Biden admin used $500,000 missile to shoot down ‘UFO’ –that turned out to be Boy Scouts balloon

The Biden administration obliterated a boy scout balloon with a $500,000 missile in the wake of their bungled response to the Chinese Spy balloon incident, The Post can reveal.

The US Air Force dispatched an F-16 on Feb. 12, 2023 to confront the apparent “invading” orb over Lake Huron, blowing it to smithereens with what was likely an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, according to video released last month by the Department of War as part of its second batch of UFO files.

The 45-second clip shows a black “orb” with a dangling string in the fighter jet’s crosshairs for just a few seconds before it is blown apart.

“The F16 shot at a balloon over Lake Huron. After the [Chinese spy] balloon embarrassment, DOD was shooting at every [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] they detected,” Tim Phillips, a former interim director of AARO, told The Post.

The object belonged to a Boy Scout troop, according to Sean Kirkpatrick, a former head of the federal All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.

“[The balloon] had circumnavigated the globe eight times before we shot it down with a half-million-dollar missile,” Kirkpatrick said at a conference on April 27.

“You can imagine the response on the Hill when I briefed that,” he said at that conference.

The orb was part of an ongoing, unspecified research project, Kirkpatrick added.

The destruction of the Boy Scout balloon came a week after the Chinese Spy Balloon debacle, which saw the feckless administration twiddling their thumbs for five days as a CCP recon operation was fully active in the airspace of the USA.

The Biden administration wasted more ammunition shooting down another hobbyist balloon on Feb 11, 2023 over Alaska.

A US F-22 fired a $439,000 missile at a research balloon which cost $12 and belonged to the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, The Guardian reported.

On another occasion, a US fighter pilot reported encountering a UFO with “stealth-like capabilities” and was authorized to fire a missile — only to to destroy a star-shaped mylar balloon from Walmart which said “Happy Birthday,” according to Kirkpatrick.

Many of the supposed UFO videos produced by the military, some of which are being released by the Trump administration, depict standard manmade objects that were misidentified by Reaper drones operators.

“They’ve been on mission and they’ve got to get back to base to rearm and refuel. And you’ve got a bored operator looking around. And they pick something up and aren’t sure what it is,” Phillips said.

“We’re actually seeing, good reporting coming out of the fleet, coming out of the operation wings and squadrons, where they’re willing to report this stuff. And this is part of that outreach where we get our scientists to talk to the Reaper operators and actually go side by side and try to do some education,” he said.