More and more is now being known about these spy balloons from China, which until last week had been little talked about around the world. Off the coast of South Carolina, US Navy divers fish everything out of the water that belongs to the airship shot down there on Saturday. Experts are assembling the fabric and the debris to find out how this 60-meter-tall aircraft was constructed and what instruments were on board. “We’ve learned a lot about these surveillance balloons,” said Brigade General and Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder.
Suddenly the highest military circles are not only concerned with this phenomenon in the USA. Suddenly it became public that these spies from heaven have long been hovering over places around the world that are of interest to China, apparently preferring military installations. In recent years, these Chinese balloons have also been seen over Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Europe, Ryder said. Consider this part of a larger Chinese espionage program.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reports that the US has shared its findings in Washington and through its embassies with dozens of countries. “We’re doing this because the United States was not the only target of this broader program that violated the sovereignty of countries on five continents,” Blinken reported. He had canceled his trip to China because of the balloon, and now NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was a guest in Washington.
Blinking also refers to the learning effect, “we receive new information almost every hour”. China has invested heavily in its military capabilities, including surveillance and reconnaissance, in recent years, Stoltenberg said. “They use satellites, they use cyber, and as we’ve seen over the United States, balloons too.”
The Chinese island of Hainan is considered the base of the balloon fleet
The Chinese have “combined incredibly ancient technology with modern communications and observation capabilities,” a US official said Washington Post. Such balloons are therefore “equipped with electro-optical sensors or digital cameras that, depending on the resolution, can capture high-precision images”, and they can also transmit radio signals.
The clues contradict China’s claim that it was a weather balloon that went astray. If it had been for civilian purposes, Beijing would have informed early, Ryder said. However, the reports about the sophisticated technology also do not fit with the first American reassurances that such a balloon could not be heard or seen any more than with the usual satellites. Such a balloon can stay above a target much longer and closer than a satellite. According to a US official, it should be equipped with propellers and a rudder and be able to turn “like a sailboat”, according to CNN, but it mostly moves with the jet stream.
The Chinese island of Hainan is considered one of the bases of this fleet. The New York Times quoted from a 2021 article by China’s army that said balloons were “a powerful eye in the sky for low-level and surface carpet surveillance.” “In the future, balloon platforms may become, like submarines in the ocean depths, a deterrent covert killer.” In the meantime, it is said in the USA that a Chinese balloon crashed over Hawaii in June 2022.
Americans are all the more wondering why this balloon was allowed to fly for so long, including over Montana, where there are silos with nuclear missiles. Apparently, the flying object was discovered before it reached US airspace over Alaska on January 28. On February 1, President Joe Biden is said to have given the order to shoot it down as soon as safe territory was reached. The Ministry of Defense justified the late shot by saying that nobody on the ground should be endangered, so that the trajectory could be observed and material secured in the water. During the Trump administration, several of those flights went undetected, a top military official admits. “And that’s a gap we need to fill.”