In the weeks after the 2023 ‘Chinese spy balloon‘ news event, in which the US tracked and eventually shot down an object floating across North America, a number of other ‘unidentified flying objects’ (in the true sense of those words) were also shot down. With the government not releasing further details of what was shot down, a mythology quickly grew in UFO conspiracy circles that these objects may have been extraterrestrial craft.
But the release of the second tranche of UFO files from the Pentagon may have popped the hype on at least one of those shootdowns: A video in the collection purports to be of offensive action taken against the Lake Huron high-altitude object, and it seems to quite clearly show it is just a balloon.
Now sure, maybe we could suggest that the government purposefully released a fake video to try and cover up what really happened over Lake Huron. After all, the on-screen information is highly redacted, so we can’t say for sure the time and location from the video alone.
But one would have to ask why the government would do this and thus bring attention instead to a UFO case most of the general public had long forgotten about. Add to that the fact that, less widely reported at the time, debris from the encounter was recovered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and that it was found to be “a module” manufactured by “a company who sells weather monitoring equipment”.
And finally, Sean Kirkpatrick – the former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) – also said as much in April 2026, during a talk given to the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS). Referring to the change of attention to objects in the sky in the wake of the Chinese balloon event, Kirkpatrick noted that all of a sudden the US military started using very expensive missiles to shoot down cheap and harmless balloons:
We scrambled jets and shot down a bunch of things. Do you know what we shot down? Balloons. And the worst one, absolute worst one, was they shot down a balloon that had a tethered package on the bottom that had a transponder on it that was built, flown, and operated by a Boy Scout group that had circumnavigated the globe eight times, before we shot it down with a half million dollar missile… You can imagine the response on the Hill when I briefed that.
Now, on top of that, other balloons that would be seen, and this is my to my point that these weapon systems aren’t meant to characterize and understand these things: There was another balloon that was shot down and the pilot described it as having ‘potential stealth-like capabilities’, and that they couldn’t get a good lock on it. And the reason they couldn’t do that is because it was a star-shaped Mylar balloon from Walmart that said ‘Happy Birthday’ on the side. We got a real nice closeup in the AIM missile before it blew up.
That’s certainly not to say all UFO sightings are just balloons, or that we should take the government’s word on incidents – far from it! As RPJ and I discussed in our recent Patreon video on this topic, we should instead get back to doing our own investigations rather than waiting to be fed by the government, military and intelligence agencies – and ask exactly why the government has been so ‘forthcoming’ (scare quotes required!) about UFO encounters over the past decade, and for what purpose?
