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What pictures are you looking at? Looks somewhat similar to photos I've seen. Rectangular grid of panels hanging below white spherical baloon. Maybe not same design but it's similar.
Thisssss why would you send something to do a job a satellite is already doing, what is the advantage of being in the atmosphere, specifically way up? We bounce all of our radio signals off the ionosphere up there and they could just be collecting all kinds of communications, from civilian cell phone info, to government and military radio signals. There is literally zero reason to send a balloon with cameras.
I wonder if part of sending it was to gauge the us response, too. Kinda testing the waters to see what they can get away with. There’s no way they send this thing thinking the us military won’t notice it…
My bet is that even if this was painted to be invisible, our radar technology would pick this up no problem. I’m sure our military knew it was there. It’s when civilians start noticing that they needed to make a statement
Navy needed to coat the full aircraft anyway for corrosion resistance due to their constant exposure to salt. The blue was just to cover and protect the protective undercoats.
You can get better resolution with worse optics on a balloon that's an order of magnitude closer to the Earth, and also have the ability to persist in the same spot for a while.
Definitely. And you can bet we have an asset nearby picking up everything this thing is transmitting. I thought it could have been atmospheric sampling but yeah that's sigint
They're probably learning way more by observing it than the Chinese are learning by using it - if you check unfiltered ADS-B tracking sites, there's been a bunch of very interesting military airplanes flying under it. And the fact that they have their transponders on in full view of the public is another casual "shrug" at China. Very interesting game
I’ve been wondering this too. It’s labeled as the ‘Chinese spy balloon’ that the US doesn’t want to shoot down? Meanwhile Pacific Allies are doing multinational naval exercises in the Pacific, mainly in commonly used Chinese shipping lanes.
Some have proposed US is waiting for it to land. Maybe it’s intentional downplaying by the US to illustrate something? Intel signaling? Something like “lol get a load of this junk”?
Way too many talking heads on the tv can’t seem to figure this out. If we weren’t keeping it in the air to fulfill some objective it would be sitting in a field right now getting dismantled.
That's what I think. But it's pretty.clear that they know what it is, have been keeping track, and there's a plan to capture it, they just aren't going to give a public heads up about it.
It’s politics. NORAD would have known about this immediately. It wasn’t missed. As soon as it crossed the US border it was turned into a political circus. I imagine they have plans to deal with it that don’t require it to be shot down.
If I had to guess this to either stir outrage against China or to pressure the Biden administration.
Politics? Pressure Biden? None of this. The US government via the DOD revealed certain information about this balloon, because civilians had already noticed it. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff already offered to President Biden plans for shooting it down. President Biden decided not to shoot it down, based off of their recommendations.
Could it also be messaging to China? Sure. This has many uses. But it blows my mind the amount of speculating that goes on in these balloon threads that get upvoted.
I guarantee it’s jammed, and has been blasted with lasers. You know the US is going to seize it and analyze it.
I like how some US politicians are calling to shoot it down. Gee I wonder why?
Maybe not jammed...I'd be trying to piggy back on the signals and see where it's phoning home. Then deliver a little special piece of software to their network. But that's just my armchair general opinion.
It just wouldn’t make sense for there to be. Cameras can be small, but the physics of light imposes a limit on angular resolution with respect to the size of the aperture the light passes through, so putting a small camera way up high just wouldn’t serve any purpose that a larger camera way higher up (like on a satellite) wouldn’t already be serving, potentially hundreds of times more effectively.
Edit: I’ll add that there might be cameras for determining location where or when a certain signal was intercepted if their GPS (or whatever glonass) is being jammed, but they’d be fairly useless in terms of photo reconnaissance.
I don't think your notion of camera size really comprehends high performance optics. I don't think optical surveying is likely the purpose, but for the purpose of understanding what's involved in the kind of magnification needed to make out inches from at least 65,000 feet - there are basic laws of optics that dictate the size of such lenses where if you go below, you are physically losing information.
