Nearly Half Of Voters Support Giving Ukraine Fighter Jets

The chart above reflects the result of the new Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 11th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,307 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error. 

It Wasn't Alien UFOs After All

Last week, Texas made the news everywhere because some folks around Stephenville decided they had seen some UFO's. Some of these people had some outrageous descriptions of what they had seen. "It was a mile long". "It had flashing lights of different colors". "It was faster than any plane could be".

Rather than search for a rational explanation, or admit they may have witnessed an optical illusion of a perfectly natural thing, many immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were witnessing ALIEN UFOs. We even had UFO organizations coming to Texas to interview those who thought they'd seen the aliens coming.

The TV and newspapers didn't help the situation. They played up the sightings and even started running stories of past UFO sightings. Of course the name of the game for them was circulation or viewership. They'll do any story that people will watch or read, regardless of how silly it is.

Fortunately, we now have a rational explanation for the event. The Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth revealed yesterday that they had 10 F-16 fighters on a training mission in that area on the date in question. This has to be what the people saw. If there was anything else, the F-16 pilots would have seen it.

I'm sure the UFO nuts will never accept any rational explanation. A certain segment of the population will always believe the aliens visited Stephenville that night (although why an alien would want to go to Stephenville is beyond me).

But the rest of us now have a rational explanation for what was seen.

Air Force Too Short Of Fighters To Defend U.S.

As Americans, we have become accustomed to believing that the United States Air Force has plenty of fighter aircraft available to defend America anywhere and anytime. In the past, this has always been true.

But since last November, this has not been true. The Air Force simply does not have enough planes to do the job at this time. Two events have converged to make this happen -- the Iraq war and the grounding of America's entire fleet of F-15 fighter aircraft.

Last November 2, an F-15 fighter crashed in Missouri. It was determined the plane crashed because of structural problems, and the same problem probably existed in many other F-15 fighters. This caused the Air Force to ground around 450 of the aircraft.

Normally, these aircraft would just have been replaced by F-16 fighters, but it turns out that the F-16's are the fighters carrying the load in the Iraq war. They can't do duty in both places at the same time. This meant the Air Force didn't have enough airworthy fighters to defend America.

The Air National Guard (ANG) from several states has been called up to plug the holes in our air defense. The California ANG is now covering the entire West Coast, while the Vermont ANG is covering the whole Northeast. The Minnesota ANG has been sent to Hawaii, and the Illinois ANG is now in Louisiana.

For three weeks, there were no American planes to cover Alaska. During this period, Canadian CF-18 fighters (pictured above) covered Alaskan airspace. There is now a squadron of the new F-22 fighters in Alaska.

The Air Force had just begun the process of replacing the F-15's with F-22's, but they are not being built fast enough to replace all of them quickly. The Air Force has not said how long they expect the F-15's to be grounded, but since it is a structural problem it could be quite a lengthy period of time.

The grounding of the F-15's couldn't have happened at a worse time. This is just one more example of how we'd be much better off if we weren't fighting Bush's dirty little war in Iraq.