6A ❚ THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 2021 ❚ USA TODAY
NATION+WORLD
Donald Trump took to blogging after
social media bans. EVAN VUCCI/AP
Trump blog
is no more;
‘broader’
site ahead
David Jackson
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – “From the Desk of
Donald J. Trump” is no longer.
The former president shut down a
blog he created just a month ago, a
spokesman said Wednesday.
Trump used the short-lived blog as
an alternative to Twitter, Facebook
and other social media sites that
banned him because of his constant
false statements about last year’s elec-
tion loss to President Joe Biden.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller
said the blog, titled “From The Desk of
Donald J. Trump,” was designed to be
temporary as the organization devel-
ops its own social media site.
“It was just auxiliary to the broader
efforts we have and are working on,”
Miller said.
Miller said he did not know when a
Trump social media platform might
launch.
Most of Trump’s written state-
ments through May, which include
falsehoods about “election fraud” and
attacks on Biden and anti-Trump Re-
publicans, still appear on the ex-presi-
dent’s website.
Trump aides announced the blog
May 4, releasing a video that included
references to his banning from social
media.
Twitter and Facebook banned
Trump after his statements in the
wake of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on
Jan. 6, when his supporters tried to
halt the congressional confirmation of
electoral votes that put Biden in the
White House.
Trump’s critics relished the demise
of the blog.
The Lincoln Project tweeted, “Gone,
but [easily] forgotten.”
Worries over UFOs are floating upward
Interest is surging as
explanations are lacking
Joel Shannon
USA TODAY
When Daniel Drezner wrote about
UFOs in 2019, he worried the column
could tank his credibility, both as a pro-
fessor of international politics and as a
columnist.
He said the evidence had been
mounting for a while. Among the most
striking: a video showing a Navy fighter
jet locking onto a mysterious target
streaking across the sky as a pilot in-
credulously asked, “What is that, man?”
The video is authentic, the Navy said
without offering an explanation.
That video helped prompt Drezner to
join an increasingly mainstream group
of academics, journalists, intelligence
officials and politicians who say ac-
knowledging UFOs exist doesn’t mean
embracing conspiracy theories or even
believing in extraterrestrial life.
Though UFOs often are synonymous
with aliens in pop culture, those who
study the phenomenon say UFOs
should be understood by their literal
name: unidentified flying objects. Once
identified, they may have a mundane
explanation – weather balloons, drones
or the planet Venus.
For now, some sightings don’t have
widely accepted explanations, includ-
ing examples documented on camera,
by multiple witnesses and with radar.
Those most concerned about the phe-
Weaponized drones join
drug cartels’ arsenal
Mexican groups use
terrorist strategies
Karol Suárez
Special to Louisville Courier Journal
USA TODAY NETWORK
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Mexican police
were clearing blockades placed by or-
ganized crime groups in El Aguaje, a
town that has become a battleground
for drug cartels.
Suddenly, authorities said, a drone
flew over, dropping a gunpowder bomb
and wounding two members of the Mi-
choacán state police force in the arms
and legs.
The attack in April underscored an
emerging danger in the international
fight against illegal drugs – weap-
onized drones.
The bloody and powerful Jalisco
New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, and
its rival Cárteles Unidos have upgrad-
ed their arsenals, using drones to
bomb enemies, posing a growing
threat to Mexican and U.S. citizens
and allowing more drugs to flow into
the USA.
Drones are part of the cartels’ larger
strategy to arm themselves like rogue
militaries.
“I’ve been a strong advocate of des-
ignating the Mexican cartels as terror-
ist groups because they’re acting like
terrorist groups. They’re equipped like
terrorist groups. They’re distributing
record levels of poisonous drugs in
America,” said Derek Maltz, a former
agent in charge of the U.S. Drug En-
forcement Administration’s Special
Operations Division.
“They’re going to use the latest and
greatest technology” to defeat adver-
saries in Mexico, go after police and
fight for territory that gives them bet-
ter routes to funnel drugs into the USA,
he said.
In an exclusive interview with The
Courier Journal, part of the USA TO-
DAY Network, one rookie drone opera-
tor with Cárteles Unidos, who did not
want to give his name, given the car-
tel’s criminal activities, said his or-
ganization has about 100 drones. Car-
tel members receive training on their
use, he said, from a man nicknamed
“Lord of the Skies.”
The man said Cárteles Unidos de-
ploys drones to watch over territory
and attack CJNG. He said neither his
organization nor CJNG uses drones for
trafficking drugs because it’s not
worth the money or effort; drones are
an inefficient way to carry the large
volume of drugs CJNG exports to the
A Congress-sanctioned UFO report
details unexplained “sightings all
over the world.” PROVIDED BY U.S. NAVY
nomenon say some sightings suggest
advanced craft performing maneuvers
that should not be physically possible.
The view has been further bolstered
by comments from high-level figures,
including former President Barack Oba-
ma, who acknowledged that “there is
footage and records of objects in the
skies that we don’t know exactly what
they are. We can’t explain how they
move, their trajectory.”
That’s led Drezner to conclude:
“What I do know is that UFOs exist … we
can’t ignore this any more,” he said.
An unclassified Pentagon report on
UFOs is soon headed to Congress.
“There’s no question anymore that
UFOs are real,” author and independent
journalist Leslie Kean told USA TODAY.
