JONATHAN PAE — On Saturday, February 5, local residents spotted a large balloon off the coast of South Carolina. But this was no ordinary balloon: this behemoth was the size of three buses and was floating slowly toward the Atlantic Ocean at roughly 60,000 feet above the ground. When the balloon reached the water, it was shot down by an F-22 fighter jet with an air-to-air missile right off the coast of Myrtle Beach.
On Friday, February 3rd, just two days earlier, a spokesperson for the Chinese government had confirmed that the balloon was in fact theirs. According to this spokesperson, the balloon was being used for “meteorological research” and was blown far off course due to the weather. However, U.S. officials clearly do not believe this explanation; on the bottom side of the balloon sits heavy-duty surveillance equipment.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the balloon surveilling “strategic sites…[was an] unacceptable violation of our [the United States’] sovereignty.”
At this time, it is unclear why the Chinese sent their so-called “spy balloon,” what information it was collecting, or the technological abilities of their contraption. Currently, the Pentagon believes that any images captured by the spy balloon are no clearer than those produced by Chinese satellites.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy divers are now trying to recover the debris in hopes of figuring out what information the balloon was gathering and storing. The one outstanding obstacle, according to the New York Times, is the cold waters, but the Pentagon is confident the balloon will be easily salvageable because of the low depth of the water in which it sits. In fact, just today, on February 14, the U.S. military recovered some parts of the balloon. No explosive or harmful devices were found in the debris collected so far, although some parts of the balloon have yet to be collected from the seabed.
As this investigation has progressed, some people, specifically Republicans on Capitol Hill, have raised the question of why President Biden allowed the spy balloon to travel all the way across continental America before giving the command to shoot it down. They claim that it should have been shot down earlier in order to prevent further intel from being gathered.
Additional reports over the past two weeks have also revealed that multiple balloons were sighted and that other unidentified objects have been shot down. Specifically, on February 6, China admitted that a balloon spotted over Latin America was theirs, while nevertheless sticking to the same story of weather research. There are even reports of balloon sightings in Japan from 2019 and in Hawaii from 2021. Moreover, the U.S. air force also shot down three unidentified objects from February 10th to February 12th. While the country of origin of these objects remains unclear, it was concluded during a classified meeting with top officials that they are not “immediate threat[s]” to Americans.
For its part, China claims that the U.S. has also sent many balloons over their airspace as well in the past two years. The U.S. National Security Council and Secretary of State Antony Blinken deny all of these allegations.
What does this mean for U.S.-China relations? Understandably, foreign relations between these two countries have become even more strained. Back in November of 2022, Secretary Blinken was supposed to travel to Beijing in hopes of smoothing out relations, but once the balloon appeared, this meeting was called off by the U.S. government. The U.S. has since put sanctions on some of the Chinese companies that are involved in aerospace surveillance. Also, they have briefed diplomats from 40 countries about the spy balloon. Additionally, the House of Representatives has passed a “unanimous” resolution “condemning” these Chinese balloons.
However, regardless of these tensions, both the United States and China still seem to want to cooperate with each other and are working to reschedule the meeting in Beijing. So far, there are so many questions that it is hard to discern the truth from fiction and without further investigation, the full story will remain unclear.
The Dutch Report 