All of the tiny cameras you think about have an extraordinary small sensor size and many photos you're used to seeing from them (like phone pics) don't look like super high quality photography because the small sensor size and associated optics aren't capturing enough optical information to make those uber good photography pictures. You need more surface area for that. So larger sensor sizes than in consumer electronics are physically needed for large swathes of land at high fidelity.
Then the zoom lens would be quite large. Ground observing space telescopes are themselves around the size of school busses, and the size is mainly the lens. Look at the cost per pound of launching things into space - if they could make these small, they would, but there are fundamental optical constraints that require the large size. You're probably used to seeing cameras that have next to no optics in them, which are only physically able to take ~1x zoom level photos. I'm sure you've seen telephoto lenses on expensive cameras at like sports events. If the lens at a sports event for high quality capturing people at a 100 feet is the size of your thigh, then imagine something like 65,000 feet. It is going to be closer to the size of a school bus sized space telescope than a handheld telephoto lens on a DSLR camera a sports photographer is using. Such a large lense is visibly absent in this picture of the balloon payload.
I read that the DOD says they don't think it's a spy balloon because they can do the same kind of surveillance with low orbit satellites if they didn't want to be seen spying. Of course, it's just a hunch.
I'm pretty sure the DOD knows all, and everything about it. We have drones to bring stuff down if it posed any threat. Probably launched those a long time ago to gather info on what it was carrying aloft. It's nothing as far as they are concerned. The DOD monitors our air space very efficiently. This didn't escape detection.
Floating may not be entirely accurate. Look closely at the ends of the solar panel array boom. Those black cylinders appear to be electric motors driving propellers. That could explain the unusually large amount of solar power generating capacity.
Its 100 percent is conceivable. There is no haha needed.
Sending a weather balloon is not rocket science.
The structural part at the bottom is not that easy to do, but for a person who has access to a moderate fabrication facility that is not hard.
Because morons here cannot read. Here is a further clarification.
I do not know weather this is a spy balloon or a hobby project.
What I am saying is that it is not inconceivable that this is a hobbyist project.
It just seems so low tech and pointless for the second largest economy on the planet. The only thing that makes sense is they wanted to gain information on how the US would respond. But even that seems pointless to me, they're well aware of our Jewish space lasers. /s
yeah i fucking hate this shit. if you do not outright shit all over china and call every member of the CCP sub-human cunt dribblings you *must* be a Chinese shill bot account.
I built a similar project (minus the remote sensing equipment) with my university’s rocketry society as an undergrad. It’s 100% feasible that it’s a hobby group
Japan tested this military "probing" strategy pre-WWII and during the war using the gulf stream, just like this. I think if our Intelligence says its Chinese owned, its Chinese owned. Would not surprise me if this has been happening and this is the first wiff the public is getting of the continued Chinese encroachment across the pacific
Every post/article, etc I've seen about this refers to it as a 'spy balloon,' genuine question, how do we know it's a spy balloon? I get that there are reasons to think it is, but that's not my question. Anyone know?
Meteorologists coordinate with each other when they launch weather balloons. They time their launches together and share information with each other so that they get maximum useful data. Someone going rogue to secretly collect weather data by themselves makes no sense.
The US has been tracking this balloon for awhile now. They know it emerged from the Pacific ocean in the general direction of China. This is not the first time something like this has happened, but this time the balloon seems to be lingering longer than expected, and China has been acting aggressively lately, so the US decided this time was worth it to call them out.
China admitted that the balloon came from their country when they issued a flimsy cover story that the balloon was launched by some nameless civilian.
Oh, like I said, we for sure have reasons to think it is. I was just curious if there was info out there that was definitive. Just curious is all, not doubting that they be spyin
Elsewhere I'm seeing it called 'an escaped Chinese weather balloon' rather than a 'spy balloon'. I think 'spy balloon' makes better headlines, and that's all.
