Up And Away In My Beautiful Spy Balloon

history of spy and surveillance balloons. We've heard a lot of talk about this in the news here in the United States this month, as the US military is shot down a couple of objects that were thought to be surveillance devices built by China, or perhaps, in at least one case, an unidentified object that could have been a surveillance or spy balloon. But so we shot it down just to be on the safe side. But we're going

to get to all of that now. Before we talk about China, we need to talk about the history of using balloons and stuff like espionage and warfare, and that brings us to beans. It brings us back to China. So the story goes that a Chinese military genius named Ju Liang, and I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. However, he was known as Kong Ming, used a paper lantern with a message written on it in order to call

for help when enemy troops were surrounding his forces. This was one of the tactics he would use, and essentially this sky lantern was a small hot air balloon. In fact, I should probably talk about how a hot air balloon works. Now you've probably heard that hot air rises, but from another point of view, you really should say that, you know, colder air sinks. This is because warmer air is less dense than colder air. Cold air is more dense, so

it settles and the warm air gets pushed up. The dense cold air sinks down, the warmer air is pushed upward to float on top, and it just kind of acts like that. It's a fluid, just as any fluids where you would deal with different densities would do the same sort of thing. Right. Well, if you have yourself a container that's light enough, and you fill it with air that is warm enough, the whole of that container will become lighter than the air surrounding it and it

will rise. This is just a basic feature of fluid dynamics, y'all. So, with a paper lantern made of thin material and a heat source that can be suspended inside the lantern, preferably held away from the walls of the lantern, or else you're just going to set fire to the lantern. You would have yourself a sky lantern. It needs to be closed off obviously. If it's not, then the heat air is just going to rise straight through the lantern, so

it needs to have a cap on the top. Lighting the lantern means a small fire heats the air inside the lantern to the point where the whole thing can rise up into the sky and voila. You got yourself a potential signaling device. You can see it, it's lit up in the sky, and you know generally where it's

rising from. Assuming that is that the folks that you want to signal can actually see the lantern from their perspective or their downwind of the lanterns, so that they have a chance to spot and or retrieve it if it has drifted away from where you released it. If the lantern floats in the wrong direction, you might find yourself without the benefit of reinforcements. Kong Ming lived around two hundred Common Era, and to this day, sky lanterns

are also known as Kongming lanterns. In China, they have been popular in various festivals and celebrations, as can be seen in the documentary Tangled when Rapunzel dreams of seeing them in person. Also, just a quick shout out to any tech stuff listeners who have been with this show long enough to remember when I would refer to work of fiction as documentaries. It has been quite some time,

all right. But sky lanterns are a long way from spy balloons, right, I mean they would take centuries a bunch of them to get to a point where humans could turn to balloons for the purposes of observing others. That's because early uses of balloons for the purposes of seeing what the heck is going on over the hill over yonder would require a real human being to be lifted up into the sky, because it's not like we had wireless sensors that could collect data and then beam

information down to us. We didn't even have wired sensors that could do that. The sensors that we relied upon were mostly connected to one of the five traditionally associated with human beings. Heck, even the earliest weather balloon observations involved humans going up with basic stuff like thermometers and barometers to see what it's like up there in the wild blue yonder. According to the US National Parks Service, the earliest recorded example of an observation balloon dates back

to seventeen ninety four, during the French Revolution. That's just a touch more than a decade after the Montgolfier Brothers first wild France with their experiments with hot air balloons. So the Montgolfier's built larger and larger balloons while experimenting with hot air as a means to achieve flight. Their earliest experiments just involved inflating a balloon and there was

no payload. That was probably a good thing, because one of those earlier experiments saw the anchor strings on the balloon break and the balloon rose to around six hundred feet in altitude and there was no way to get down apart from it cooling off enough to descend, because once the air cools down, it gets more dense, and if it gets dense enough, then it's no longer going to be bulliant in the surrounding atmosphere. It's going to

