On All Those Objects Being Shot Down
Published at 12:13 on 13 February 2023
Obviously, something’s changed. We virtually never heard of spy balloons, then we hear about one, it gets shot down after being tracked across North America, and now suspected spy balloons are getting discovered and being shot down all over the map.
What has changed is unlikely to be the mere presence of spy balloons. We know this because it has already come out that what are now known to be, or strongly suspected to be, spy balloons flew over the USA under the Trump Administration.
The mere existence of spying is no great surprise. Nations have been spying on each other since literally forever, and aerial surveillance by superpowers against each other has been a thing at least since the USA got caught with its hand in the cookie jar by the USSR.
I suspect paranoia or at least some measure of it. There are a lot of reasons to launch unmanned balloons. Collecting upper atmosphere weather observations is one of them. It is not hard to come up with other ideas for research involving unmanned balloons. More than likely, some of those balloons which have now been downed (or will be downed in the near future) will be discovered to be innocent. More ominously is the possibility that some manned aircraft might get accidentally shot down.
Some probably are spy balloons after all. All I am saying above is that it is very likely that not all of the suspicious flying objects are there for espionage or other nefarious purposes.
Beau’s theory is probably a good one. Beau of the Fifth Column recently released a YouTube video where he speculated about the origins of the suspicious flying objects, and concluded that:
- There could well be multiple causes at play here, and
- It is likely that air defense systems have now been fine-tuned to detect and respond to such objects.
China has no grounds to complain about their balloons being shot down. Suppose for sake of argument it was just an innocent scientific research project. Well, why didn’t China then tell the USA and Canada that it had gone off course and was about to enter their airspaces? What did they think was likely to happen were such an unannounced balloon to be discovered? That an unannounced balloon would get shot down is just about the least surprising bit of news since the sun rising this morning.