“Keep looking up at that balloon!!” (Pickpocketing secrets.)
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How does one even detect a balloon in the air?
I don’t think our tech is THAT good.
And they can’t find a missing plane?!
The comments to Coke Jr. in the twitter thread are comedy gold.
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It’s not ONLY a balloon. And, I’m guessing it’s a pretty fricken big balloon to hold its payload.
Supposedly the size of 3 large buses.
Being in Montana there’s surely somewhere unpopulated in its path you could shoot it down. There’s only like 50 people that live in the whole state
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I’ve read somewhere that they likely are using more sophisticated ways. They’re not collecting information from the balloon, they’re collecting information about the response to the balloon, like where the jets were scrambled from, how soon the balloon was detected, etc.
Perhaps a balloon is the least aggressive way to measure all sorts of ‘how the US responds to a threat’. If they flew a plane overhead the response would’ve included a lot more aggressive response from the US including I suspect all sorts of diplomatic hairballs.
Bruce Willis is still alive. They should just land him on the balloon and have him deflate it and bring it down.
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There’s someone else who just became available and is very good at that sort of thing.
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So there’s another 97 out there?
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Most folks here aren’t old enough to remember when Gary Francis Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. It was huge news at the time and created an international incident. Paris Summit was postponed.
The US initially claimed Powers’ U-2 was engaged in weather surveillance and that Powers had blacked out and his plane had drifted accidentally into Soviet air space. That laughable claim was eventually reversed and it was admitted he was spying.
I wasn’t born for that one. I do remember this incident well though, and I imagine others do too
I don’t know . . . when satellites can target a 10m^2 area visually . . . it’s not difficult to detect (and track) any moving objects that are at higher altitudes.
IIRC, it was right around the time that Red Dawn (the original) came out.
Gary Francis Power was shot down in 1960. I remember his name well as the elementary school teacher in our one-room schoolhouse had a 15 minute “current events” roundup to start every school day and we talked about Powers several times as more details came out.
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That was fairly predictable.
Hopefully that shuts up the Fox News critics.
Wrong again; the criticism continues.
Why am I not surprised that the Fox headline is misleading?
I’m concerned that it took days to do anything too… so the Chinese can send spy balloons to spy on the whole of the country and we won’t bother to do anything about it until they wander over the ocean?
That said, I’m not sure what other options existed. It’s alarming, but I certainly can’t say that the administration erred.