I stand corrected: the Chinese spy balloon wasn’t launched from Central China but from its base in Hainan Island in the South China Sea. And our defense personnel tracked it for nearly a week—and did nothing. We could have shot it down before it entered US airspace but chose not to for some reason. When it hovered above populated areas, I could see the point: the balloon and the surveillance devices were the lengths of three buses. Falling debris could have been fatal to civilians. Also, I’m sure the military wanted an exclusion zone to recover any retrievable intelligence from the device (via WaPo):
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 near China’s south coast, an earlier sighting of the balloon than has been previously known.
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 their 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.
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Who accidentally launches a spy balloon? An authoritarian regime seldom has incidents that can be passed off as mere coincidence in this area.
It circles back to why the Biden administration allowed a spy balloon that we tracked from its launch site, a new development, to enter US airspace. There seem to have been many opportunities to down this device thousands of miles from the homeland. The “awareness” gap NORAD mentioned as a reason for the breach isn’t comforting. Still, this administration's lack of urgency is exhibited, which always seems a step or two behind the curve.
With another incident of gross incompetence staring at them in the face, the Biden spin is that the Trump administration was equally bad at tracking spy balloons and that some penetrated US airspace under his presidency. The issue is that Trump didn’t do anything because he wasn’t told. And if that’s the case, then the brass and others at the Pentagon intentionally kept their commander-in-chief in the dark about security matters. That’s also not an excuse.
We’ve had three UFO incidents since the conclusion of balloon-gate, where we’ve downed all three objects. It’s proof that we certainly could down the spy balloon well before residents of Montana and passengers on a commercial airliner spotted the device.
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