Seymour Hersh, that is. He of “the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline” infamy.
Now it’s those shot down UFOs.
Legendary Journalist Says He Knows What the ‘Mystery Object’ Was the US Military Shot Down Over Alaska
“The federal government has a contract with the meteorology department, the weather department, at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks—that is one cold place, it’s way up there.”Hersh, who said he’s visited the university campus there, said it’s so cold in Fairbanks that there’s no weather station there. So the university uses what Hersh describes as small aerial vehicles that collect weather data that is transmitted back to officials at the university, who can notify pilots flying over the Arctic Circle of any unusual weather activity.
The university may not have a weather station, but Fairbanks International Airport certainly does. In fact, the National Weather Service has ten weather stations in the Fairbanks area.
I’ve been to Fairbanks, too. It is not “too cold” for a weather station.
I see that the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica station is operating, and that’s a hell of a lot colder than Fairbanks, Alaska.
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In fact, U of Alaska-Fairbanks DOES have a weather station.
It is located at their Toolik Lake field site, which has been publishing research papers since (at least) 1985.
I do not give the e-mail address here, but it can be found with a 10-second Internet search.
The reason why they don’t have the weather station on-campus is to avoid the urban heat-island effect, which in the only major settlement in central Alaska would render the data useless without so much post-processing that it is easier to have the meteorologists drive outside town, and gather their data there.
Or maybe this is all a lie, and the USgovt has been preparing since 1985 to lie to the public about the accidential destruction of a weather balloon.
(Note that it may well have been weather balloons, framed by edgy radio operators who after the “Chinese spy balloon affair” would rather report any flock of birds as a possible intruder than be caught overlooking a real intruder.
But this is not what Hersh claims. Hersh claims that it specifically was a U of A balloon, launched due to the cold in Fairbanks preventing the operation of a weather station.
That it may well have been SOME weather balloon by WHOMEVER – might just as well have been Japan, either Korea, Russia, or China, for all we know – is MY claim, not Hersh’s.)
Like with the Nord Stream narrative, Hersh provided a grand tale which after the most basic fact-checking turned out to be “not even wrong”. There, he did (to name just one example) not settle for “oh, it was no Alta-class minesweeper, but the Oksøy-class minehunter Hinnøy; sorry, my bad”, but claims that he was 100% correct and weveryone else is stupid or lying or both, and that was indeeed an Alta-class vessel – probably the Alta herself -, and all evidence proving that no such ship took part in Baltops22 is fakes planted in advance of the operation. (He has explicitly claimed that photos of the ship Alta being scrapped before Baltops22 are fabricated.)
His motives, and how and why these quite unique (there is no precedent on the Internet; Hersh, or his source, must have invented them de novo) and bizarre claims actually were made up deserve investigation, and plenty of it; any other aspect of his fairytales deserves to be quickly forgotten, lest some thinking person’s mind reels in horror so hard it suffers lasting harm.
At present, it is patently obvious that someone is feeding Hersh misinformation – to no greater effect than comic relief in this case, but in an obvious attempt to obfuscate culpability in case of the Nord Stream attack.
Find that actor, and you’ll have a lackey of whoever gave the order to blow up three-quarters of the Nord Stream pipelines on your hands.
Alternatively, someone could inform Hersh that Antarctica DOES in fact EXIST, and has literally dozens of operational weather stations – on the chance that this will make his head explode and prevent further embarrassing utterances on his part.
I figured that the university had a station, but just looking at NWS stations was good enough for this post.
I think Hersh got played (and has been for a while). He’s misses the old glory days, and will jump at any sensational story and let his own confirmation bias convince it’s real without doing the fact-checking he should.