come back down, right. So, in seventeen eighty three, three important actual living beings took the very first hot air balloon flight to carry a living payload. Now, earlier experiments did include moments where strapping men who were holding on to anchor lines were lifted off their feet, but those don't really count like they weren't intended to go on

a flight. They were intended to hold the balloon down while experiments were conducted, and occasionally they would be lifted up like a foot or two before they would either let go or the balloon would be pulled back down. The three critters that actually went on this maiden voyage were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, which sounds like the beginning of a joke, but no, these were suggested by King Louis the sixteenth himself. Now why he

chose those particular three animals, I have no idea. I also don't know if lou thought he was giving these animals a real treat, or if he wanted to punish them for some reason. There's so many unanswered quest stents in history. This balloon ascended to around fifteen hundred feet or so. It traveled about ten thousand feet until the air inside the balloon had cooled enough for the balloon

to descend. It landed. The animals were all safe inside the wicker basket that was attached to the balloon, so they got out none the worse for wear. I don't know how they felt during the flight, but they were fine afterward. And not long after that, some brave pioneers and ballooning decided they would become the first humans to

take flight in such a contraption. Now, at this stage, the balloons featured a sort of container that had portholes through which one could insert fuel into a brazier that was suspended above the wicker basket that could hold people. You know, that would be at the very base of the balloon, and it would be right at the very bottom of the opening for the balloon itself. Right, So you filled this brazier up with fuel and you fire to it. Heats up the air, the balloon inflates and

eventually becomes light enough to take flight. If you wanted to go higher, you put more fuel into the brazier, or if you just wanted to stay in the air, you would put more fuel in because otherwise the fire would burn down and the balloon would lose bullyancy and

it would come down. Right, you could also cause the balloon to come down on purpose by introducing something that would slow down or stop the combustion, like pouring water through the porthole into the brazier to help extinguish the fire. This would allow the air to cool and again the balloon would come back down. These balloons were pretty risky.

You know, a quick change in wind could potentially cause flames from this brazier to come into contact with the inner wall of the balloon itself, which could potentially mean that the balloon catches fire. Obviously that would be disastrous. You would have an uncontrolled descent, ak a crash. And there was also no way to steer these balloons, so you were just subjected to the whims of the wind itself.

So you might think, oh, we're gonna go up, we'll travel a few thousand feet and we'll come down in that field over there, But because of the wind, you're like, nope, we're coming down the louver. Move over, Louis. It marked an incredible advance in science and technology. Even old Benjamin Franklin, fresh off his hardened glass Armonica tour, took note of the first hot air balloon flight while he was in France.

Around this same time, other scientists and daredevils had come up with an alternative to hot air balloons because some gases are pretty light, right like, they're lighter than the surrounding atmosphere. Hydrogen, for example, is lighter than the air that we're walking around in, and so thought the physicists. If you were to fill a balloon with a very light gas like hydrogen that could also float on air, you wouldn't need a source of heat to heat up

the gas. You would just need enough hydrogen to overcome the weight of the balloon itself. But hydrogen comes with a couple of drawbacks. The big one is that it's very, very flammable see also the tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster. But you wouldn't need or want an open flame anyway, because again, the gas you're using is lighter than air. There's no need to have a heat source to heat

the air inside the balloon. Now, the same year that the Montgolfiers were launching hot air balloons, we got the first flight of a hydrogen balloon and it carried a payload of about twenty pounds or around nine kilograms. And you might wonder where the heck did they get hydrogen gas?

Because hydrogen, while it is the most plentiful element in the galaxy, is also notorious for bonding with other elements like hydrogen and oxygen makes water, so you have to put forth real effort to break those molecular bonds to release hydrogen gas, and then you have to collect it. Well. The researchers were using scrap iron and then they were pouring sulfuric acid onto the iron. One of the byproducts of the chemical reaction that would follow is hydrogen gas.

