Recent Rash of UFO Scares Cost US Military HOW MUCH?!

Almost as quickly as the phenomenon arrived, it has passed, with a rash of strange aerial encounters over America fading into obscurity with far more questions than answers available.

Incident number uno was pretty straightforward:  A Chinese spy balloon that we had been tracking ever since it was airborne was shot down over the Atlantic Coast, just off the shores of South Carolina.  In response to this incursion, (and public pressure), the Biden administration cranked our radar capabilities to eleven and starting investigating any blip that pinged our heightened sensors.

The next thing you know, UFO enthusiasts are running around preemptively screaming “we told you so”, suggesting that we were encountering some triggering event for a massive extraterrestrial disclosure.

Turns out, the rash of encounters after the Chinese spy balloon incident were all likely corporate or educational tools. Harmless aside from their hovering in commercial airspace’s altitudes.

Worse still:  The overzealous response cost us a pretty penny.

The Defense Department spent at least $1.6 million to shoot down three unidentified objects that the Biden administration now says may have been recreational balloons.

Air Force jets used four $400,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles to down the objects over Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron on Feb. 10, 11, and 12, respectively.

However, a defense official told The Post that total doesn’t include the cost of the flights used to track and shoot down the devices — since those flight hours were considered part of previously budgeted pilot training.

And these are conservative estimates.

It also doesn’t include the price of the Navy, Coast Guard, Alaska National Guard and Canadian forces scouring the remote regions for debris.

The search was called off Feb. 17, with US officials saying they might never be able to identify the objects.

To add insult to injury, one of the objects required the use of two Sidewinder missiles after the first failed to engage the target.