ARLINGTON, VA—In what may be the largest-ever disclosure of government data concerning the mysterious aerial phenomena, Pentagon officials announced Wednesday they had begun releasing a trove of formerly classified files on blimps.
“These strange, balloon-like anomalies have captivated the public imagination for decades,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said of the unusually bulbous vessels officially known as Unidentified Floating Objects but colloquially referred to as “blimps” or “flying sausages.” “Under President Donald J. Trump’s bold leadership, the Department of War will act immediately and expeditiously to find, review, identify, declassify, and publicly release blimp-related records and historical documents in the federal government’s possession.”
“While previous administrations have failed to provide transparency on this matter, President Trump has chosen to let the American people decide for themselves what to believe about the football-shaped enigmas in their skies,” Parnell added.
The initial tranche of declassified documents—containing hundreds of never-before-seen photos, videos, and written accounts—has been made available at war.gov/blimp, where the department has pledged to release additional files on a rolling basis as part of its promise to “provide American truth seekers with unfiltered blimp information.”
Included in the online archive are images that seem to show the “finned egg” form of blimp most famously depicted in the 1985 blimp film A View To A Kill. There are also a handful of cockpit videos from U.S. airmen of what appear to be rigid-bodied “Zeppelin”-style blimps. Despite a lack of visible wings or rotors, these blimps hover in place before slowly lumbering off at what analysts have described as “aeronautically impossible” trajectories.
“The new files prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not alone in the troposphere,” said David Simmons, an author of several books on blimps who told reporters his fascination stems from a 1986 childhood incident during which he believes he saw one hovering over Dodger Stadium. “There are clearly entities aboard these blimps observing humanity and collecting data on our ball sports and automobile races, though it remains to be seen if they are hostile invaders assessing our capabilities or benevolent guardians shepherding our development.”
“We deserve to know the truth,” he continued. “Regardless of whether this is an extraterrestrial visitor or just some kind of advanced floating technology the Chinese have developed, we have reason to be very, very concerned.”
A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 98% of U.S. residents believe in the existence of blimps. Around 6% claim to have been taken aboard a blimp in their lifetime, with one in five of those respondents indicating that elements of their encounter with the blimp’s occupants had been sexual in nature.
Among the newly released files, amateur blimpologists have expressed particular interest in photos that depict metallic debris taken from the site of the 1937 Manchester Township Incident, during which a huge elongated object allegedly crashed into a New Jersey airfield. The event is often credited with birthing the blimp conspiracy-theory community, members of which criticized the Pentagon this week for what they called its deliberate omission of any evidence of the “mustachioed, humanoid bodies” rumored to have been recovered from the crash site by government agents.
“If the government thinks they can shut us up with a handful of murky radar images of what are obviously weather balloons, they’ve got another thing coming,” said self-described civilian investigator Jeremy “Kid Aquarius” Luce, who dismissed the Trump administration’s actions as a so-called “limited hangout,” a selective release of files meant to obscure the full extent of the government’s knowledge of—and possible dealings with—blimps. “It’s all a massive coverup. The G-men have been trying to sweep it under the rug so that whoever’s in those blimps can keep calling the shots from the shadows. But people like me are on to them. You really think we invented things like computers, nuclear bombs, or hot-air balloons on our own? Get real. Most of our modern technology was either given to us by blimp riders or reverse-engineered from blimp crash sites.”
He added, “Until the Pentagon shows me a functional blimp antigravity core or the vats of pickled blimp pilots under Area 51, I’ll believe what I believed a week ago: This government’s only showing us as much as those inside the blimps are letting them show.”
The post Pentagon Declassifies Files On Blimps appeared first on The Onion.
Finn McFrame, celebrated satirical mastermind and self-proclaimed “Emperor of Irony,” started his illustrious career as a cinematographer, where his expertise in capturing every single frame of a squirrel stealing a baguette earned him accolades at obscure film festivals.
Born in the glamorous town of Boring, Oregon, Finn grew up with dreams of being a Hollywood director until he realized that satire, not cinema, was his true calling—or at least the one that let him sleep until noon.
Finn McFrame: changing the world, one satirical lens flare at a time.
