Chinese Weather Balloons, and Should You Worry About Them?

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patbunn said:
I wouldn't exactly call what a newspaper said "facts" This thing is easily seen by the public and the DOD did not announce it until public outcry asking what is it, demanded them to. I saw it this morning and it is a large object and is easily seen. No others have been reported by the public in the past years.. There is no way an object like this has flown over the US in the past with no detection by the public.
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Just playing devils advocate here, why do you think that previous balloons passed over the continental US? I can definitely see a scenario where the previous ones were shot down either at the 12-mile limit offshore or over rural Alaska. This time they let it go because they wanted more data about it. They already established that we let it keep flying because whatever it picked up was deemed to be no worse than what it could see from satellites.
 
That huge amount of fabric seems to be making a good steamer. Wonder what the descent rate actually is.
Let's see how quickly they get it "recovered"...

Edit: After seeing better video of the "popping". It looks like the main payload disconnected from the balloon, and free fell. (News is still showing the Balloon, BUT the important parts, gave already crashed into ocean.)
 
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My brother in law just seen two jet fighters flying over his house and just watch them blow up the balloon. He lives in South Carolina about a half hour ago.
 
My brother in law just sent pictures of the jets shooting down the balloon. He watched the whole thing from his house through binoculars. He lives in South Carolina. They shot it down over Surf Side Beach. The pictures he took look cool with the jets firing their rockets at it.
 
I'm okay with it on our end. I am sure they looked at radio spectrum from it. Then they were jamming much of any transmissions from it. They don't know what type of "stuff" was in the payload section. Waiting till it cleared the Atlantic coastline, then shooting it down was a good idea. Now let's give it a few days for the "specialists" to determine what kind of "weather data" was being collected.

If it's full of ozone, and temperature sensors, we say "here you go", "don't do that again"and hand it back. If it's full of radio receivers and cameras, and data collection stuff, it will be "confirmed" in the State of the Union speech...

I think it is more embarrassing to China. Of course their state media will not let info be known to people in China.
 
I hope they recover enough of it to know for sure what was going on. I also hope it turns out to really only be weather stuff and there not be anything nefarious. Not sure we'll ever really know the truth, though.

Sandy.
 
Not very confident in our safety as an American, that's for sure. To be fair, Americans funded much of China's growth so we deserve whatever we get from that Country.
 
bobby_hamill said:
It was in ground mode while flying ?
I could see the icon moving from VA/NC border to Tarboro NC
It is south of Orangeburg Sc and still in ground mode
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I think so, i saw it go by SJAFB an it was black, even the trail was black, when i usually see aircraft on the ground with it toggled off they are usually gray.
 
jderimig said:
What an embarrassment.
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What's an embarrassment? We reacted with restraint and reasoned logic. The President acted in accordance with guidance from those closest to the threat assessment and the military carried out the task without incident. Shame on China, but the US handled this well.
 
Marc_G said:
What's an embarrassment? We reacted with restraint and reasoned logic. The President acted in accordance with guidance from those closest to the threat assessment and the military carried out the task without incident. Shame on China, but the US handled this well.
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Weak.
 
So... Rather than use a single inert 20mm round from an F-18 to puncture the balloon and recover the payload, our Military scrambled an F-22 and used a $1M air-to-air missile to obliterate it. Not only a ridiculously unnecessary expense, the explosion and shrapnel from the missile most certainly destroyed the payload. Nothing to recover and examine. Hundreds or thousands of pieces now scattered on the sea floor. Something is very, very off with this whole sequence of events.

From a reply on Fox news…. Not my words
 

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