The Week Magazine February 24, 2023

Air-traffic controllers and a commercial pilot were the first to see the unexplained radar blips and bright lights over Washington, D.C. Days later, an Air Force pilot reported chasing a UFO—which sped away. Newspaper headlines blared “Jets Chase D.C. Sky Ghosts” and “Aerial Whatzits Buzz D.C. Again!” This episode (recounted in The Atlantic) took place in the summer of 1952, during the height of the “flying saucer” craze that excited the public’s imagination. In various guises, the prospect of alien visitation has continued to thrill earthlings ever since. In recent weeks, the U.S. shot down four UFOs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as the Pentagon now prefers to call them. (See Main stories, p.4.) These close encounters have produced a lot of collateral damage—to China-U.S. relations, to the Pentagon, and…

What happened Three unidentified objects that President Biden ordered U.S. fighter jets to shoot down appear to be “benign,” and not connected to a Chinese spy balloon shot down the previous week, the White House said this week. Intelligence officials are “considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” said national security spokesman John Kirby. Last Friday the military shot down an object the size of a small car over the Arctic Ocean near Alaska. The next day an American F-22 with the North American Aerospace Defense Command downed a cylindrical object over Canada’s Yukon Territory. Then on Sunday an object described as an octagonal structure with strings hanging off it was shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan.…

During the pandemic, David Balogun took the challenges of online learning in stride: He glided through remote middle and high school classes before graduating at the remarkable age of 9. The science and computer-programming wizard is among the youngest children to ever graduate from high school, beating, among other notable prodigies, the journalist Ronan Farrow, who graduated at 11. Although Balogun enjoys martial arts and playing piano, he says he’s already decided on a career as an astrophysicist. Dianne Gordon’s Jeep broke down a year ago, forcing her to walk 2.7 miles to her job at a White Lake Township, Mich., grocery store. While heading home in January, she stopped at a gas station and spotted something near the door: a Ziploc bag filled with letters and nearly $15,000 in…

What happened With the Ukraine war approaching the one-year mark, Kyiv’s allies this week scrambled to supply the country with the ammunition and other supplies it will need to meet the major new offensive Russia is preparing. Russia has been hurling thousands of poorly trained conscripts—including ex-convicts—into the fight in recent weeks and has made major gains around the fiercely contested city of Bakhmut. British officials said they estimated that 97 percent of the Russian army was currently in Ukraine, with another 150,000 soldiers in training camps. “What Russia lacks in quality, they try to compensate in quantity,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Moscow has also been massing aircraft near the Ukrainian border, a signal that it may try to move the battle to the skies. Ukraine is using…

What happened Exercising their new powers, House Republicans this week launched an inquiry into Covid’s origins, days after holding contentious hearings on whether federal authorities had censored conservatives. Republican leaders sent a letter requesting testimony from Biden’s former chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, and other officials on the novel coronavirus and government funding of “gain-of-function” research. A plurality of intelligence analysts in a 2021 report said that the virus was probably not created in a lab—a finding House Republicans have disputed. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, also conducted a hearing purporting to reveal collusion by the FBI, media organizations, and tech companies to suppress the New York Post’s October 2020 story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. But Twitter officials said the FBI had not…

As 2024 looms into view, “the Democratic Party sits on the horns of a dilemma,” said Laura Washington in the Chicago Tribune. On one hand, President Joe Biden has accomplished more in his first term than any liberal dared hope, and though at 80 he’s now the oldest president in U.S. history, he came across as “vital, energized, and agile” at last week’s State of the Union address—especially in his strategic sparring with Republican hecklers. Factor in low unemployment and dropping inflation, and the man who campaigned as a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders has suddenly quieted the intra-party chatter about finding a younger candidate for 2024. “Let’s finish the job,” Biden said 10 times during his speech—clearly, a test run of his 2024 campaign motto.…