Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?

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We just shot down another object in Alaska that is a UFO until we identify it. I wonder is this is another spy plane or balloon.
 
NateB said:
From the limited information available, my guess is the altitude. If it is at 40,000', it would be in the path of some jetliners.
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Not a lot of jetliners near the location. There are some though. 40K is around the sweet spot for airliners and cargo haulers so that seems like a plausible excuse. I suspect there is more to the story when it comes to the "why". Clearly I'm suspect of how the last balloon was handled but mostly embarrassed by the way it was handled.
 
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cwbullet said:
I still wonder if this is a ploy to cover the poor prior decision.
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There is geopolitical value in that for both sides. Based on what Kirby briefed, I'd say the US was a little more "spring loaded" to aggressively counter any future events after their last showing. At the same time, China can introduce doubt on any public statements on the first balloon by putting a legitimate weather balloon in the mix.

There are specific procedures a country must follow when flying state sponsored aircraft into US airspace. State sponsored is anything that is not a commercial airliner/cargo hauler. They have their own system. I led the team that established the US Executive Agent for Foreign Clearance for the DoD. It is/was led by the Air Force and established in 2010. Any aircraft flying in US airspace "pre-announced" before coming into the area. That included weather balloons.
 
Matt_The_RocketMan said:
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Again with the standard measurements used, "3 buses long" " 1 car length" might as well use boats, and trucks...

Actually speaking of standard measurements they should use trailers as a measurement, why? Trailers actually are quite specific most of them used by trucking companies are 53' long and 13'8" tall and as a country that uses millions of them I think people can get the jest that length is around 53 feet...

Buses and cars vary in length and is rather confusing to use, there really isnt a standard bus length from what i learned in school lol
 
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See I told you so:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/eurasi...h-altitude-balloons-for-deploying-hypersonic/
Notice they say a small emp nuclear blast from 80k ft would turn the US back to 1870. Sure some hardened military sites would survive. But are you going to launch your nukes just because China or Iran took down the power grid? Well maybe Iran.
I want you to imagine a US with no electricity especially in all the urban areas. Things would get really interesting really fast.
 
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Not a conspiracy theorist, but I am really surprised that our radar would miss a school bus sized item. Hopefully, they will tell us more. I guess it must have had a lot of carbon fiber and plastic and very little metal.
 
cwbullet said:
Not a conspiracy theorist, but I am really surprised that our radar would miss a school bus sized item. Hopefully, they will tell us more. I guess it must have had a lot of carbon fiber and plastic and very little metal.
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Probably not. Radars are run through a computer. The computer decides what's important, based on pre-set inputs regarding such things as size, velocity, altitude, etc. A high, slow moving object may have been "seen" by the radars, but did not trigger a warning because of low velocity. If you don't have these parameters set, every flock of birds will trigger a warning.
 
Sooner Boomer said:
Probably not. Radars are run through a computer. The computer decides what's important, based on pre-set inputs regarding such things as size, velocity, altitude, etc. A high, slow moving object may have been "seen" by the radars, but did not trigger a warning because of low velocity. If you don't have these parameters set, every flock of birds will trigger a warning.
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Sounds like a human error then. We programmed it wrong so it is our fault.
 
When they released Red Dawn, I would have never imagined that the biggest threat to the US mainland would be an unmanned drone baloon.
 
Through out the 80s in AK, AK Air Command and the 21 TFW regularly encountered “air anomalies”. Believe it or not AK has volcanos. They made for strange atmosphere effects. We had northern lights. Mountains that change color. Not only that, the USAF regularly chased USSR out of “debatable” air space. And they did it to us. Real life cat and mouse. I had been in briefings with piolots talking about locking on and being locked on. I don’t know how they handled it. I guarantee you - nothing - going over “Top Cover For The World” goes undetected since the 1970s. And the technology just keeps getting better.

So ask yourself: Why now are we being informed of all these over AK (or anywhere else) balloons?
 
cls said:
Except for the recovered signals equipment...
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Yes, but...China will just say its a fake pictures and the US is lying. You get shown a picture of a waterlogged bent up box and some circuit boards and clearly all of the Americans will go; "Oh, yes, I see the sensitive signal processing units, digital picture processors, Satellite transmitters...and receivers and GPS unit." Especially the ones from Cleveland. It'd be like looking into their dust clogged desktops. "Now where is that spinny, whirlly thing that keeps all my pictures from grandma?" Some will get it, most won't. No, all they have to do is introduce some doubt and half the country will believe them...
 
So somebody that knows me (must be from this forum) sent me an email. All it said was “source”. I cannot “source” my security clearance, obviously. And Im sure it was decertified upon my discharge. Actually one of the reasons I got out of the USAF is because my superiors wanted me to get a higher clearance. It would have required a 4 year extension because of the cost involved. I had already extended 2 years to get to AK. I have a wife and 2 daughters. I couldn’t put my family through what would become once I had another security clearance.

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Matt_The_RocketMan said:
Again with the standard measurements used, "3 buses long" " 1 car length" might as well use boats, and trucks...

Buses and cars vary in length and is rather confusing to use, there really isnt a standard bus length from what i learned in school lol
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But the VP recently declared the yellow school busses the original and universal "mass transit" vehicle for America. So, in a sense, all public school educated people know what that is. Only the people down/up at the border care about trailer lengths since American trailers aren't "standard" in other countries. It's only about what people can visualize. When you talk about shipping trailers most people think about the Amazon truck.
 
cwbullet said:
We just shot down another object in Alaska that is a UFO until we identify it. I wonder is this is another spy plane or balloon.
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Are we about to be at war with Mars?

cwbullet said:
Sounds like a human error then. We programmed it wrong so it is our fault.
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I've read that the AA guns on the Bismark were programmed for faster aircraft so they could not defend against the feeble British aircraft that disabled it with a torpedo hit.
 
Bravo52 said:
, but...China will just say its a fake pictures and the US is lying. You get shown a picture of a waterlogged bent up box
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We also have pix from U2 and high res from ground. It's undeniable.
 
bjphoenix said:
I've read that the AA guns on the Bismark were programmed for faster aircraft so they could not defend against the feeble British aircraft that disabled it with a torpedo hit.
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Ha

In the Falklands war, the Argentines sank a British ship with a (French) Exocet missile, because the Brits never expected Exocet to be used against them, so they didn't correctly set up the IFF.
 
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bjphoenix said:
Are we about to be at war with Mars?
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No, we are going to subcontract that to SpaceX. They will be the first to the FEBA. No one else will help Mars because of what Ender did. Finally, Blue Origin will protest the contract and with all the Amazon people turning in their Teslas, we'll leave a gap in Earth's defenses and no one, not one single person (except some drunk guy from Alabama), will get a clear picture of the martian ships with their 10K iPhones.
 
hobie1dog said:
on the news they interviewed a Montana politician on Capitol Hill who said "they could have shot it down over Montana, what was it going to hit, a cow?"
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The gubbermint probably would'a compensated the rancher for the cow too.

I never made it to visit Montana back in the day but made it to Colorado and Wyoming in 1965. I could'a got into that lifestyle! I bet I can still ride a horse despite being an "old man"!!! I loved it. Horses are the next desireables next to dogs and cats.

Except one walks dogs. One empties litter boxes with cats and one shovels manure with the later. (Horses)

I never kept horses but if I had the appropriate area/land, I might have in spite of the "manure" issue.

Kurt
 

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