Inbound Missile False Alarms

On Saturday Jan. 13, unsuspecting Hawaiians received a text message alert reading:

“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

With increasing tension of a potential nuclear conflict with North Korea over the past year, the message sent people running for cover, under the assumption they had 15 minutes or less before a missile would hit land. It took nearly 40 minutes for a correction to be issued and Hawaiians’ fears placated.

In statements issued by the Hawai’i Emergency Management Agency, the warning was a result of an employee who pushed the wrong button during an emergency training drill. Images of the computer interface used by the agency were posted online, showing the rudimentary format that supposedly led to the false alarm. A spokesperson added that a less ambiguous false alarm feature was added shortly thereafter.

On Tuesday Jan. 16, a similar warning was sent to residents of Japan by public broadcaster NHK, cautioning citizens:

“NHK NEWS ALERT. NORTH KOREA LIKELY TO HAVE LAUNCHED MISSILE. THE GOVERNMENT J ALERT: EVACUATE INSIDE THE BUILDING OR UNDERGROUND.”

In addition to text message alerts, Japanese media sent out television and radio warnings. Unlike the Hawaiian debacle, Japan was able to notify citizens of the false alarm within five minutes.

According to Japanese officials, the false alarm was also the result of human error by an employee who was operating the system for online news. A slightly vaguer explanation than the Hawaiian excuse.

The Michigan Meteor

The same day Japanese public broadcasting issued its ballistic missile warning, a large meteor fell from the sky over southeastern Michigan. Just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday evening, residents witnessed a fireball light up the sky, traveling at a speed of about 28,000 miles per hour.

The 2-yard meteor exploded just 20 miles above Earth shaking the ground with the equivalence of roughly 10 tons of TNT, raining meteorites and creating a shockwave equivalent to that of a 2.0 magnitude earthquake.

The excitement came amid recent reports over the past year of mystery booms heard throughout 64 different locations around the world. Some of these booms have been definitively attributed to meteor strikes or earthquakes, while many others have remained unexplained. Local news broadcasts have even been stumped by some of the enigmatic sounds, with the only potential explanations assumed to be undisclosed military operations.

ZUMA and Other Mysterious Launches

Over the past month, there have been a multitude of strange launches within close succession of each other among the world’s major space programs, as well as the mysterious loss (or not) of the ZUMA satellite by SpaceX and Northrop Grumman.

Less than a month ago, SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload for a private contractor to launch a flotilla of small satellites into low earth orbit. The launch over southern California created quite the spectacle, leading many to believe they were witnessing a UFO. Elon Musk teased unassuming witnesses on Twitter, calling it a “nuclear alien UFO from North Korea.”

A minute prior to the SpaceX launch, a Japanese rocket was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center near the southern tip of the country. Within a week, China launched a rocket, and Russia fired two of its own.

This all came within a week of the disclosure of a black budget, Pentagon UFO program over the course of five years, raising some eyebrows within the conspiracy community.

Then, on the heels of all of this came the bizarre launch of a clandestine military satellite known as ZUMA which was reported to have failed or lost contact during the final stages of its launch. The satellite was deployed by SpaceX on its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and the company reported a successful mission.

The ZUMA satellite, a completely undisclosed Defense Department project with a $1 billion dollar or more price tag, was labelled a failure and purportedly crashed back down to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere upon reentry. SpaceX denies any wrong doing, while the government refuses to answer any questions.

Is There a Connection?

NASA recently announced that a potentially hazardous asteroid, the size of a multi-story house, will pass by Earth’s orbit next week within 4.6 lunar distances, or LD (the distance between the Earth and the Moon). Anything that passes within 19.5 LDs is considered potentially dangerous. This particular asteroid is somewhere between 22 and 68 meters in diameter and could potentially hit Earth or miss in a near flyby. It is expected on Jan. 23.

A recent Volkswagen commercial eerily shows a couple hysterically packing their car before an impending asteroid strike, leading some to call it out for predictive programming.

NASA has a program called the Planetary Defense System at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, which tracks asteroids on a potential collision course with Earth. If an asteroid has an Earth-bound trajectory, NASA’s job is to figure out ways to deflect or mitigate the damage it might cause.

Could this be the reason for all of the bizarre activity that has occurred over the past month, or is there something else going on? Is there really a connection between these supposedly disparate events or is it all merely coincidental?

If the government knew of an inexorable asteroid impact and wanted to test citizen’s response, what better place to test than on an island, rather than a large metropolitan area on the mainland where the damage could have been more significant?