Allow me to have a large element of skepticism.
If you follow the news at all, you've been reading of "leaked" Navy videos of UFOs, followed by official confirmation from Navy pilots along the lines "gosh, we don't know what the heck those things are".
Yeah. . . well. . .
What we know for sure is that in recent years, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena have been interacting with ships of the U.S. Navy as well as Navy aircraft. Video of them has been steadily "leaked" for several years, and the service, which normally likes to keep the most mundane things secret, has been pretty active in babbling about it.
Oh. . . and not just that.
The Navy also has applied for a patent for technology that appears to offer impossible high speed drives for aircraft, and acting to force through the patents when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office looked like it was going to say "oh bull". The patenting Navy agent, moreover, a mysteriously named and mysterious scientist, has written babbly papers that are out there, but not well circulated.
So, what's going on?
Gaslighting, most likely.
To those who follow international developments, the US and the Peoples Republic of China are, quite frankly, sliding towards war in a way that reminiscent of Imperial Japan and the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s. China acts like a late 19th Century imperial power and is building up its naval forces in an alarming way. China is a land power and has no real need whatsoever for a defensive navy. The only real use of a navy for China is offensive, or to pose a threat as it could be offensive.
And China has been busy posing a threat. It's using its navy to muscle in on anything it can in the region. It's constantly at odds with Vietnam off the latter's coast. It's threatening the Philippines, whose erratic president shows no signs of backing down to China, and its been so concerning to Japan that Japan is now revising its defense posture. Most of all, it's been threatening to Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province which it sort of is.
The problem with a nation flexing its naval muscle is that sooner or later, it goes from flexing to "I wonder how this stuff really works?" Almost all totalitarian powers with big navies get to that point and there's no reason to believe that China won't. Given that, the US (and as noted Japan) have been planning to fight China.
This has resulted in a plan to overhaul the Marine Corps with a Chinese war specifically in mind, and the Navy, upon whom the brunt of any Chinese action would fall, at least initially, has been planning for that as well. And the Navy is worried.
As it should be.
The United States Navy has been a aircraft carrier centric navy ever since December 7, 1941 when it became one by default. And its been the world's most power navy as a carrier based navy. Carries have allowed the United States to project power around the world in a way that no other country can. But in the age of missiles, a real question now exists and is being debated on whether the age of carriers is ending.
Plenty of defense analysts say no, but plenty say yes. Truth is, we just don't know, and absent a major naval contest with a major naval power, which right now there isn't, we won't know. But China is attempting to become that power and it has the ability to act pretty stoutly in its own region right now.
So how does this relate to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?
The U.S. military has a long history of using the UFO phenomena/fandom for disinformation. It notoriously did this in a pretty cruel way in at least one instance in the 60s/70s in which it completely wrecked the psychological health of a victim of a disinformation campaign that it got rolling, even planting a bogus crashed UFO to keep it rolling. Beyond that, it's been pretty willing to use the stories of "weird alien craft" to cover its own developments, with plenty of the weird alien craft simply being developments in the US aerospace industry.
Given that, and the fact that at the same time the service purports to be taking this really seriously, it continually leaks information about it, and it doesn't seem really all that bothered, the best evidence here is something else is going on, of which there are a lot of possibilities. These range from the service developing some really high tech drones and testing them against the same Navy units (they're usually the same ones) again and again to just having the ability to make this stuff all up.
So why the leaks?
If the service is experimenting with high tech drones, and if the experiment is going well, leaking the information may serve as a warning to potential enemies, notably the PRC, that "look, we have something so nifty our own Navy can't do squat about it. . .let alone yours". Being vague about it probably serves the US interest better than simply coming out with "Nanner, nanner. . surface fleets are obsolete . . .". After all, once we admit we have them, at that point the race to figure them out is really on.
On the other hand, maybe we're just making the whole thing up. We have been worried in the past about other nations development super high tech aircraft, notably the Soviet Union, then Russia post USSR, and now China. Running around patenting mysterious things and having weird things going on may be a disinformation campaign designed to make a potential enemy a little hesitant. And they'd hesitate, because. . . .
Maybe we really have developed some super high tech craft, either manned or unmanned, that are now so advanced that we feel pretty comfortable testing them against a control set, that being, at first, the same U.S. Navy units again and again. A recent report indicates that other navies are now experiencing the same thing, and we might frankly be doing the same thing with them. There's no reason to believe that a nation that would do U2 overflights over hostile nations in the 60s, and then SR71 flights the same way, which tested the spread of biological weapons by actually spreading biological agents off of the coast of California, and which tested the intelligence use of LSD by giving it to unsuspecting CIA employees, might not do this.
Indeed, it'd make for a pretty good test.
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