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The high-stakes nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general has turned into a clash of wills between President Trump and two Senate Republicans whose political careers he claims credit for ending.

After a vote on Blanche’s nomination was delayed over concerns raised by two lame-duck Republican senators, the president said Thursday he might put Blanche’s nomination on hold rather than meet their demands.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) have indicated that they will vote to support advancing Blanche’s nomination only if the Justice Department provides written assurance that it has completely abandoned a controversial $1.8-billion “anti-weaponization” fund created as part of a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service and will limit the scope of tax audit immunity granted to Trump, his sons and a business.

Those provisions were part of a proposed settlement of a $10-billion lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS, which is part of his administration.

“The opposition to such a high-ranking executive branch nomination from within Republican ranks is quite unprecedented,” said Phil Brest, who was a top Democratic staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee during the nominations of Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr and Merrick Garland, who each served as attorney general.

The Senate careers of both Cornyn and TIllis are coming to an end this year after Trump declined to endorse them.

“John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform. “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

But that decision brings about its own political risk.

With the president’s approval rating sitting below 35% in recent polls, Democrats could shrink or even reverse the Republican Party’s current 53-seat Senate majority this November. Cornyn‘s and Tillis’ seats in Texas and North Carolina are both at risk of flipping to Democrats.

“So waiting until 2027 could be far harder than it is right now,” said Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Blanche has been serving as acting attorney general since Atty. Gen Pam Bondi was fired in April. He was previously the deputy attorney general and has been associated with some of the most controversial policies associated with the Trump administration, including the IRS settlement, the handling of the Epstein files and prosecutions of Trump’s perceived enemies.

Blanche can continue in the acting role even if he is not confirmed, but the Trump administration would be blocked from appointing a new deputy attorney general unless he is confirmed.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is vetting Blanche, told reporters Thursday that he is hoping to keep Blanche’s nomination on track.

“I’m going to work real hard the next few days to get this thing settled. That’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to consider any other option, because there’s no reason to consider other options at this point,” Grassley said.

Because the Senate is scheduled to begin its five-week August recess at the end of next week, Blanche probably wouldn’t come before the full Senate for a vote until September at the earliest if the nomination advances out of the Judiciary Committee.

That would put the vote squarely in the middle of peak campaign season, which could present vulnerable Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska with a difficult vote on a nominee who has been linked to many of the Trump administration’s most polarizing policies.

A vote against Blanche could incur the wrath of Trump, while a vote for him could turn off moderate voters.

“It’s a Catch-22 for a lot of these candidates. They still need Trump’s voters to come out, but they still need a swing vote as well,” Taylor said.

Blanche worked earlier in his career as a federal prosecutor in New York but was more recently Trump’s criminal defense attorney in the lead-up to his second term in the White House.

Blanche faced questions about his independence from his former client throughout his nomination hearing earlier this month. But his answer to one seemingly friendly question, about whether he and Trump are friends, might have inadvertently hurt his case.

“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche replied, before correcting himself. “Was his lawyer.”

The Judiciary Committee currently has 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. With all 10 Democrats firmly in opposition to Blanche, a vote against moving forward by Cornyn or Tillis would probably put an end to the nomination.

This isn’t the first time Tillis has wielded his political leverage during a high-stakes nomination process.

He briefly blocked the nomination of Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh until the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

“Sen. Tillis has been unafraid to use his vote to extract concessions from the Trump administration,” said Brest, who is now president of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal nonprofit. “There’s a playbook for this and he has been effective with that playbook.”

Betye Saar, a Los Angeles artist who transformed collections of bigoted bric-à-brac — Sambo dolls, ceramic mammies and crude renderings of pickaninnies — into potent works of assemblage that mined the searing history of race in the United States, and whose works influenced generations of artists, has died. She was 99.

Saar died in her sleep — just a few days short of her 100th birthday — in Los Angeles, her longtime gallerist Julie Roberts at Robert Projects said. Saar’s death was confirmed by her publicist Hannah Gottlieb-Graham.

“Betye Saar was one of the greatest artists of our time, and it has been an immense honor to work with her for nearly 20 years,” Roberts said. “Her singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art, and her legacy will continue to inspire generations of artists, scholars, and audiences around the world.”