They captured this with a system of lead pipes that fed into the interior of the balloon, and this allowed them to inflate the gosh darn thing. At the end of seventeen eighty three, the Fringies successfully flew a hydrogen based balloon just a few days after the first successful hot air balloon flights. So these things are progressing in tandem. You know, it's really amazing how quickly this took off. That was a terrible, unintentional pun which I'm sure I'm

going to repeat throughout this episode. Anyway, Unlike a hot air balloon, a lighter than air gas balloon doesn't need to constantly be refueled, so it just will stay up there for as long as the balloon is able to contain this lighter than air gas, so to be able to control things like altitude, the balloon would have ballast. That's bags of stuff that's used to weigh it down. So if you wanted to go higher, you had to ditch some ballast. You have to throw some weight overboard,

like a sand bag or something. This would decrease the weight of the balloon and allow it to fly higher in altitude. But in order to come down, you would have to have a release valve that would let you have a controlled release. Controlled is the important part of hydrogen. You let out a little hydrogen, you lose some buoyancy, you start to come down. The more hydrogen you release,

the more you come down. And if you're very careful, you're able to have a controlled descent and land without crashing. But you know, when you have that flammable true goal where you've got fuel and oxidizer and heat, things get dangerous. So hydrogen is fuel with a big, big f And if the hydrogen were to catch fire, believe me, you would be well and truly ft. It wouldn't be so much a fire as it would be an explosion. We get back to the Hendenburg disaster there, but there were

also other factors that contributed to that particular tragedy. Interestingly, the Hindenburg was not designed to use hydrogen gas in the first place. It was meant to use helium. Helium is also lighter than air. You know, we're all familiar with helium balloons, but unlike hydrogen, helium is not flammable, so it's safe to have in areas where you've got

things like internal combustion engines and such. However, in the nineteen thirties, the Hendenburg, which originated in Germany, wasn't able to import heli because well, it's nineteen thirties, it's Germany. Nazis were in power, and even though World War Two had not really started yet and the United States certainly wasn't pulled into it, the US was already let's say, concerned about Germany and refused to export helium to the Germans, so instead they used hydrogen, and thus the die was

cast for the Hendenburg. The use of the hydrogen balloon also taught us that if you go to a high enough altitude, your ears go pop and that can hurt. Also, researchers started to carry meteorological instruments like thermometers and barometers aboard the hydrogen balloons. So these became the first weather balloons of a sort, but they were manned. Unmanned weather balloons would have to wait nearly a century. So by

seventeen ninety four, balloons were a known thing. And during the French Revolution wars in which countries like Britain and Austria would to war against France, largely because it's pretty scary to see these common French peasants overthrow the previously unassailable monarchy and the noble classes, the French military would use balloons to get a bird's eye view of the battlefield.

I'll explain more when we come back from this quick break. Okay, So we had French military officials using balloons in order to get a high altitude view of areas like potential battlefields or even actual battlefield conditions like active conditions during combat. It turned out that these uses were at best distractions. They were not providing really useful info. Apparently, the reports of the time said that they had no impact whatsoever on the course of battles. So early on they had

hardly any impact. But flash forward a little more than half a century and head on over to the United States and we would see another use of observation balloons, this time during the US Civil War. So you had the Union and you had the Confederates, and both sides of the conflict used balloons to gather observations of the

enemy and to map out battlefields. So in this case it wasn't necessarily during an actual battle, but sometimes it was just to get a really good bird's eye view of a battlefield, map out where units could take position, places that they should avoid, just conditions they need to be aware of before they go into battles so that they're not finding out while you know, warfare is breaking out all around them, and it starts to make a little sense. And this was all in an effort to

just provide intelligence to military units on the ground. Now, the Confederates had their share of military balloons, but the Union side historically made better use of this technology. Meanwhile, the Confederates were experimenting with submarines. It was a really scary time for military innovation because these were all in many cases unproven technologies where people were being put at risk in order to test them. Now, both sides used

