Glen David VanHerck is a retired U.S. Air Force general who commanded NORAD, the binational North American air defense command, and U.S. Northern Command from August 2020 to February 2024. The dual post made him responsible for warning of and responding to threats in North American airspace. It also put him at the center of two episodes that shaped the modern UAP debate: the February 2023 shootdowns of unidentified objects and the drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base later that year.

Born in Murray, Kentucky, in 1962 and raised in Bismarck, Missouri, VanHerck was commissioned through Air Force ROTC at the University of Missouri in 1987 and later earned a master's degree from the U.S. Naval War College. A command pilot, he led the 7th Bomb Wing and the 509th Bomb Wing, commanded the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center and served as director of the Joint Staff before his promotion to general in 2020. Gen. Gregory Guillot succeeded him in February 2024, and he has since been listed as a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

His UAP relevance began with the Chinese surveillance balloon that crossed the United States in early February 2023. VanHerck called the failure to detect earlier incursions "a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out," and said later radar adjustments gave "better fidelity on seeing smaller objects." Within days, fighters under his command shot down three more objects, over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron. Asked at a February 12 Pentagon briefing whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin, he deferred to the intelligence and counterintelligence communities and said, "I haven't ruled out anything." Another defense official said there was no sign the objects came from outside Earth, and the White House later said they could prove to be benign commercial or research balloons.

Ten months later, beginning on December 6, 2023, unidentified drones flew over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on repeated nights while he was still in command; no operator has been publicly identified. Speaking at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in August 2026, he said the Langley incursions held "no surprises" for him and his team, because he had told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December 2021 that he lacked the domain awareness to do his mission. He blamed unclear authority at base fence lines, argued for layered defenses rather than missile shots, and offered no new details about who flew the drones. Earlier in 2026, journalist Ross Coulthart publicized remarks in which VanHerck called an apparent drone swarm over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana "astonishing."

VanHerck's UAP record is substantial in an operational sense rather than an investigative one. He has not claimed knowledge of non-human craft; his public statements concern sensor filtering, detection gaps and who has authority to act over domestic bases. Because he led the command that tracked and destroyed unidentified objects in 2023, his refusal to rule anything out and his later warnings about unattributed drones over military bases remain reference points in the debate over what the United States can see and stop in its own airspace.