A whizzing from the sky past midnight

By Alex P. Vidal

“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.”— Bruce Schneier

AT past midnight or at about one o’clock and 45 minutes early morning on February 11, I was roused from sleep by an annoying sound, a loud and sustained whizzing from the sky.

When I checked, I spotted what looked like a jet fighter and a chopper patrolling the skies over the Manhattan metropolis. The noise didn’t stop even after I returned to my room.

It’s like the flying objects didn’t leave and were just encircling certain parameters in the skies for a purpose.

Did the pesky sound emanate from the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16 jet fighters or the choppers?

Most probably yes because the building where I was sleeping was located some three blocks away from the United Nations headquarters on 1^st Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, which hosts the highest concentration of powerful people in the world in September each year.

I used to hear the same noise when the United Nations General Assembly, a yearly event, was in session in September. The US government comes in because the period becomes the juiciest target imaginable for terrorists.

The place where I slept was an apartment building in a neighborhood where some of the foreign consulates are located. It is adjacent the East River, a saltwater tidal estuary in New York City.

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But it’s only February and September is seven months away. Why would fighter jets and choppers patrol or check the skies near the UN headquarters?

I checked the news. Bingo, there was a “breaking” news just hours earlier: the military shot down an unidentified flying object “the size of a small car” in a remote northern coast of Alaska, less than one week after shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon.

Although it’s unclear if the object was another balloon, National Security Council Coordinator spokesperson John Kirby said, “We’re calling this an ‘object’ because that’s the best description we have right now.”

And as I write this article, another unidentified object was reported to have been shot down over North American airspace as confirmed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It’s the third in a row.

Saying the latest object “violated Canadian airspace”, Trudeau confirmed it was shot down over Yukon in north-west Canada.

Both Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled to track down the object which was taken out by a US F-22 fighter jet, according to the Canadian leader.

Thus I theorized the whizzing from the sky that interrupted my sleep was probably part of the Pentagon efforts to check and secure the main structures all over the United States as precautionary measures and security.

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During the UN General Assembly usually in the fourth week of September, the Federal Aviation Administration restricts the airspace over Midtown Manhattan; private aircraft, and drones, weren’t allowed in the area.

The job of watching for that goes to the Air Force.

The Pointsguy’s Alberto Riva pointed out that there’s always the possibility that a plane might stray unwittingly into the restricted zone, or that someone with a less innocent intent may breach it.

Circling the city at high altitude, the fighters—always flying in pairs—are ready to swoop down and escort any intruders away.

Riva said jet fighters are relatively small, and the patrols are flown at 24,000 feet or above, so it’s very hard to see them with the naked eye. “You have a much bigger chance of seeing the air-refueling tankers that keep them in the air by filling them up in flight. At any given time during the patrols, a tanker circles the city waiting for the fighters to periodically come up to it for gas,” Riva wrote on September 24, 2019. “You can follow it using specialized flight-tracking sites, and with a bit of luck and a big enough lens on your camera, even photograph it.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)