gas balloons for this purpose. They weren't using hot air balloons, They're using gas balloons. They tried using balloons to extend communication lines, but they found that the actual use of this was tricky. It was hard to read signals that were sent by balloonists. They were relying on things like signal flags, which could be difficult to see. Some of them were even outfitted with telegraph wires that extended down to the ground, but those ended up being a little

fiddly as well. However, the idea was sound, even though the implementation was a bit lack Again, like, this was all unfolding in the middle of a war, so it was tricky to get things to work just right while you're out in the field while it's all happening. The first weather balloons to carry instruments but not people, would arrive in the eighteen nineties back in France, where this whole business got started, essentially a century after balloons were

first being used for surveillance in wartime conditions. These weather balloons had an open bottom and they were gas balloons, and so when they would be released during the day, the lighter than air balloon would rise up into the sky. They would carry all these instruments that would record measurements. At night, the gases would cool down enough for the

balloon to start deflating. You had air pressure that was forcing gases out, and the balloon would start to come down, and the idea was to retrieve the instruments and record the readings as quickly as possible in order to track weather conditions. This was not always easy because the balloons had a tendency to drift, sometimes by hundreds of miles, so sometimes the data you got back wasn't necessarily the most useful. But not long after this, early meteorologists came

up with a better plan. So instead of using an open ended balloon, where you know, you're essentially releasing a bag filled with light gas up into the sky, they would use a sealed balloon that was filled with lighter than air gas. They would release this balloon into the air. It would ascend up into the sky, and as the air around the balloon would get thinner at higher altitudes, the balloon would swell because there was less air pressure on the outside of the balloon than there was on

the inside of the balloon at that altitude. You've probably seen pictures of balloons that looked incredibly spherical way up in altitude, but when they were first launched they and look like that at all. Now, the material on these balloons was also really thin. These days we make them out of latex, and because they're thin, this material is so thin at higher altitudes. As the balloon stretches and stretches and stretches, as it swells up, it begins to tear.

And when it tears, then the gas escapes the balloon and it starts to come tumbling down. Now, the meteorologists, they knew this was going to happen, so what they did was they attached a small parachute to the payload to the instrument bundle, so that the parachute would deploy as the bundle was falling, and then the payload could

float down rather than crash down. And we still use weather balloons that use this method today, though obviously now we can include devices that send out a radio signal that make it way easier to track down where those instruments have landed once they do. So, by the time you get to the early twentieth century, balloons have become a common tool the militaries. They were in fact in heavy use in World War One among pretty much all

the countries involved in the conflict. The potential for spies to use balloons to uncover enemy positions and battlefield conditions were enough to prompt the various militaries to target balloons with high priority. They became important targets for the military. This is also in balloons, often in the form of dirigibles like the Hindenburg, were used as weaponized vehicles. Some dirigibles had machine guns mounted within the cabin, or they

carried a payload of bombs. But that starts to get outside the surveillance and spy stuff, so I'm not going to spend any real time talking about that. That's a separate episode. Also in World War One and into World War Two, some countries started to use what we're called

barrage balloons. Now, these were a defensive measure, So essentially the idea was to attach steel cables to unmanned balloons, and if there was an incoming attack by a you could release the balloons and they would go up into the air, lifting these cables up in the air, and the cables would serve as obstacles for enemy aircraft. Like you would just have these balloons holding taut cables still attached to the ground, and aircraft if they were to try and fly through the area could get tangled up.

They could foul the aircraft and cause them to crash, or it would force pilots to climb at a higher altitude to fly over these barrage balloons, but that would bring them within range of anti aircraft weaponry. So it was all meant to dissuade aerial attacks, all right. But back to observation balloons. In the nineteen forties, General Mills yep, the food company, the one famous for cereal, created balloons designed to ascend all the way up into the stratosphere.

The aeronautical arm of General Mills, which is wild to think about, would use these balloons to lift instrumentation way way up in the sky, typically to do stuff like study weather conditions and also detect radiation in the upper atmosphere.

