Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Tyler Thompson/U.S. Navy.
Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recovered a high-altitude surveillance balloon on February 5, 2023, off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
U.S. fighter aircraft engaged and destroyed the balloon at the order of President Joe Biden, and with the full support of the Canadian Government.
Or so I’ve read. Apparently, it was a rather large balloon.
I’m not sure why the Canadian government was involved in an event off the coast of South Carolina, but maybe that’s a good thing to have another English-speaking government on board, when you are shooting down Chinese balloons.
The hard-working politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would require U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials “to report to Congress their work with allies deterring Chinese surveillance aircraft and to provide a classified briefing on any airborne spying over the U.S.”
All eight House members of Colorado’s congressional delegation, Republicans and Democrats, voted in favor of the measure. So we are seeing a bit of bipartisan collaboration, for a change.
Where balloons are involved.
Guns? That’s a different matter. But balloons, we can agree on.
I doubt the politicians were working as hard as the sailors who had to gather wet balloon pieces in the middle of winter. The Atlantic Ocean is not that warm in February.
One of my favorite carnival booths at the County Fair was the one where you throw darts at inflated balloons. As I recall, they gave you five or six darts, and the trick was to pop a balloon with every dart, and then you won a stuffed animal. I never did win the stuffed animal, but the satisfying sound of a balloon popping (on the rare occasion I hit one) kept me coming back again and again.
I can barely imagine how the U.S. fighter pilots felt, shooting down a 200-foot diameter balloon.
The news reports didn’t say anything about stuffed animals.
The balloon belonged to the People’s Republic of China, and news reports suggest the incident caused a rift in U.S.- China relations, which were not that great in the first place. Whether the rift was caused mainly by China allowing a balloon to (accidentally or intentionally) float across the North American continent, or if it was caused by U.S. fighter aircraft (accidentally or intentionally) shooting it down, I can’t say.
In response to an NBC News report that the balloon was able to transmit data back to Beijing in real time, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh on April 3 said, “I wouldn’t be able to say that they were able to transmit back to Beijing … I just don’t have that type of information at this point.” So don’t believe everything you hear on NBC News.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has authority to spy on at least 193 independent countries around the world. Which is, like, practically every country, including China. We can assume they are using spy satellites.
Considering that Google can deliver me a satellite photo showing the flowers in my back yard, I feel sorry for the Chinese if they are still using balloons to spy on us.