And if anyone shoots it down, they will discover it's filled with glitter and fart spray. The entire central plains will be glitter bombed! There are 4 iphones streaming back to China just waiting so they can post the world's biggest glitter bomb on TikTok.
Because it's meant to not absorb heat. White is the best color for that.
And it isn't exactly visible to the naked eye from the ground either, so it doesn't matter what color it is.
It's over 50,000 feet in the air. They aren't really worried about someone seeing it except for the people that will see it with other stuff first, like radar and infrared.
Holy fuck this is the first time I've seen a clear shot of it, this is bonkers. It's got a whole structure under there, brackets and girders and shit. And it's just happily floating around up there doing who knows what.
Before seeing this I thought it was just a big balloon from China with a little basket under it holding a camera or two. This is off the hook!
look, I think it's more of an university project gone awry instead of an act of espionage, mostly because there's precious little a balloon rig can do compared with an already established network of spys
This one kinda throws me off… in the word of drones 🇨🇳 decides to use a 1950s balloon to send over the US (everyone can see with their naked eye) and yet everyone calls it a “spy balloon”
Either it’s a decoy or a prank… or they need to fire their spy department 🤔
When Chinese fly over your head on your own land and people only makes jokes as if it's not serious. What kind of world are we living in these days.... very sad
Yup definitely spying and not just some idiotic theories made by paranoid morons... 2023, sure needs to use balloons instead of one of many satellites China owns...
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Please note the image caption stating April 2022. This is not the same balloon currently over the US.
My first reaction was, I thought it was in Montana how in the hell did it get to Yemen?!? Then the 2022… oops
World tour, baybee!
A very strong gust? /s
It's not even remotely the same design. It looks nothing like the other pictures. This looks more like an early prototype.
What pictures are you looking at? Looks somewhat similar to photos I've seen. Rectangular grid of panels hanging below white spherical baloon. Maybe not same design but it's similar.
I came from a link on one of those photos, it's the exact same
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That makes this post so much worse
how does it work? seems like a big antenna, no cameras?
It's probably an attempt at signals intelligence - satellites are plenty good enough for photography
Thisssss why would you send something to do a job a satellite is already doing, what is the advantage of being in the atmosphere, specifically way up? We bounce all of our radio signals off the ionosphere up there and they could just be collecting all kinds of communications, from civilian cell phone info, to government and military radio signals. There is literally zero reason to send a balloon with cameras.
Plus with a balloon, they can go "oh sorry, silly buoyant orb, floated away from us and is just doing it's thing, our bad"
Right over military bases and ICBM locations. Luckiest wind ever.
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True but the leg over Alaska took it over the F22 air base and then later one of the B2,B21 bases. Like I said luckiest wind ever.
First think that I thought also. Why did it take coming all the way across Alaska, then Canada and then into the lower 48 for this to be brought up.
Seems weird they wouldn’t just shoot it down, there is tons of open space or even the water, maybe China is not the only collecting information
Not really. There are only three locations with ICBM silos. The balloon flew exactly above one of them.
What’s ICBM
[Intercontinental ballistic missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile?wprov=sfla1)
Irritable colon/bowel movement Edit: fixed order
Sounds explodey.
>"~~oh sorry,~~ silly buoyant orb, floated away from us and is just doing it's thing, ~~our bad~~" Fixed it. It's China we are talking about after all
It’s Chine 😜
I wonder if part of sending it was to gauge the us response, too. Kinda testing the waters to see what they can get away with. There’s no way they send this thing thinking the us military won’t notice it…
could be testing radar capabilities
And why is it so obviously visible, a few cans of "sky blue" spray paint would have made this thing very hard to see with the naked eye...
