Chinese Spy Balloon
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@Jolly said in Chinese Spy Balloon:
We can detect them
Why not tell Mr. Trump?
Maybe because it is cleaner, there might have been a lower probability of hitting the electronics.
The Chinese told Mr. Biden they wanted spy data right up to the coastline, so he earned his pay. Also, they wanted to retrieve the data via submarine. -
@George-K said in Chinese Spy Balloon:
How does that happen?
"We know it happened, but we didn't know it happened at the time."
One could image seeing a balloon, seeing signs in certain radar (or similar) data correlating with its path, then going back and seeing similar patterns in past data, thus concluding that there were previous balloon visits in the past that went unrecognized.
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Nice to know that we're not alone:
American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of a global surveillance effort that is designed to collect information on the military capabilities of countries around the world, according to three American officials.
The balloon flights, some officials believe, are part of an effort by China to hone its ability to gather data about American military bases — in which it is most interested — as well as those of other nations in the event of a conflict or rising tensions. U.S. officials said this week that the balloon program has operated out of multiple locations in China.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Brig Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said that over the past several years Chinese balloons have been spotted operating over Latin America, South America, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Europe.
“This is what we assess as part of a larger Chinese surveillance balloon program,” General Ryder said.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said at another news conference in Washington that the State Department has shared information on the spy balloon program with dozens of countries, both in meetings in Washington and through U.S. embassies abroad.“We’re doing so because the United States was not the only target of this broader program, which has violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents,” he said.
The balloons have some advantages over the satellites that orbit the earth in regular patterns, U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, say. They fly closer to earth and drift with wind patterns, which are not as predictable to militaries and intelligence agencies as the fixed orbits of satellites, and they can evade radar. They can also hover over areas while satellites are generally in constant motion. Simple cameras on balloons can produce clearer images than those on orbital satellites, and other surveillance equipment can pick up signals that do not reach the altitude of satellites.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported details about the surveillance program, including that it had operated partly out of the main island of Hainan Province off China’s south coast.
China’s military modernization has been driven by the conviction that the People’s Liberation Army had to catch up with advanced rivals like the United States, as well as develop weapons and strategies that could give it a surprise edge. And balloons became a small but active part of that strategy.
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China’s National University of Defense Technology has a team of researchers who study advances in balloons. And as early as 2020, People’s Liberation Army Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese military, published an article describing how near space “has become a new battleground in modern warfare.” In recent years, the paper has been telling its officer readers in sometimes hyperbolic language to take balloons seriously.Balloons are “a powerful eye in the sky for covering low-altitude and surface targets,” an article in the newspaper said in 2021. “In the future balloon platforms maybe become, like submarines in the depths of the ocean, a chilling hidden killer.”
The balloons may help fill gaps in China’s network of satellites dedicated to intelligence and surveillance. Balloon collection may include data on atmospheric conditions and also communications that could not be gleaned from outer space, said John K. Culver, a former senior intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency who is now a senior fellow at the Global China Hub of the Atlantic Council.
In the United States, at least five spy balloons have been observed — three during the Trump administration and two during the Biden administration. The spy balloons observed during the Trump administration were initially classified as unidentified aerial phenomena, U.S. officials said. It was not until after 2020 that officials closely examined the balloon incidents under a broader review of aerial phenomena and determined that the incidents were part of the Chinese global balloon surveillance effort.
So, this has been going on for a long time, and we're learning about it now because someone one Montana happened to get a photo of it?
And...no one expressed any concern?
Dafuq?
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US-China hotline goes unanswered
Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.
But Austin’s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.
China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action had “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/biden-ufo-shot-down-michigan-flying-objects
‘Significant’ debris from China spy balloon retrieved, says US military
Sensors and electronics pulled from waters off South Carolina,... -
@George-K said in Chinese Spy Balloon:
US-China hotline goes unanswered
Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.
But Austin’s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.
China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action had “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday.
The Chinese are pushing, to see how far they can go and to see what our response is.
I think it's time for economic warfare, fought as smart as we can. That involves protection of strategic assets, by both bringing production back to the U.S and using other trading partners.
I also think it is time to help Japan ramp up its defense forces and to further harden Taiwan.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Chinese Spy Balloon:
"Just going to say that it's a real bad time to be a hot air balloon enthusiast right now."
Not necessarily. Hot air balloon rises to about 3,000 ft. above sea level. A blimp may go up to about 7,000 ft. above sea level.
The “objects” shot down were over 20,000 ft. above sea level.
NORAD should have no problem recognizing civilian hot air balloons and blimps as such. -
The US watched it take off, and tracked it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/14/china-spy-balloon-path-tracking-weather/
By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.
U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam. But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S. officials, who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with its airborne surveillance device.
The balloon floated over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands thousands of miles away from Guam, then drifted over Canada, where it encountered strong winds that appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. A U.S. fighter jet shot the balloon down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, a week after it crossed over Alaska.
U.S. intelligence and military agencies tracked the balloon as it launched from Hainan Island. Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental, but are confident it was intended for surveillance, most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific. Either way the incursion into U.S. airspace was a major misstep by the PLA, prompting a political and diplomatic furor and deeper scrutiny by the United States and its allies of Beijing’s aerial espionage capabilities.
Its crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and its hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident, officials said, raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland, Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence.
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I think everyone should just calm down about these balloons. There is really nothing new here that NORAD did not already have on its radar or under control.
A little background that if you take the time and effort to read will put a lot things about this and other past mysteries/alleged conspiracies and extra-terrestrial alien encounters in their proper light and perspective:
“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@Renauda said in Chinese Spy Balloon:
I think everyone should just calm down about these balloons.
Well these guys are not happy:
A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.
The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.
But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.
There are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts’ community, which combines ham radio and high-altitude ballooning into a single, relatively affordable hobby.
“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
