You can imagine the state of excitement last Monday in the newsroom of La Vanguardia when colleagues from the International section commented that a US military high command did not rule out that the flying objects shot down in North America could belong to extraterrestrials. He was nonsense. But it is true that at first no one believed that the pandemic that came to us from China would end up having such terrible human and economic consequences, and neither did anyone believe that in the middle of the 21st century Russia could invade Ukraine and today it has not only done so, but also we are threatened by a third world war. What else can happen to us? Is it possible that the Martians are invading us now?
Glen VanHerck, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, did not have his best day Monday. When some astute journalist asked him at an official press conference if the objects shot down by his army fighters could carry aliens, his response was bookish clickbait: “I’ll let the intelligence community find out. I’m not ruling anything out.” Other military chiefs did rule it out, but VanHerck’s phrase was already running in minutes through all the digital editions, radios and televisions in the world. The Martians are coming!
In the end yesterday the balloons were punctured (really and euphemistically) and the US military authorities themselves denied that the four objects shot down were of extraterrestrial origin and even that they came from China.
Today we will sleep much more peacefully and we will worry about the real problems, the real ones. And here what is going on in the head of Vladimir Putin emerges with force. The Norwegian secret services assure that Russia is walking these days with ships loaded with missiles in the Baltic Sea, something that has not happened since the Cold War. NATO’s reaction, in turn, is to speed up aid to Ukraine, and Spain decided yesterday to send a missile detachment to Estonia to protect the anti-aircraft defense of this area of ??Europe.
It is clear that, more than worrying about what can come from other planets, it is time to be careful with what happens on Earth. Everything is very fragile.