They used essentially what was the similar to a photographic plate, where instead of using light to create an image, it was there to detect nuclear radiation that could hit the plate and create an image that we could then see once we retrieved this when it came back to the ground. So these balloons were not meant to spy on people. They were meant to make observations about weather and science, potentially detecting nuclear radiation which could be related to espionage

or at least intelligence gathering. This whole thing was called Project Skyhook, and it fell under the administration of the Office of Naval Research in the United States, with the Atomic Energy Commission joining in a little bit later. These balloons would typically jettison their payload, which would then descend via parachute for retrieval by a ground team or a water team, as the case may be, and the work

done there would then inform later espionage efforts. See if you could send balloons way, way, way up into the sky, maybe you could do that so that they could potentially take photographs or film of the land that was beneath, so that, you know, you could get an idea where someone might be, I don't know, trying to hide nuclear

silos in their country, or military bases or whatnot. And so in the late nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties, the US began to rely on balloons to lift surveillance payloads into high altitudes, expressly for the purpose of photographing the then Soviet Union as well as China. The two massive communist powers that the US was convinced served as existential threats to truth, justice, and the American way, so the only way to really defend yourself is to snoop

on them. Now. One early example of this was called Project Mogul, which technically started before Projects Skyhook did with General Mills. But Mogul's purpose was to carry equipment designed to detect sound, but not just any sound. Instead, it was designed to detect sound that would come in the wake of the detonation of atomic bombs. The thought was an atomic bomb detonation would create sound that would travel in a channel, high, high, high up in the atmosphere.

So the US was concerned that the Soviet Union was testing atomic weapons and they wanted to keep an ear out for that. And the US had already demonstrated atomic weapons being extremely effective if you wanted to wipe out an entire city, because they had done it twice already. By the way, balloons like the ones the US released and the ones that China has released have a pretty huge overlap. In the ven diagram that has balloons in one circle and UFOs in the other circle like a

really big overlap. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and that's all that UFO actually means, right Like, it literally means you see something that's in the air and you can't figure out what it is. So it's a UFO. It's unidentified, it is flying, and it's something an object. What UFO does not mean, at least it doesn't intrinsically mean, is that it's an extra terrestrial object. That is, that

it's something that's not from Earth. But over the years, we've kind of conflated these two things that UFOs and aliens are one and the same, or rather that UFOs are what aliens used to tool around in our solar system. But no, UFOs are just stuff what's up in the sky, but we ain't sure what it is yet. And when you look at balloons, especially weather or surveillance balloons, you can really understand how this can happen because I think a lot of people think, well, of course I know

what a balloon looks like. I'm not going to mistake a balloon for something else. But at lower altitudes, these balloons are tear drop sheepd right with the bulbous part of the tear at the top of the balloon. They look like they've been released prematurely, like ah, you let go before you've finished filling it up. It's not full

of gas. This, however, is done on purpose, because, as I mentioned earlier, as these balloons rise in altitude, they move into areas of lower air pressure and they expand. The balloons get bigger and bigger. So a balloon that's tear drop shaped at a low altitude turns into this enormous sphere as it climbs to upper altitudes, and like I said, it eventually can pop or rather the material again.

Typically latex will tear and then release gas and cause the balloon to deflate quickly, or sometimes they'll just completely rip apart and the stuff what the balloon was carrying comes crashing down. In nineteen forty seven, a rancher named WW mac Brazil was driving across his land with his son Vernon, and the two encountered something weird. They found a mass of fabric, rubber, metallic foil, and some other

stuff that was heaped on the ground. So the rancher collected as much of this stuff as he could, and then a few days later he drove it down to Roswell, New Mexico, to hand it over to the local sheriff. This innocent chain of events would eventually be reported as a rancher having salvaged the wreckage of a flying saucer. Now, the US military thought maybe it was best to just let the flying saucer story go unchallenged, because the truth of the matter was the balloon was part of the

aforementioned Project Mogul. But you were entering into an era of observations by balloon, and so there were a lot of UFOs that were out there, not extraterrestrial, but unidentified