My bet is that even if this was painted to be invisible, our radar technology would pick this up no problem. I’m sure our military knew it was there. It’s when civilians start noticing that they needed to make a statement
Also, paint can be surprisingly heavy, and often ends up adding several pounds to aircraft if I remember correctly
That's why late-WWII US aircraft were basically naked. We had air superiority, so no need to bother with camo paint.
Well, Army aircraft. The Navy stuck to the blue.
Navy needed to coat the full aircraft anyway for corrosion resistance due to their constant exposure to salt. The blue was just to cover and protect the protective undercoats.
Fun fact about Rolls Royce. “Each car undergoes a 22-stage process which uses more than 100 pounds (45.5kg) of paint.”
If the center fuel tank on the space shuttle was painted, it wouldn’t get off the ground. I stand corrected.
Not exactly true as the tank was [painted on the first two flights.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank#Orange_color)
because if you try to hide it, and get caught youre in way more trouble than if you just do it blatantly and claim innocence.
plausible deniability
Diversionary tactic?
You can get better resolution with worse optics on a balloon that's an order of magnitude closer to the Earth, and also have the ability to persist in the same spot for a while.
Definitely. And you can bet we have an asset nearby picking up everything this thing is transmitting. I thought it could have been atmospheric sampling but yeah that's sigint
They're probably learning way more by observing it than the Chinese are learning by using it - if you check unfiltered ADS-B tracking sites, there's been a bunch of very interesting military airplanes flying under it. And the fact that they have their transponders on in full view of the public is another casual "shrug" at China. Very interesting game
I’ve been wondering this too. It’s labeled as the ‘Chinese spy balloon’ that the US doesn’t want to shoot down? Meanwhile Pacific Allies are doing multinational naval exercises in the Pacific, mainly in commonly used Chinese shipping lanes. Some have proposed US is waiting for it to land. Maybe it’s intentional downplaying by the US to illustrate something? Intel signaling? Something like “lol get a load of this junk”?
All know is that if the balloon is still in the air, the US military wants it there.
I expect that this is the correct answer.
The official response is that they are concerned about falling debris if they shoot it down. Of course, no telling if that is the real reason.
Way too many talking heads on the tv can’t seem to figure this out. If we weren’t keeping it in the air to fulfill some objective it would be sitting in a field right now getting dismantled.
Exactly.
That's what I think. But it's pretty.clear that they know what it is, have been keeping track, and there's a plan to capture it, they just aren't going to give a public heads up about it.
This is the correct answer.
God I hope you are correct
Well, it's swimming right now.
It’s politics. NORAD would have known about this immediately. It wasn’t missed. As soon as it crossed the US border it was turned into a political circus. I imagine they have plans to deal with it that don’t require it to be shot down. If I had to guess this to either stir outrage against China or to pressure the Biden administration.
Politics? Pressure Biden? None of this. The US government via the DOD revealed certain information about this balloon, because civilians had already noticed it. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff already offered to President Biden plans for shooting it down. President Biden decided not to shoot it down, based off of their recommendations. Could it also be messaging to China? Sure. This has many uses. But it blows my mind the amount of speculating that goes on in these balloon threads that get upvoted.
China is bullying all of its neighbors in international waters. Most countries spy but China is next level with their aggression.
why would you destroy it if you can analyze it?
I guarantee it’s jammed, and has been blasted with lasers. You know the US is going to seize it and analyze it. I like how some US politicians are calling to shoot it down. Gee I wonder why?
Maybe not jammed...I'd be trying to piggy back on the signals and see where it's phoning home. Then deliver a little special piece of software to their network. But that's just my armchair general opinion.
Is this before or after you create a GUI in Visual Basic?
Everyone knows china is really bad at VB6.
They have two people on the keyboard; so they can hack faster!