A diminutive woman with a low-key manner that belied a steely resolve, Saar was known for combing garage sales, flea markets and junk piles for objects that she employed in collages and assemblages large and small. These explored difficult aspects of American history — including slavery and Jim Crow — but also touched on more personal themes of family, memory, magic and spirituality.

“My work has to do with recycling,” she told a documentary crew in the 1970s. “Each item I collect has a certain energy from its previous function that carries over into its new use.”

Artist Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon home in 2016.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In a 1984 profile, Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic described Saar as an artist who used found objects in a way that “draws on the power of mystery, the hurt of discrimination and the authenticity of individual vision.”

As Saar’s 100th birthday approached, her work and its groundbreaking importance were celebrated afresh in a slew of articles, including two recent profiles in The Times. As she approached the momentous milestone, Saar appeared more interested in creating new art than in dissecting her legacy. “That’s what art is,” she told The Times in an interview in late June. “Making something where there was nothing.”

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1970s, after crafting a small assemblage — roughly the size of a shoebox — that featured at its center a stereotypical Black mammy figurine bearing a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. The piece was first shown at the Rainbow Sign, a community center in Berkeley that was located near the headquarters of the Black Panthers.

The artist had begun her professional life as a designer of greeting cards and home accessories. But 1972’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” as the assemblage was called, catapulted her into the center of the Black Arts Movement and connected her with a broader tradition of assemblage in California and the art world at large. Three years after its creation, she had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Decades later, activist Angela Davis credited “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” with spurring the Black women’s movement.

“It’s like they abolished slavery, but they kept Black people in the kitchen as mammy jars,” Saar said in a 2015 interview. “I had this Aunt Jemima, and I wanted to put a rifle and a grenade under her skirts. I wanted to empower her. I wanted to make her a warrior. I wanted people to know that Black people wouldn’t be enslaved by that.”

In June 2020, in the wake of the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, Quaker Oats announced that it would retire the Aunt Jemima brand. Saar took to Instagram with an image of her famous work and a message: “She’s liberated! Finally at long last! And it’s about time!”

“Liberation” now resides in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, not far from where it was first shown.

Betye Saar was born Betye Irene Brown in L.A. on July 30, 1926, the eldest of Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson‘s three children. Her father, with whom she was close, died when Saar was about 5. And shortly thereafter, Parson relocated the family to Pasadena to live with her maternal aunt, Hattie Parson Keys. (Years later, Saar created a series of works in honor of Keys, employing objects that her aunt had left behind — something she would do for other family members as well.)

Saar’s parents weren’t artists, but art was in the air. When she was a child, her mother encouraged her to sew and make crafts. And, in the summers, she spent time at the home of her paternal grandparents in Watts, where she saw Simon Rodia building the Watts Towers and was struck by his use of materials.

“The one I find the most amusing is the corn cob,” she told the podcast “The Modern Art Notes” in 2016. “He had a piece of space with wet cement so he just put the corn cob in there. And I just love the kind of freedom to make the piece. Anything can go in there.”

After graduating from high school, Saar spent two years at Pasadena City College before transferring to UCLA in 1947. She majored in design, figuring that she would become an interior decorator — and, for a time, she did indeed work in that field, teaming up with Curtis Tann to form a cleverly named studio called Brown and Tann. Operating out of Tann’s home, the company produced an array of decorative and functional objects, including bowls, ashtrays and jewelry.

To market their goods, they turned to an informal network of African American artists, staging pop-up exhibitions in people’s homes and in other impromptu locations. In 1951, the pair was featured in Ebony magazine.

It was through that circle that she met a ceramicist of German American descent by the name of Richard Saar. In 1952, they married. The following year, their daughter Lezley was born. Two other daughters followed: Alison in 1956 and Tracye in 1961. (Lezley and Alison are now respected artists in their own right. And, in fact, on more than one occasion, all three women have shown their work together, most recently at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster in 2018.) In 2024, the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Gallery installed Saar’s “Seeking Secrets of Destiny” alongside her daughter Alison’s sculpture “The Beckoning.”

