U. S. collected wreckage and analyzing downed spy balloon
2023.02.18 07:16
U. S. collected wreckage and analyzing downed spy balloon
By Ray Johnson
Budrigannews.com – On Friday, the United States announced that efforts to recover sensors and other debris from a alleged Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on February 4 had been completed off the coast of South Carolina. Investigators are currently analyzing the “guts” of the balloon.
However, authorities in both the United States and Canada announced that they had halted their efforts to locate any debris from three unidentified objects that had been shot down over the weekend.
This week, President Joe Biden stated that the U.S. intelligence community believed that the other three items were most likely balloons connected to private businesses, recreational facilities, or research institutions, not China’s spy program.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command reported that an FBI laboratory in Virginia is receiving the last piece of the Chinese balloon’s debris for analysis. The Chinese balloon was shot down by a Sidewinder missile.
The conclusion of the recovery efforts for the alleged Chinese spy balloon, which were halted on Thursday, was first reported by Reuters.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council (NYSE:), stated, “It’s a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that’s now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico.”
Kirby stated that by observing the balloon as it flew over the country, the United States had already learned a lot about it.
He stated at a White House news briefing, “We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of.” The Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been searching the sea for nearly two weeks, according to the U.S. military, have left the area.
In a statement, Northern Command stated, “Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted.”
The U.S. military has stated that it believes it has gathered all of the priority sensors and electronics of the Chinese balloon as well as large portions of its structure. These elements may assist counterintelligence personnel in determining how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance data.
Before being shot down off the Atlantic Coast on Biden’s orders, the balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, flew over the United States and Canada for a week.
The incident sparked controversy in Washington and prompted the military to search the skies for additional objects that radar could not detect. Between last Friday and Sunday, Northern Command carried out an unprecedented three shootdowns of unknown “objects.”
It said that the search for the two objects that were shot down in U.S. airspace—one over Alaska and the other over Lake Huron—had come to an end late Friday night and that they had “discovered no debris.”
According to the statement, “The U.S. military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, but did not locate debris.”
Over the Yukon region of Canada, a third object was shot down. In a statement on Friday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also decided to end the search.
A statement read, “The RCMP is terminating the search given the snowfall that has occurred, the decreasing probability the object will be found, and the current belief the object is not tied to a scenario that justifies extraordinary search efforts.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a planned trip to Beijing this month due to the Chinese balloon incident, which has further strained relations between Washington and Beijing.
Both parties viewed that Blinken trip as an opportunity to stabilize increasingly tense ties. It would have been the first time a U.S. secretary of state had traveled to China in five years.
Since then, officials from the United States have been considering the possibility of Blinken and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which started on Friday.
The administration’s handling of the balloon incident and the shooting down of the three other objects was defended by Vice President Kamala Harris, who is in Munich for the conference.
According to Harris’ remarks to MSNBC, the Chinese balloon “need to be shot down because we were confident that it was used by China to spy on American people.”
She stated, “We will maintain our perspective on what should be the relationship between China and the United States.” That won’t change, but without a doubt, that balloon wasn’t helpful.”