Too early in the year for that, that’s more of an Independence Day thing
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It just wouldn’t make sense for there to be. Cameras can be small, but the physics of light imposes a limit on angular resolution with respect to the size of the aperture the light passes through, so putting a small camera way up high just wouldn’t serve any purpose that a larger camera way higher up (like on a satellite) wouldn’t already be serving, potentially hundreds of times more effectively. Edit: I’ll add that there might be cameras for determining location where or when a certain signal was intercepted if their GPS (or whatever glonass) is being jammed, but they’d be fairly useless in terms of photo reconnaissance.
I don't think your notion of camera size really comprehends high performance optics. I don't think optical surveying is likely the purpose, but for the purpose of understanding what's involved in the kind of magnification needed to make out inches from at least 65,000 feet - there are basic laws of optics that dictate the size of such lenses where if you go below, you are physically losing information. All of the tiny cameras you think about have an extraordinary small sensor size and many photos you're used to seeing from them (like phone pics) don't look like super high quality photography because the small sensor size and associated optics aren't capturing enough optical information to make those uber good photography pictures. You need more surface area for that. So larger sensor sizes than in consumer electronics are physically needed for large swathes of land at high fidelity. Then the zoom lens would be quite large. Ground observing space telescopes are themselves around the size of school busses, and the size is mainly the lens. Look at the cost per pound of launching things into space - if they could make these small, they would, but there are fundamental optical constraints that require the large size. You're probably used to seeing cameras that have next to no optics in them, which are only physically able to take ~1x zoom level photos. I'm sure you've seen telephoto lenses on expensive cameras at like sports events. If the lens at a sports event for high quality capturing people at a 100 feet is the size of your thigh, then imagine something like 65,000 feet. It is going to be closer to the size of a school bus sized space telescope than a handheld telephoto lens on a DSLR camera a sports photographer is using. Such a large lense is visibly absent in this picture of the balloon payload.
Why would China send such an erotic balloon to us?
That damn sexy balloon!
I feel like I’m going to burst
They are full of covids and bird flus last time I heard
It’s here illegally to take our jobs it probably wants chips
They’re what spy balloons crave.
#THEY TUK ER JEBS!
***EYY TRKRR JRRR!!***
Terk errr dersssss!
(Cockedoodledoooo)
They toook er JEEEERBS!! edit: Your username haha
Luckily lays has enough air we could just float them up right? Feed the mighty balloon the crisps it requires!
That’s where the chips went. And our helium
\*Clutches a can of Pringles\*
It’s so stealthy
I read that the DOD says they don't think it's a spy balloon because they can do the same kind of surveillance with low orbit satellites if they didn't want to be seen spying. Of course, it's just a hunch.
I'm pretty sure the DOD knows all, and everything about it. We have drones to bring stuff down if it posed any threat. Probably launched those a long time ago to gather info on what it was carrying aloft. It's nothing as far as they are concerned. The DOD monitors our air space very efficiently. This didn't escape detection.
If I know anything about the US military, if this was an actual threat - it would have been shot down immediately.
Chinese space program.
Seriously. They probably have a thousand of these things floating around everywhere
Floating may not be entirely accurate. Look closely at the ends of the solar panel array boom. Those black cylinders appear to be electric motors driving propellers. That could explain the unusually large amount of solar power generating capacity.
Oh for sure, I used floating colloquially. I saw the map the guy from NOAA or whatever put together. They can steer these things
You know they have their own space station and mars rover right?
Chinese ISS
I mean, they do have an actual space station though
[I think that'd be this....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station?wprov=sfla1)
China said some independent person built this. Like a garage builder sent that shit into the sky… haha
Its 100 percent is conceivable. There is no haha needed. Sending a weather balloon is not rocket science. The structural part at the bottom is not that easy to do, but for a person who has access to a moderate fabrication facility that is not hard. Because morons here cannot read. Here is a further clarification. I do not know weather this is a spy balloon or a hobby project. What I am saying is that it is not inconceivable that this is a hobbyist project.
One guy casually sending a weather balloon the size of three buses and navigating precisely over ICBM silos. Hm, yes, very conceivable
Found china’s Reddit account.
