The U.S. Military was tracking a Chinese balloon for the past week as it floated through Alaska, then across the Continental United States. I didn’t see the thing, but from the news reports about it, it sounds like it was enormous. I guess they waited to shoot it down until it was over the ocean, so it wouldn’t fall on someone’s grandma.
That was actually a valid concern. China says it was an errant weather balloon owned and operated by a private business. But more likely, it was a spy balloon owned and operated by the Chinese government. I mean, come on. The reports said the bottom of the balloon, which houses all the supposed scientific instruments for collecting weather data, was the size of three buses. If it were really a weather balloon, I’d think with that much equipment, they’d be able to predict the weather accurately for the next 100 years.
And why were they spying on Montana? It entered the United States at the Canadian border over the panhandle of Idaho, and it bumbled across Montana for a few days. I’m actually surprised nobody in Montana shot that thing down long before the government did it. Maybe that’s why they sent it over Montana and not Wyoming. Even the Chinese know better than to try to float something over our airspace. I don’t know what kind of gun you need to shoot down a three-bus-sized balloon, but I’ll bet there are several people here in Wyoming who have one. And they probably wouldn’t be afraid to use it, either.
The military finally blew that sucker out of the sky when it drifted out over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Carolinas. I’ll be interested to see if they recover the debris, and what it proves about what that balloon was doing over Montana.
