniform who observe these craft and their less than responsive commands. It even fits into Russia's hybrid warfare playbook, elements of which have been copied by other nefarious actors around the globe, including China.

Clandestine launch platforms

In November 2019, we went on to lay out how submarines can launch their own aerial drones and have been able to so for far longer than most realize. Fast forward to today, and the Navy is now procuring swarms of drones for its submarines. Keep in mind, this is what they openly discuss, imagine the capabilities that have been in place for some time that have never been disclosed. Russia and China, who are looking for every asymmetric advantage against America's overwhelming technological superiority, certainly had seen the promise that the lowly drone showed for these types of ELINT gathering operations and Russia, in particular, has the submarines to deploy them in the hemisphere in question. Doing so with radar reflector and electronic intelligence gathering payload-carrying balloons is an even lower hanging fruit.

Many naysayers have said that this is impossible because there are no Russian submarines deep in the Atlantic and that the U.S. largely controls this massive body of water. We begged to differ on that point and it turned out that the Navy eventually did too. It is now open knowledge that Russian submarines are operating deep in the Atlantic to the point that the Navy is calling it a contestedbody of water. And if you think the Navy has a perfect track on those boats at all times, you would be sorely mistaken. So, there is a motive and there is a delivery method, but really, we are probably overthinking it, at least to some degree.

The cold hard truth is that you don't need a submarine to launch a swarm of low-end drones and/or balloons to gather intelligence on an adversary's sensors. They can be launched from any vessel really, and especially from medium to large ones. There is a lot of shipping traffic out there at any given time, with ships flagged all over the globe and operated by an even more diverse roster of operators. A lowly freighter would be an effective delivery platform, and a far more accessible one. In fact, this concept of operations is well established already and considering the ranges that some of these smaller drones can fly, it is even less of an issue. They can be launched in international waters.

An expanding picture of widespread events

Over the past two years, we have also reported on what appears to be an increasing phenomenon of large drone swarms spotted over the United States, as well as its outlying territories, and especially near strategic installations. The Colorado drone swarm saga seemed like something of a bizarre series of events in which the general consensus couldn't seem to settle on a case of mass hysteria or something actually occurring—this was not helped by really reckless reporting on the issue by one or two major outlets. Our subsequent investigation showed that internal correspondence between federal and local stakeholders pointed to it being anything but some product of mass groupthink.

Then things got even more serious when we uncovered a series of drone swarm events over the massive Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. Subsequent documents showed that this was far from a one-off anomaly, with dozens of drone incursions involving America's nuclear plants having occurred not long before or after. How to protect this highly sensitive infrastructure from threats posed by drones remains a strangely awkward debate. While some claim an attack from small drones may have limited impacts on a nuclear facility—a highly debatable claim—there are other concerns, including those surrounding using drones to find networking security holes and more.

Then, maybe most chilling, we uncovered that drones had taken a very troubling interest in one of the most important U.S. air defense sites on earth—the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile battery on Guam. This is literally the last line of defense against incoming ballistic missiles for America's most important base in the Western Pacific. It is also the home of an AN/TPY-2 radar, one of the most advanced in the world, that provides surveillance and targeting for the THAAD missile interceptors. It isn't hard to imagine how valuable electronic intelligence from that radar and the system's local area and beyond-line-of-sight datalinks would be to an adversary like China, which not only has a huge interest in disabling such a capabilityduring a time of war, but also learning from it to develop its own systems.

While some may brush off the actual destructive capabilities of a relatively small drone, they shouldn't. A drone packing a small charge may not be able to sink a ship or blow up an entire missile site, but it can punch a hole into a radar array and put the entire system out of business for long periods of time. In other words, a mission kill is just as effective at achieving the primary goal of disabling a defensive system as literally blowing it up. And yes, it is ironic that a THAAD battery, one of the most technologically impressive surface-to-air weapon systems ever created, can swat down incoming ballistic missiles but is extremely vulnerable to what could be as simple as a modified hobby drone. Once again, this is in large part a result of the Pentagon's unwillingness to recognize the threat of low-end drones before it materialized and its chronic under-investment in short-range air defenses (SHORAD) that withered on the vine in the decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a situation which you can read all about here.

The same can be said for warships. While a swarm of drones couldn't sink a destroyer, they can overwhelm its defenses and neuter it by attacking its sensors, leaving it blind, vulnerable, and useless—the definition of a mission kill. Our report on the events that occurred off Southern California in the summer of 2019 underlined just how troubling the situation has become. 

Swarms of drones harassed a number of U.S. Navy destroyers executing combat drills less than 100 miles off Los Angeles. This occurred on multiple nights. The level of documentation in that article alone shows just how palpable this part of the so-called phenomenon has become. You can imagine just how good the intelligence would have been with those ships' sensors and communications systems stimulated by the swarm of unknown origins within the perceived safety of America's own territorial waters. That swarm could have been, and likely was, sucking up, or helping another nearby platform suck up, all that sensitive ELINT data on the most capable warships on earth and at very close range.

Once again, in that case, the drone swarm could have come from a simple cargo vessel and it wouldn't have to be even within line-of-sight of the destroyers, which are easily tracked using open sources during routine training. The drones used in this event appear to have been smaller fixed-wing types similar to those that America's adversaries have built for various missions, like long-range strike, anti-radiation, decoy, and surveillance operations. As noted earlier, they can fly for hours and could easily be programmed to execute a certain route in the vicinity of where the destroyers were operating or even potentially programmed to react to certain RF emissions, at which time they would fly pre-programmed maneuvers near those emissions. This isn't some crazy high-tech thing. These are capabilities that America's primary adversaries possess and are further refining with each day. China, in particular, is far ahead in this regard and already has the operational capability to rapidly deploy large networked swarms that can work cooperatively together. Russia is also in the game and has focused on drone swarms that are electronic warfare enabled. 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUg5GZqttkA&t=58s

In recent weeks, more official evidence has come to light. This includes recently released images taken from an F/A-18 cockpit that clearly show balloons, not strange totally unexplainable craft. A video and still images from the incident we reported on that occurred off the California coast in 2019 have also come to light. They seem to show either delta-wing-shaped drones, very similar to the ones we have discussed earlier, or, and far more likely, another type of drone that is obscured by bokeh effect, the result of a bright light source being recorded out of focus through a night-vision scope by another camera. Once again, nothing appears unexplainable here. Quite the opposite, really. 

One other leaked set of images, taken by the Littoral Combat Ship USS Omahaaround the same period of time, shows what some claim is a 'trans-medium craft' disappearing into the ocean. The stills provided prove nothing of the sort. It looks like a balloon or other object hitting the water as seen through a thermal imaging system. Once again, maybe other data exists that is compelling and truly exotic, but this certainly isn't that. 

As for the authenticity of these latest photos and videos, our friend John Greenewald got confirmation that they are indeed authentic from the Office of Secretary of Defense spokesperson on the UAP issue, Susan Gough.