BBC Panorama worked with an artificial intelligence company to sift through millions of satellite pictures.
New evidence of China's spy balloon programme - including flights over Japan and Taiwan - has been uncovered by BBC Panorama.
John Culver - a former East Asia analyst for the CIA - told Panorama that this "had been not just a one-off, but a continuing effort dating back at least five years." He said the Chinese balloons were "specially designed for these long-range missions" and some had "apparently circumnavigated the globe".
Japan is a close ally of the US and more American forces are stationed there than in any other foreign country.Yuko Murakami, from the Japanese ministry of defence, told the BBC that the government was "taking all precautions to monitor the situation on a daily basis" and would even be willing to shoot down balloons to protect the "lives and property of people in the territory of Japan".
They found two photographs taken by Taiwan's weather service, appearing to show a balloon over the capital, Taipei, in late September 2021. Corey Jaskolski started with a sketch of what he thought the balloon would look like from space. He then fed this outline into his AI software, together with rough coordinates of where it was last seen.Corey Jaskolski
He also plotted the flight path of the balloon back to its most likely launch site - Hainan Island in the South China Sea.
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