The recent downing by the US Air Force (USAF) of several so-called UFOs over the US and Canada has left the whole UFO community sorely disappointed. “Look, there are a lot of people out there who seem to believe that Independence Day was a documentary and that UFOs are evidence of aliens in possession of technology centuries in advance of our own, just waiting to invade the earth,” explains noted sceptic Quentin Habbler. “So when the news broke that the USAF had shot down three UFOs in one weekend, they were swarming all over social media predicting that within hours the mothership would be arriving to incinerate us all – but Monday rolled around and nothing. Now, it seems, they were all just balloons. It has really shaken their faith” Leading UFOologists have been quick to disagree with Habbler, claiming that, on the contrary, the recent events have merely confirmed their core beliefs. “The fact that these UFOs might not have been of alien but rather terrestrial origin is surely evidence that they were the start of a ‘false flag’ operation by the US government and its true masters to fake an alien threat so as to create a world government under the auspices of the UN, but really controlled by the WEF and the Bilderberg Group,” opines top flying saucer expert Nick Priest, a former waste contractor for the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), who claims to have seen thousands of top secret reports on alien encounters while emptying official waste baskets. “Why else would they have been so keen to go public with this stuff when they’ve previously spent decades trying to cover up UFO reports?”

The fact that the supposed UFOs were so easily shot down using conventional weapons has also left the UFO community disturbed. “They’ve spent decades misquoting eye witness reports and poring over carefully edited bits of dubious footage to try and convince us that these supposed alien spaceships are incredibly fast and manoeuvrable, even capable of ‘dematerialising’,” says Habbler. “But when they finally turn up in an officially authenticated encounter, they can’t even move out of the way an air-to-air missile. In fact, they couldn’t move at all. No wonder that many in the community are starting to question the whole basis of their quasi-religion!” According to the sceptic, in the face of an alien invasion failing to materialise and the hugely unimpressive capabilities of the recent UFOs, many UFO enthusiasts are beginning to realise that their entire belief system is based upon unreliable testimonies, dubious photographs and deliberately misinterpreted documents peddled by eccentrics, charlatans and cranks. “That’s what this latest nonsense about false flag operations is all about – it is plan B to try and reassure the faithful that their whole belief system hasn’t just been shot out of the sky like those so-called UFOs,” Habbler contends. “Of course, when the fake alien invasion turns out to be as elusive as the real one, then they’ll be able to tell everyone that the false flag theory was obviously true as it is obvious that their exposure of it forced the authorities to shelve it! That’s the thing about these conspiracy fantasies – they are entirely self contained, explaining any eventuality within their own circular logic without any concessions to reality.”

Habbler also pints out that the false flag theory has the advantage of itself acting as a recruiting poster of sorts. “Anything than mentions UN, WEF, Bilderberg Group or whoever the current object of their paranoia is, will inevitably pull in all manner of other crazy conspiracy freaks, mostly from the extreme right,” he says. “They might not have ever had an interest in aliens and UFOs, but as soon as you start mentioning these organisations, they are right on board.” Again, Nick Priest is unhappy at the way he and his fellow UFO enthusiasts are being characterised in the wake of the US UFO shootings down. “Just because they haven’t yet escalated it all to a fake alien invasion and world government yet, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sinister government conspiracy at work here.” he argues. “These recent incidents could just be a distraction from, well, whatever it is those God damned bastards want to distract us all from at the moment. Be it the war in Ukraine, that toxic train crash in Ohio, the fact that Joe Biden died years ago and his embalmed corpse is currently running the US as a puppet whose strings literally are being pulled by the WEF, or the fact that there’s a secret trans plot to turn America’s men gay through exposure to gender neutral pronouns. Maybe there’s been a real alien incursion they are trying to distract us from by staging a patently fake one. Perhaps it is all a plot to discredit the whole UFO community by deploying obviously fake UFOs to be shot down, thereby enabling the government to dismiss all UFO sightings as surveillance balloons? Who knows?”

Unsurprisingly, none of Priest’s arguments have impressed arch-sceptic Habbler. “It’s no different from anything else this crowd spouts – all speculation and a complete absence of verifiable facts. We’re expected to take it all on faith, a bit like religion.” he chuckles. “In fact, the whole UFO thing has a lot in common with religion, especially Christianity – they both involve a lot of sexual imagery. Think about it, one involves women being impregnated by aliens coming down from the heavens, the other frequently involves women being sexually probed and ipregnated by aliens descending from the skies. Not to forget Christianity’s key icon of a near naked man on a cross in pain, being poked with a phallic spear, while UFOlogy constantly invokes images of men being abducted by aliens, stripped naked, painfully examined and being stuck up the jacksie with a ‘probe’. Moreover, the followers of both are expected to take all of it on faith, as there is no hard evidence to verify any of it!”

With the recent events over the US having effectively undermined several of the central tenets of the UFO faith, its leaders, says Habbler, now fear that the whole edifice might now start to crumble. “At last we have a verifiable series of UFO encounters and they turn out to be, as the authorities have always claimed, the result of man made artefacts,” he muses. “It completely contradicts everything that these UFO ‘experts’ have been banging on about in their books and lucrative speaking and TV engagements – they can see the ‘Golden Goose’ that has been providing them with a ‘nice little earner’ rapidly fading away!” Habbler, however, does concede that one good thing might have come out of the whole debacle. “Well, as a result of the publicity surrounding the USAF shootings down, we’ve learned that here in the UK, our skies too are safe, with Rishi Sunak assuring us that the RAF are also ready to shoot down any Chinese spy balloons straying into our airspace,” he says. “Not that they are ever likely to trouble us as, thanks to thirteen years of Tory governments, the UK has sweet FA worth spying on.”