Betye Saar, flanked by her daughters, stands before a painted brick wall.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

In 1962, the Saar family moved to a rambling hillside home in Laurel Canyon, then a very rustic part of L.A. It put them in a hotbed of hippiedom right as the 1960s got rolling.

“Down the road was Frank Zappa,” Saar recalled in one interview. “There weren’t that many houses. We had the long skirts and long hair, and it was very casual. You’d go to a love-in or a concert.”

“We were as hippie-ish as hippie could be, while still being responsible.”

By the late ‘60s, she and Saar had divorced. But she remained in Laurel Canyon, where she would live and work until the end of her life.

Saar came to art almost by accident. In the late 1950s, she enrolled at Cal State Long Beach to pursue a master’s degree so that she could teach. But a stroll through campus led her past the university’s printing department.

“I walked past the print workshop and I was like, ‘Heyyy!’ ” she later recalled.

The master’s degree never happened. Instead, she poured herself into printing.

“I loved making prints,” she recalled. “The move into fine art, it was liberating. It gave me freedom to experiment.”

A pair of other, longer journeys, also proved formative.

There was a trip to Chicago’s Field Museum, where she immersed herself in the institution’s extensive collection of African art, followed by a trip to Haiti in the early 1970s. Saar was drawn to the Caribbean nation because of her interest in voodoo and magic — and the power that these could confer on inanimate objects.

“In the early 1960s I began going to coffee houses and they’d have books on the occult,” she told the New York Times in 1978. “I was attracted to signs and diagrams of alchemy and palmistry, and I began to use them in my prints. I also haunted second-hand and junk stores, and I started to frame my prints in old window frames.”

But it was a visit to an exhibition of the work of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Musuem) that inspired her to take a three-dimensional turn in her work. Saar was moved by the surreal qualities of the New York artist’s intimately scaled assemblages, which were often presented in small boxes.

“I immediately started collecting stuff after I saw that show,” she told the L.A. Times in 2016. “I started going to yard sales and estate sales.”

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, she took on a series of part-time jobs to provide for her children, designing costumes at a cultural center and teaching at area art schools. These provided her with necessary income, but also allowed her enough time to make work — which she often did at the kitchen table.

Saar’s creations from that era are on display through Aug. 22 at Roberts Projects. Titled, “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show covers the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions.

“Art comes from the heart and the head,” she once said. “You don’t need to have a separate space in which to make it.”

Plus, art gave Saar a crucial political voice at a time of the civil rights and Black power movements. “If you are a mom with three kids, you can’t go to a march,” she once stated, “but you can make work that deals with your anger.”

“The Weight of Betrayal,” 2015, by Betye Saar.

(Brian Forrest / Roberts Projects)

In her assemblages, she incorporated symbols that channeled dark episodes of U.S. history and African American struggle: the schematics of slave ships, the hackneyed images of vintage kitsch and the cruel sobriquets used by white supremacists to describe Black children.

At first she was apprehensive about using this type of imagery in her work. “Blacks were ashamed of those derogatory images,” she told the New York Times. “I like to think I recycled those images from negative to positive.”

But there was power in those images — and Saar knew just how to harness it.

“Saar’s assemblage doesn’t just describe history,” wrote former Times art critic Christopher Knight of her work in 2019, “it embodies a visceral connection to it.”

She would go on to deploy these tropes in myriad ways throughout her career — in particular the stereotypical figure of the Black mammy.

This included one particularly potent work: a glass bottle featuring the visage of a smiling mammy, which she transformed into a Molotov cocktail. The piece, which for decades had been in a private collection, reappeared in the traveling exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85,” which went on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in 2017.

“Historically, the mammy was the ultimate image of Black female servitude in the American psyche,” wrote historian Steven Nelson in the catalog that accompanied a 2017 exhibition of Saar’s work at the Craft Contemporary (then known as the Craft & Folk Art Museum). “She was kind and giving. She cooked and cleaned and did the laundry. She took care of the children. She was harmless.”

By arming her mammies with revolvers, rifles and bullets, Saar turned a symbol of servility into one of militancy and power.

“Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail,” 1973, shown at the exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution” at CAAM in 2017.

(Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum / Betye Saar, Roberts Projects)

Her work also frequently touched on the personal: family, dreams, magic and the body (particularly the Black female body). In the process, she influenced a younger generation of artists, key figures such as Houston Conwill, Senga Nengudi and David Hammons.

“You can really see the impact she had on them,” said Kellie Jones, a scholar and independent curator who organized “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” at the Hammer Museum in 2011. “She had this multimedia practice. It was about Africa, but it was about the world. She has works with Mexican milagros, she has titles in Spanish, she at certain points has Asian influence and Haitian influence. She was really looking at the globe. She was a person in the world, and she really modeled that for people like Hammons and Conwill and Nengudi.”

Saar’s work resides in the permanent collections of more than 80 international museums, and in recent years, she was the subject of solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona (which hosted a retrospective).

In L.A., she had regular exhibitions at her Culver City gallery Roberts Projects, as well as one-woman shows at CAAM and the Craft Contemporary. In 2019, a small but potent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art explored the ways in which her drawing process factored into her assemblage work. But a full retrospective at one of her hometown’s major museums eluded her.

Saar told The Times that she didn’t let it bother her: “I’ve always done what I did and never felt I was competing with what was going on.”

An installation view of “Mojotech,” 1987, by Betye Saar at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

(Tim Lanterman / Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Roberts Projects)

If anything, she competed only with herself.

Well into her 90s, she continued to get up every day to craft assemblages out of the objects she had amassed in her studio. At 96, she scoured the Huntington Library gardens for a commissioned installation she called a “full-circle” project.

“I used to come to the Huntington with my mother when I was a child. She loved to garden, especially African violets, and she passed that love of plants and nature on to me,” Saar told the New York Times Style Magazine in 2024.

That love is palpable in “Drifting Toward Twilight” and its accompanying documentary, which sees Saar fawning over the orange tint of sloughed bark and the mystical qualities of garden scraps.

“Even in death those things can be really beautiful,” Saar said in the short documentary.

After working with a 17-foot canoe as a centerpiece for the Huntington exhibition, Saar told Curate LA that she felt compelled to return to small-scale pieces. The result was her 2024 Roberts Projects exhibit, “Betye Saar: New Work,” an objet trouvé medley in bronze and gold hues.

“At first, the new works were more nostalgic, with vintage photos and female ephemera, like gloves and such,” Saar said. “Then I brought in the tall ship bookends and African masks, and the works moved in a more ancestral and political direction.”

Even her grandson’s discarded computer parts made a cameo, a testament to Saar’s uncanny ability to mine inspiration from the most mundane objects.

“The worst problem for an artist is having nothing to say,” she once said in an interview. “I just have so many ideas. … Look at things that are important to you, what’s happening in your life. If you have that, you never run out of ideas.”

With her centennial on the horizon, Saar in 2025 formed the Betye Saar Legacy Group, a committee of her trusted curators and collaborators charged with preserving her vast archive and keeping her name fresh in the minds of new generations of artists.

A Saar biography penned by Zoé Whitley, who co-curated “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” is expected in 2027.

Saar is survived by her daughters Lezley, Alison (both artists) and Tracye (a writer), and her grandchildren Kyle Leeser, Maddy Inez, Sola Saar, Gen Saar Agustsson, Spencer Saar Cavanaugh, Megan Cavanaugh

Times staff writers Malia Mendez and Jessica Gelt contributed to this report.

The U.S. military has finally released video footage showing an Air National Guard F-16 shooting down an object over Lake Huron back in 2023, which appears to be a balloon. American fighters downed three still-technically unidentified objects over the United States and Canada that month. Only one other image had been released from any of these incidents before now, and questions remain unanswered, including why it has taken so long to share key details with the public.

The video in question, seen below, was included in a new tranche of declassified records that the Pentagon posted online today as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) initiative. UAP here stands for unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), which are also still commonly referred to as unidentified flying objects (UFO). This is the second batch of videos, pictures, and documents to be released through PURSUE, with the first having come back on May 8. Overall, what has been disclosed so far has been underwhelming, to say the least.

