2023 just started and the year has already been busy for UFO enthusiasts. Earlier this month, members of the United States Armed Forces shot down four separate unidentified aircraft flying over North American airspace. While one has since been confirmed to be a spy balloon from China, three more remain unidentified. Now, officials have called off the search for two of those crafts, seemingly suggesting the crafts shot down will never be retrieved or analyzed by government officials.
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In a new report from the New York Times, rough terrain and weather were the primary reasons the searches have been called off. The two objects were taken down over remote areas of Alaska and Lake Huron. The third unidentified object, while shot down by United States forces, was over Canadian airspace, meaning Canadian officials are now searching for that item.
Both boat and flight restrictions were implemented during the two US-based searches, with the Coast Guard shutting down operations on Lake Huron Thursday before the search was officially called off on Friday. After some uncertainty regarding the identity of the crafts from the Department of Defense earlier this month, the Biden Administration announced this past week each of the crafts shot down were likely research balloons belonging to the private sector.
Though administration officials have tempered on the messaging, there was a moment shortly after news of the crafts first broke one high-ranking official publicly said he wouldn’t rule out alien or extraterrestrial life. “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything,” NORAD chief General Glen VanHerck said on a call with reporters Sunday evening.
He added, “At this point we continue to assess every threat or potential threat, unknown, that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”
The latest group comes months after Pentagon officials formed the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, founded last summer to analyze hundreds of reported UFO sightings.ย Earlier this year, that office released its annual report, saying it’s looked through 510 sightings, an increase of 366 from the inaugural report last year. Out of those 366 new sightings, 163 were determined to be balloons, 26 were attributed as drones, and an additional six were listed as “atmospheric clutter.” The remaining 171 cases weren’t determined to be any of the above items and were lumped into a “requires further analysis” category.
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