When the Federal Aviation Administration announced it was shutting down El Paso Airport this morning, social media lit up with speculation.
Had freedom-hating terrorists planted anti-aircraft weapons in the desert? Was the government covering up an early-stage zombie apocalypse with El Paso as ground zero? Or had the Trump administration perhaps started firing high-energy laser weapons into the sky without bothering to tell anyone?
The answer, impossibly, seems to be door number three.
According to CBS News, the bizarre airspace closure came under orders from FAA administrator Bryan Bedford. Apparently, Bedford made the call after learning that the Pentagon planned to unleash high-energy, counter-drone laser weapons at Fort Bliss, situated right next to El Paso International Airport.
But wait, there’s more. Separately, Fox News reported that military personnel had shot down a rogue party balloon — like you’d see at a child’s birthday party — near El Paso, after misidentifying it as a foreign drone. Whether this was done using the Pentagon’s mega-laser is unclear at the moment, but it’d be a wild coincidence if this wasn’t the case.
The airspace closure occurred without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources told CBS. Originally, the closure was said to last 10 days, citing “special security reasons.” The FAA’s original notice warned that the “government may use deadly force” against planes if officials decided “the aircraft poses an imminent security threat.”
In Bedford’s defense, CNN reports the military laser weapon deployment came nine days before a February 20th meeting to review the system’s potential impacts on commercial aviation.
Again, it isn’t clear if the Pentagon went ahead and deployed the laser system before officials could meet. That said, CNN‘s sources said the Defense Department was seeking to use the system in El Paso before such a sit-down could take place.
Further muddying the waters are the Trump administration’s claims that the Pentagon had taken action to disable a vague “cartel drone incursion” right before the airspace shutdown. (We have yet to see any evidence that that’s the case.)
So to recap: the FAA and the Pentagon appear to be in such poor communication that experimental weaponry by the latter is shutting down civilian flights by the former — and party balloons are caught in the crossfire. Welcome to 2026.
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