Lake Huron UAP engagement by F-16

What has already been well established is that a pair of F-16CM Vipers from the Minnesota Air National Guard scrambled in response to the detection of an unidentified object on February 12, 2023. Authorities deemed the object, which was soaring at approximately 20,000 feet, to be concerning and a potential hazard to civil aviation. One of the F-16s shot it down over Lake Huron, which lies right along the U.S. Canadian border, with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile. Canadian authorities subsequently recovered debris, which we will come back to later on.

U.S. Air Force fighters had also downed two other still unidentified objects, one in the skies off the coast of Alaska and another over Canada’s Yukon Territory, on February 10 and 11 of that year, respectively. This all followed the shootdown of a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, which came after it had already spent days passing over parts of the United States and Canada.

The official description of what is seen in the newly video, which is titled “USAF ANG F-16C (callsign [CALLSIGN]) Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023,” reads:

“At the 11 second mark, the sensor focuses on an area of contrast in the center of its field-of-view. At the 20 second mark, the footage appears to depict a kinetic interaction between two distinct areas of contrast, with the initial subject of the footage fragmenting in a radial displacement pattern that suggests a high-energy event.”

“This video description is provided for informational purposes only. Readers should not interpret any part of this description as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination regarding the described event’s validity, nature, or significance.”

The footage was shot through an infrared camera. The F-16s involved in the shootdown were seen at the time carrying Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods (ATP), which have both electro-optical and infrared video cameras, among other features. From what can be seen, the object is distinctly balloon-like with a roughly spherical shape. It has a single wire or some other kind of line dangling below, but there is nothing readily visible attached to it.

How the object is seen ‘bursting’ apart at the 20-second mark in the video is also very consistent with a balloon.

At the time of the shootdown over Lake Huron in 2023, which was widely publicized, the object was described as “octagonal” and as having multiple “strings” hanging below, but no visible payload.

The description above is in line with unclassified audio recordings of the in-cockpit communications from the two F-16 fighter jets that TWZ published the day after the shootdown.

“I wouldn’t really call it a balloon … I don’t know what … I can see it outside with my eyes,” one of the pilots can be heard saying in that audio. “Looks like something … there’s some kind of object that’s distended… it’s hard to tell, it’s pretty small.”

“I’m gonna call it a balloon,” one of the pilots adds later on.

“In the targeting pod, I can’t tell if it’s metallic or what, but I can see like lines coming down below it, but I can’t see anything below it,” one of the pilots also says at one point.

“The size of it, that would be challenging, it’s so slow and so small, I just can’t see it,” one of the pilots notes, as well.

You can listen to the full 2023 Lake Huron shootdown audio below.

Radio Audio From F-16 Shoot Down Of Object Over Lake Huron

In 2024, Canada’s CTV News also published records that were obtained via a request under Canada’s Access to Information Act, one of which said that a “module” was among the debris recovered after the shootdown and that it was “from a company who sells weather monitoring equipment.” The document in question was an email from Mark Flynn, at the time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) deputy commissioner for Federal Policing, to Canadian Armed Forces Brig. Gen. Eric Laforest, then-strategic joint staff director of general operations.

“It will be analyzed to determine if there is anything unusual with it but I suspect not given the size,” Flynn’s email added. “Whether or not it is from the shoot down is uncertain.”

“Debris has been recovered from the shores of Lake Huron but after careful analysis, it was determined not to be of national security concern,” the RCMP also told CTV News directly.

The records the Canadian outlet obtained also included a redacted Royal Canadian Air Force report that further suggested the object might have been a weather balloon launched from a U.S. National Weather Service radar station in Michigan. That same report also highlighted the possibility that the object shot down over the Yukon Territory had been a so-called “pico” balloon, which amateur radio enthusiasts regularly launch across North America, a theory that was widely reported at the time.

The newly released video all but closes the case on what was shot down over Lake Huron being an innocuous balloon. This, in turn, adds to the existing and serious transparency questions surrounding all three of the still largely unexplained shootdowns in February 2023.

The only image to be released before now was a single still picture of the object downed over the Yukon Territory, which is seen below. You can find our previous analysis of what that picture shows here.

