When one Chinese spy balloon turned into a series of ongoing attacks on American airspace, the public started asking questions. There aren’t a whole lot of answers and diplomatic tension levels are spiking into critical territory. Xi Jinping is practically daring us to do something.
Chinese air aggression
We know the first one was a balloon and the Chinese admit it was theirs. After it was allowed to complete its mission, we finally shot it down. Our fighter pilots have been getting some experience this week, shooting down one UFO after another. Some are saying they are also balloons but nobody is saying it for certain. We do know they’re “about the size of a small car.”
China isn’t admitting they are theirs. Not only that, they are accusing us of sending balloons over their airspace. If they aren’t just lying as political misdirection, maybe someone else is spying on both of us and we only found out by accident.
What we do know is that the Pentagon reports another “high-altitude object” was blasted over Lake Huron, Sunday afternoon. It might not be Chinese. That was number four. Three was an “unidentified object” shot down Saturday over northern Canada. We got number two over Alaska on Friday. There was another big one spotted over Latin America.
If I had to guess . . We shot down one of our own new toys on purpose so we can blame it on Aliens, then we can fly them all over China and say it is UFOs and make them look stupid when they can’t shoot them down at all. What do you think? #ufo #ufotwitter pic.twitter.com/D7FfyyzD5H
— Carl Vibe (@Carl_Vibe) February 11, 2023
At this point, experts are claiming “there’s no indication at this point whether the unidentified objects have any connection to China’s surveillance balloon.” They also don’t think they are something new, just that we started looking and they were already there.
Our Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, Melissa Dalton, announced that we shot them down to be on the safe side. “They were taken down out of an abundance of caution.” She was clear not to call them enemy spy craft and especially didn’t blame the Chinese.
“High-altitude objects can be used by a range of companies, countries, and research organizations,” she notes, for “purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.” Generally, those are publicly announced and coordinated. Especially since the latest objects are operating in the same airspace as commercial jets.
F-22 jets to shoot down “objects” over the US repeatedly, close US airspace
What is going on here ?
pic.twitter.com/crVqQJ0KBA— Antonio Sabato Jr (@AntonioSabatoJr) February 12, 2023
First one was different
Ms. Dalton insists that there are clear differences between the first object and the later ones, which might not even be of Chinese origin. “The spy balloon from the PRC was, of course, different in that we knew precisely what was.” They can’t say the same about the rest.
“These most recent objects do not pose a kinetic military threat, but their path in proximity to sensitive DoD sites, and the altitude that they were flying could be a hazard to civilian aviation and thus raised concerns.”
While some are positively identifying the new sightings as balloons, there are conflicting reports. One official told CNN that “there has been caution inside the Biden administration on the pilot descriptions of the unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Canada due to the circumstances in which the objects were viewed.”
UPDATE: An F-16 "fired an AIM9x to successfully shoot down an airborne object" that had been flying some 20,000 feet over Lake Huron following direction from President Biden, NORAD said
https://t.co/IS69ksWrWN— Axios (@axios) February 14, 2023
That sounds sort of spooky because balloons are pretty easy to identify from just about any angle. They won’t know if whatever they are is Chinese until they analyze some wreckage.
One of the things that’s confusing the issue is that before the first big Chinese balloon came wafting overhead, we really weren’t looking for them. Or anything else at that altitude. As soon as we started looking, we started finding. “NORAD command recently readjusted its filters to better spot slow-moving targets operating above a certain altitude.”
Now they’re hiding from congressional investigators until they can get a story straight. “In light of the People’s Republic of China balloon that we took down last Saturday, we have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we detected over the past week,” Dalton hedges.