Kean has co-written several New York
Drones used by Mexican drug cartels often carry explosives. PROVIDED BY ATTORNEY
GENERAL OF THE REPUBLIC (MEXICO)
“I’ve been a strong advocate
of designating the Mexican
cartels as terrorist groups
because they’re acting
like terrorist groups.
They’re equipped like
terrorist groups.”
Derek Maltz
Former Drug Enforcement Administration agent
USA.
CJNG – which is known for kidnap-
pings, torture and murders in Mexico
and the USA – is blamed for the spread
of fentanyl, one of America’s deadliest
illicit drugs.
CJNG and other Mexican cartels
make fentanyl in clandestine laborato-
ries and produce and traffic “the over-
whelming majority of the heroin avail-
able in the United States,” according to
the DEA’s 2020 National Drug Threat
Assessment.
Mexican Secretary of Defense Luis
Cresencio Sandoval blamed CJNG for
the drone attack against police in April
and said the person who used the drone
was arrested.
After the attack, The Associated
Press reported, Papal Nuncio Monsi-
gnor Franco Coppola visited Aguililla,
offering a Mass for residents and walk-
ing through the streets with an image of
Christ “to symbolically reclaim road-
ways where dozens of bodies – some de-
capitated – have been left in recent
months.”
CJNG has been blamed for many at-
Times articles on UFOs. Those reports,
which included footage confirmed by
the Navy, helped inspire a recent surge
in the public’s UFO interest.
After studying the phenomenon for
more than two decades, Kean said she’s
open to connecting UFOs with extrater-
restrial life, but she’s quick to distance
herself from conspiracy theorists. The
people who have researched UFOs the
most tend to be “agnostic about what
they are,” she said.
She described the connection be-
tween UFOs and extraterrestrial life as
an easy one for people to make, aided by
decades of films and books on the sub-
ject. She hopes the growing interest in
the topic will prompt study from scien-
tists who may offer other explanations.
History, and Wikipedia, are replete
with UFO sightings, dating back to 1440
B.C. when “fiery disks” were allegedly
seen over the skies of Egypt, though
some have come to doubt the papyrus
the sighting was written on.
Fast-forward 3,000 years, and hun-
dreds, if not thousands, of sightings
have been chronicled. Most end up on
the scrap heap of galactic research, ex-
planations from fireflies on windshields
to crop dusters in the high sun to the Au-
rora Borealis on a clear night.
But some sightings endure to chal-
lenge imagination and explanation,
such as the “Gorman Dogfight” of 1948,
when an Air Force captain said with cer-
tainty he sighted and aggressively pur-
sued a UFO in the skies over Fargo,
North Dakota, before the mysterious
craft went into a steep vertical climb
NEWS
tacks in Tepalcatepec in the Michoacán
state and one in Baja California, a Mex-
ican state bordering the USA where the
cartel targeted the house of Public Secu-
rity Secretary Gerardo Manuel Sosa
Olachea.
During a briefing in Mexico City, San-
doval said such attacks are concerning
but “haven’t been as effective” as the
cartels would like. He said the drones
they use can’t carry enough explosives
to seriously harm a person or destroy a
building.
Authorities are concerned cartels
could get hold of more deadly devices.
They worry cartels may step up efforts
to smuggle drugs across the border with
drones; they say some use this tactic to
bring marijuana and other drugs into
the USA.
In the journal International Studies
Perspective in 2018, researchers cited
an expert who said cartels use drones to
look for Border Patrol agents and inform
drug smugglers of their positions.
As drones proliferate among cartels,
public safety officials in Mexico try to
curb their use. The office of Mexico’s at-
torney general has launched several in-
vestigations into terrorism by organized
crime and seized drones and C-4 explo-
sives.
Experts in Mexico and the USA worry
more militarized cartels will mean more
casualties in both countries, a more dif-
ficult battle for law enforcement and
more drugs on American streets.
Last month, government officials
from both nations held talks at Mexico
City’s Foreign Ministry to discuss a new
joint security policy. A statement re-
leased by the Foreign Ministry said,
“Mexico and the United States reaffirm
the commitment to work together
against transnational organized crime.”
that outmaneuvered his P-51 Mustang
aircraft. A year later, the Air Force con-
cluded the pilot had been chasing a
lighted weather balloon.
In recent years, “the issue itself has
acquired a level of credibility,” Kean
said. Politicians from both parties have
expressed national security concerns.
The videos published by the Times pro-
vided new evidence. Pilots began talk-
ing on the record about their experienc-
es.
Skeptics say evidence and experi-
ence suggest the concern about UFOs is
overblown. “There’s all sorts of things
we don’t understand,” Seth Shostak, a
senior astronomer at the SETI Institute,
told USA TODAY.
He noted, for example, that some
rules of physics have been called into
question by new research without a
public outcry. It’s not alarming to ac-
knowledge humans encounter things
they don’t understand, he said.
Shostak said a number of UFO sight-
ings don’t yet have adequate explana-
tions, but whatever the explanation is,
it’s probably less interesting than an
alien invasion.
Shostak said it’s most likely found
among the stars, not floating in our
skies.
UFO sightings have been happening
for decades and don’t appear to endan-
ger the public or cause harm, he said:
“They are irrelevant … they don’t change
the daily news at all.”
Contributing: Dustin Barnes and
Mike James, USA TODAY; The Associat-
ed Press