Originally published at: Video of the suspected Chinese spy balloon (aka "civilian airship") floating over Montana | Boing Boing
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I’m sure this is common knowledge to people who know these things but what happened to “secret” ballistic missile silos?
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Some friends from Costa Rica told me they had the same balloons over their country on the same day: ¿Qué son estos objetos divisados en el cielo nacional? Esto dicen los expertos
They still don’t know who sent those up, their weather service and their FAA don’t have a clue.
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They’re trying to steal the secrets of our elite rural circuses.
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Now is the time to get the chalk spreaders they use to mark out lines on football fields and start drawing … creative things for the Chinese intelligence community to look at. Like Winnie the Pooh. And peens. Lots and lots of peens.
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I am impressed that China has some magical technology that is able to control the directions of a spy/weather ballon.
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Where are the Jewish Space Lasers when you need them?
Frankly, if any national secrets are visible from space, somebody isn’t doing their job.
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If they’re doing signals intelligence they’re collecting date from a pretty wide corridor, so pinpoint accuracy isn’t necessary. Knowledge of prevailing winds is enough to chart a rough course controlled only by the point of release and altitude control.
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If they were clever, they’d make it look like a frozen guy in a lawnchair.
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The “we don’t want to shoot it down, it might hurt someone” excuse seems a little dubious.
Presumably the concern isn’t so much with the balloon and its payload as the munitions fired by whatever aircraft gets sent up to deal with it. Still, there’s an awful lot of empty space in the US. If you pick the intercept point carefully, I’d bet that the odds against falling shells intersecting anything or anyone important would be vanishingly small.
It also occurs to me that shooting down Chinese surveillance balloons safely may be a skill that we might want to practice in the coming years.
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As opposed to anyone not important?
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USAF is busy uploading a virus through the balloon, and it’s a damned slow connection.
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“Food Factory?”
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For administrative purposes, the phrase “anyone important” should be read as “anyone with a lawyer”.
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If this really is a Chinese spy balloon (I have no idea), I think its purpose would be more provocation than gathering useful information. “Hey we can send a balloon over your territory, what are you going to do about it?” China does this with flyovers of Taiwan all the time.
I have no idea if this has any connection or not, but Japan, in WWII, did try some attacks on the US mainland with fire balloons. Very ineffective but they did cause a few deaths in the US.
I remain skeptical about what these balloons (are they even Chinese?) until more information is released about them.
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I honestly have to wonder if someone told her about Mama Dolce’s Food Processing and she didn’t understand that Fallout is a dark-humored satire rather than a news source.
That’s literally the only other instance of sinister Chinese food factories I’ve ever heard of.
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The Chinese government says that it is a weather balloon, which is an admission that it is Chinese.
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speaking of loon, it’s interesting that it looks so different than loon; which also used long duration steerable balloons. i wonder why 
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I read “we don’t want to shoot it down, it might hurt someone” to mean
“We’re looking at the data stream it’s sending back, and don’t want to stop because getting this information about how China operates their signals intelligence (on US emissions) is quite useful”
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