If you had told President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the military-industrial complex he famously warned against would find itself repeatedly foiled by an off-the-shelf product available at the grocery store, he probably would not have believed you.
The Oct. 12 story published in The Wall Street Journal, about how mysterious drones over Langley Air Force Base have baffled the best of America’s military and homeland security apparatus, is clearly not intended to leave you with this impression, yet it does.
The Journal article was likely intended as yet another entry in the now-extensive subgenre of Pentagon reporting that might be called, “What are we going to do about the UFOs?”
In these stories, which seem to regularly appear several times a year (possibly timed with congressional appropriations), military and intelligence officials either publicly or anonymously complain to their regular Pentagon beat journalists about how they are stumped by the mysterious lights in the sky. In 2022, the Pentagon set up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to better collect and analyze reports of these UFO sightings. Before AARO was the wordier Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), set up in 2021. Congress has had multiple UFO hearings, ranging from fairly serious investigations into the likely role of Russian and Chinese drones surveilling U.S. national security sites to “X Files”-style hearings with whistleblowers claiming the U.S. has recovered alien corpses — or, as they phrase it, “biologics.”
The Wall Street Journal piece attempted to emphasize how serious the deployment