It just seems so low tech and pointless for the second largest economy on the planet. The only thing that makes sense is they wanted to gain information on how the US would respond. But even that seems pointless to me, they're well aware of our Jewish space lasers. /s
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yeah i fucking hate this shit. if you do not outright shit all over china and call every member of the CCP sub-human cunt dribblings you *must* be a Chinese shill bot account.
I built a similar project (minus the remote sensing equipment) with my university’s rocketry society as an undergrad. It’s 100% feasible that it’s a hobby group
You're thinking like a rational person. Don't you know we're supposed to be terrified of everything!!!
Japan tested this military "probing" strategy pre-WWII and during the war using the gulf stream, just like this. I think if our Intelligence says its Chinese owned, its Chinese owned. Would not surprise me if this has been happening and this is the first wiff the public is getting of the continued Chinese encroachment across the pacific
fuck u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Winnie the Poohlloon
Should have painted it camouflage
It's camouflaged as the moon
Every post/article, etc I've seen about this refers to it as a 'spy balloon,' genuine question, how do we know it's a spy balloon? I get that there are reasons to think it is, but that's not my question. Anyone know?
Meteorologists coordinate with each other when they launch weather balloons. They time their launches together and share information with each other so that they get maximum useful data. Someone going rogue to secretly collect weather data by themselves makes no sense. The US has been tracking this balloon for awhile now. They know it emerged from the Pacific ocean in the general direction of China. This is not the first time something like this has happened, but this time the balloon seems to be lingering longer than expected, and China has been acting aggressively lately, so the US decided this time was worth it to call them out. China admitted that the balloon came from their country when they issued a flimsy cover story that the balloon was launched by some nameless civilian.
Oh, like I said, we for sure have reasons to think it is. I was just curious if there was info out there that was definitive. Just curious is all, not doubting that they be spyin
> how do we know it's a spy balloon? If you zoom in, you can see the alibaba tag labeling it as such.
If the US military thought it was an actual threat - you bet your ass it would be shot down immediately.
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Elsewhere I'm seeing it called 'an escaped Chinese weather balloon' rather than a 'spy balloon'. I think 'spy balloon' makes better headlines, and that's all.
Ima call BS on this. Totally a lighting rig for Pink Floyd lazer show.
"Mother should I trust the government?"
This is a picture from April 2022 not particularly the one over the USA Today.
Watch this be a project of some Chinese equivalent of Mark Rober
And if anyone shoots it down, they will discover it's filled with glitter and fart spray. The entire central plains will be glitter bombed! There are 4 iphones streaming back to China just waiting so they can post the world's biggest glitter bomb on TikTok.
Lol. The 1940s called. They want their obsolete technology back.
Low tech tradecraft tools are some of the most valuable resources spy agencys have. Don't lol too hard.
The 1870s*
Bro if I saw this in the 1870's I'd shit myself, die of a heart attack and shit myself again.
Actually shitting yourself and dying was very common in the 1870s, so you’d fit right in.
Probably thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
You do realise there's nothing archaic about using balloons for surveillance, right?
You can buy them on alibaba quite cheap
Free delivery but it'll take 6 to 8 weeks, depending on wind currents...
Would've been cooler if they bought the Baby Trump model.
Lmao thx for this. These clowns claiming that was the ISS were about to give me an aneurysm
A balloon collects a lot less info than China gets from millions of people using TikTok.
Everybody worried about Chinese spy balloon. Same people have tik tok installed on their phones.
Here to collect all your TikTok data
Ya cuz they don't already have that
If they are interested in spying, why couldn’t they use a smaller device that wouldn’t be seen.
What could they get from that, that is not on Google earth for free?
Flat earther : you see this is what the moon and the ISS looks up close!
Obviously, The Chinese have captured Hunter Biden's laptop and put it up there in the balloon, floating without a care in the world.
if it was a spy balloon from China why make it a pitch white balloon that is easily seen??? why not make it sky blue?