In an interview with TWZ‘s Howard Altman earlier this year, Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Maj. Gen. Chris McKenna also described the object shot down off the coast of Whitehorse in Alaska as a “white balloon” belonging to “either research or a state actor.” McKenna is the commander of 1 Canadian Air Division, operational commander for the Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Region (CANR), and the Canadian Joint Forces Air Component Commander.

TWZ and others have noted for years now that it has been, at best, curious that the U.S. military had not released imagery and/or video of any of these unprecedented shootdowns that followed the Chinese spy balloon affair. This disconnect is even pronounced given how quickly higher resolution video footage and pictures of geopolitically charged events, often captured through exactly the same kinds of sensors, are routinely released.

“Data release and footage is prioritized based on the geopolitical environment at the time,” Sean Kirkpatrick, then head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) said in response to a question from TWZ about why video or pictures from the February shootdowns had not been released at a press briefing in October 2023. “So engagements with Chinese fighters, Russian fighters have a much larger priority in getting it through the review process or declassification than UAPs or other similar engagements.”

“We are however, working through those processes, which all exist and we’ve got several of them actually already declassified and ready to update on our website [which] we’ll be doing on the next update to the website,” Kirkpatrick, who left AARO in December 2023, added at that time. “And we’re putting them out as quickly as we can get them through their proper steps.”

The Pentagon established AARO in 2022 to serve as a central manager within the U.S. military for policies and procedures for tracking, reporting, and analyzing UAP incidents, as well as to act as a repository for intelligence assessments and other relevant data. Since then, the office has been a focal point for that criticism, especially from members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle, who have complained about stonewalling on UAP-related matters.

With all of this in mind, it’s interesting to note that the Pentagon’s PURSUE website says the newly released video of the Lake Huron shootdown did come via AARO, but in what appears to have been something of a circuitous route.

“On March 6, 2026, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records allegedly held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community,” according to the entry in the PURSUE archive. “The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) identified a collection of responsive materials held on a classified network. Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody.”

“AARO assesses that this video, whose uploader-defined title is, ‘USAF ANG F-16C (callsign [CALLSIGN]) Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023,’ is likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within the United States Northern Command area of responsibility in 2023. A user uploaded this video to a classified network in February 2023.”

This is a very odd description, suggesting that AARO was somehow not aware of the origin of the footage and/or could not confirm it. The PURSUE archive simply lists “Department of War” as the source of the video. TWZ reached out to the Pentagon and NORTHCOM for more information. The Pentagon confirmed to us that the video is indeed of the well-publicized shootdown.

As TWZ has noted in the past, there is evidence that U.S. and Canadian authorities withheld the release of certain materials related to the trio of shootdowns in February 2023, ostensibly to avoid confusion and speculation. We have also pointed out that this looks to have had exactly the opposite effect, and the optics of choosing this course of action remain puzzling.

The Chinese spy balloon incident earlier in February 2023 had already become a cause célèbre, highlighting worrisome gaps in air defense sensor coverage over and around North America. At the time, U.S. authorities very publicly scrambled to assure the public it was addressing those concerns. Major changes were subsequently made to various policies, as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures.

There does continue to be questions in this regard, especially when it comes to responding to the ever-growing threats posed by drones. The Pentagon and other elements of the U.S. government have been working to address those issues in recent years, as well. TWZ has long pointed out that many UAP sightings are very likely to be drones, as well as balloons, operated by malign actors, including China and Russia, for intelligence collection or other purposes.

It remains to be seen whether the release today of the Lake Huron shootdown video leads to more disclosures around that incident, as well as what happened in the skies off the coast of Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

Update: 6:58 PM EST –

It has been brought to our attention that former AARO head Sean Kirkpatrick described the objects shot down between February 10 and 12, 2023, as all being balloons during a talk in April. Kirkpatrick, now an adjunct assistant professor of physics at the University of Georgia, was addressing a gathering of an independent organization called the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) at the time. He is a controversial figure to many in the UFO community for his stark refusal that the government has no proof of truly non human intelligence visiting earth.

“We scrambled jets and shot down a bunch of things. Do you know what we shot down? Balloons,” Kirkpatrick said. “You can imagine the response on the Hill when I briefed that.”