How a fog of questions over a spy balloon and UFOs fed a diplomatic crisis.
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In another example of the fog created by superpower rivalry and political imperatives, U.S. officials said in interviews on Wednesday that they now increasingly believe three unidentified flying objects shot down over North America were unlikely to be surveillance devices.U.S. officials said they are still trying to make a definitive conclusion on what the objects were, and do not think they will reach one until more debris is collected.
An F-22 fighter jet shot the balloon down with a single missile hours later, on the afternoon of Feb. 4. Once the balloon went off course, as U.S. officials suspect, Chinese officials and the machine’s operators, who could be employees of a civilian-run balloon maker under contract with the People’s Liberation Army of China, appeared to make a series of bad decisions.
There is much the U.S. government still does not understand. While the balloon was equipped with small propellers, U.S. intelligence agencies do not believe it had the power to dramatically change speed or direction, some American officials said. The Biden administration has said the Chinese military’s spy balloon program has sent airships over more than 40 countries on five continents, violating their sovereignty. U.S. officials began learning about the program after 2020, during a broader review of unidentified aerial phenomena. Officials then realized some past instances of aerial objects in U.S. airspace were Chinese surveillance balloons.
Early findings suggest the balloon’s self-destruct mechanism was intact, U.S. officials say. Navy divers searching for debris off South Carolina have seen a blasting cap meant to destroy the payload, they say. FBI investigators examining recovered debris could potentially determine if some malfunction had prevented the mechanism from working, though several U.S. officials say they now assume that the device was functional.
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