There are conflicting reports of what exactly we’re shooting down over Alaska and Canada. We’re reasonably sure that a balloon with a car-sized payload was shot down over Alaska on Friday. The balloon was flying at 40,000 feet — about the same altitude as commercial jets. But the Pentagon doesn’t think the balloon was from China, given that it flew over the North Pole.
On Friday night, NORAD detected another object flying over Alaska. It drifted into Canadian air space, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fulfilled his boyhood fantasy of being a wartime leader and helped the United States shoot down the unarmed — and presumably unmanned — balloon on Saturday.
Then the FAA closed the airspace over Montana. Another “object” had been detected by radar but before the fighters were able to investigate, it disappeared.
What in the Sam Hill is going on?
“There were multiple theories in Washington as to the provenance of the objects, but several Biden administration officials cautioned that much remained unknown about the last two objects shot down. The United States has long monitored U.F.O.s that enter American airspace, and officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers, weather balloons or other airborne clutter may explain the most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in past years.
“However, nearly all of the incidents remain officially unexplained, according to a report that was made public in 2021. Intelligence agencies are set to deliver a classified document to Congress by Monday updating that report. The original document looked at 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021 that were reported by U.S. government sources, mostly American military personnel.”
So why are all these objects suddenly being discovered? Part of the answer is that the hyper-sensitive sensors we use to protect our airspace sometimes filter out valuable intelligence. If we didn’t use the filters, the raw data would overwhelm man and equipment.
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“We basically opened the filters,” said one defense analyst.
That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary.”
If the objects are spy balloons smaller than the one China sent over last week, who is sending them? These latest balloons may be launched from a ship in the Arctic Ocean or perhaps even a surfaced sub. Whoever it is, they are hiding their identity well.
Notably, the US intelligence community’s method to track China’s fleet of surveillance balloons was only discovered within the last year, six people familiar with the matter told CNN.
The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time, which they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said.
An $800 billion defense budget and we’re just now figuring out how to track these things? Not a very comforting thought.
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