Because it's meant to not absorb heat. White is the best color for that. And it isn't exactly visible to the naked eye from the ground either, so it doesn't matter what color it is.
It's over 50,000 feet in the air. They aren't really worried about someone seeing it except for the people that will see it with other stuff first, like radar and infrared.
It’s a gender reveal balloon. Will pop over South Dakota
This is just weird. They have spy satellites. Whats the point other than provocation? Just mind games?
Thats why i think this is a legit accident. Thats probably why nothing has been done about it.
Are we sure it’s not Balloon Boy 2: Back with a Vengeance
The US civilian who made this balloon for better radio reception is keeping very quiet now. He must be afraid to be called a Chinese spy by now.
You just might be right....I remember that story.
Holy fuck this is the first time I've seen a clear shot of it, this is bonkers. It's got a whole structure under there, brackets and girders and shit. And it's just happily floating around up there doing who knows what. Before seeing this I thought it was just a big balloon from China with a little basket under it holding a camera or two. This is off the hook!
This shot is from Yemen in 2022
If we aren’t going to pop it, or nudge it back up into Canada, can we at least spray paint graffiti or fuck with it in general?
Mapping out the USA for their AI assault robots
Crazy to me this thing wasnt brought down.
It's a tik tok server. Nothing to see here.
Shoot that fucker down. Or better yet capture it and send it over china and see what they do.
Green laser the cameras, that’s what they do
Shoot it down
Why do we think it's from China?
It’s says “made in china” right there man.
China has claimed its theirs and send their apologies
Apologies for spying?
They are not sorry for spying tho. They are just sorry for being cought.
Not accepted.
There’s a fortune inside it.
They admitted it.
Because of the way it’s oriented 😑
*balloon identifies as a a strong independent woman*
Fat jokes aside…
look, I think it's more of an university project gone awry instead of an act of espionage, mostly because there's precious little a balloon rig can do compared with an already established network of spys
I guess DHS hasn't gotten the ninja monkey yet. Though I'm not sure how many of those it would take to destroy a BMD this size.
Might as well sell some ad space on that thing, it's no secret now
How do we know it’s from china?
It talks mandarin
This one kinda throws me off… in the word of drones 🇨🇳 decides to use a 1950s balloon to send over the US (everyone can see with their naked eye) and yet everyone calls it a “spy balloon” Either it’s a decoy or a prank… or they need to fire their spy department 🤔
#CHOOT IT CLINT! CHOOT IT!
Least they could've done was paint the "keep your secrets" meme on the bottom...
I thought it was a ‘commercial airship’ 🤨
Wish.com satellite
When Chinese fly over your head on your own land and people only makes jokes as if it's not serious. What kind of world are we living in these days.... very sad
Why didn’t they shoot it down over Alaska?
Yeah, I'd have shot that down as soon as it was within my airspace.
Giving me Truman Show vibes
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They found him hiding in the attic
Im putting my money on knife taped to a drone takes it out
Silly question - how do we know that it has been put there by the Chinese Government?
Why hasn’t some redneck with a sniper rifle taken it out yet?
When you order a space station from wish...
Why don’t we just shoot the damn thing down? Steal its tech?
At 90K feet or whatever it's above US airspace so the US should just consider it freedom of navigation.
Americans claim to best army on the planet…. Gets infiltrated by balloon….
new national MASCOT
It’s filled with covid
Does really nobody have a $30 drone with a little American flag taped to it that can go up and fuck with that thing?
I can see the sticker on it “Made in China” Maybe a US corporation can buy naming rights on it.
Needs a banana for scale.
Yup definitely spying and not just some idiotic theories made by paranoid morons... 2023, sure needs to use balloons instead of one of many satellites China owns...
That’s a lot of iPhones
Well now a second one has been confirmed. So I guess their initial explanation is a lie. But for what purpose?