by the people on the ground. And because the US military didn't want to talk about espionage, because despite what a certain James Bond would have you believe, it's best not to walk into a room and introduce yourself as a spy to everybody, folks were left to fill in the gaps of their understanding with all sorts of speculation

and nonsense. They weren't told that the US was using balloons to try and keep tabs on the Soviet Union because the US didn't want the Soviet Union to know that, So they were left to just kind of figure out what the heck this stuff was. Even when a Kentucky National Guard pilot and military pilot died in an accident in nineteen forty seven while he was trying to identify an object in the sky that was very likely an observation balloon, the military states silent on this because that

was classified. Not even pilots were told that there were this there was a surveillance balloon program that was active. That kind of silence continues to this very day. All Right,

we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll continue the history of spy balloons, all right, So we talked about Project Mogul, which was designed to listen in for the evidence of atomic weapon detonations, but for more direct observation, the US created a couple of projects, one called Project moby Dick and another one called Project Genetrics.

These were balloons that carried cameras that were meant to gather intels, specifically on the Soviet Union and on China, and they would float at altitudes of more than fifty thousand feet, which put them out of range of fighter aircraft at the time. Because it's pretty common for these aircraft not to have sort of oxygen equipment, so they couldn't go and higher altitudes pilots would pass out they

wouldn't be able to breathe. So the idea was that these balloons would remain out of reach of Soviet forces, but they would still be able to take detailed photographs and film of the ground below. But she still had to retrieve the darned things. By the way. They would release these in various places around the world, like in Turkey, Norway, Scotland, and they would just let the air currents carry the

balloons across the Eastern Asian continent. Well, there were a couple of ways that the US would try to retrieve these payloads once they had drifted across the USSR and China. One was just to wait until payload released from its balloon parachuted into the Sea of Japan, whereupon a US Navy vessel would rendezvous and pick up the payload. But the other was to use an aircraft to catch the payload as it was falling in midair. This aircraft was

the C one nineteen flying box car. This aircraft was used for tons of different stuff, including deploying airborne troops. So like parachute corps would jump out of C one nineteens. But this aircraft could also go long for a hail merry pass, which is my dumb way of saying. They could be outfitted with equipment designed to snag a descending payload. But the Soviets caught on to the Shenanigans for one thing. In the early morning hours, these balloons would drift at

a significantly lower altitude. Again, this is because the gas inside the balloons would cool down overnight. Then as they cooled, they became more dense and they lost some of the balloons buoyancy. Then they would float low enough for some Soviet aircraft to fire upon these surveillance balloons. And so really just a fraction of the balloons launched were ever retrieved. I think they launched more than five hundred of one of these, and I think around fifty were finally retrieved.

So yeah, it was not great odds. The Soviets managed to get hold of some of the payloads and they said, hey, United States, stop violating our sovereignty by sending these spy balloons over our country. And the US responded in a couple of different ways. One was to say, hey, easy comrade, these are just weather balloons. We're just studying the weather, you know, all over the world to get a better idea how weather and climate patterns happened. No big deal,

we can't even control where these things go. The other strategy was to say, hey, nobody owns the upper atmosphere. Airspace only extends as far up as you can use it, and you don't have any aircraft that can go that high, so go pound sand. As you can imagine. The Soviets

didn't they guy. These responses had very much merit to them, But the US would end up migrating away from balloons as a main method of spying, not necessarily because balloons were ineffective, but because the United States had secretly developed aircraft like fixed wing aircraft that could fly at extreme altitudes, namely the U two spy plane. And for those of y'all interested in that story, I recommend searching the Tech Stuff archives for our old episodes about the U two,

because that story is crazy all on its own. Also, by the late nineteen fifties we started getting into the space age. Spootnick was the first man made satellite to go into orbit. It was launched on October fourth, nineteen fifty seven. It essentially just went beep, sent out a little radio signal as it moved through its orbital pattern. But this still had an enormous impact around the world.

For one thing, folks in the United States became terrified because if the USSR could launch a payload into space, then they potentially launch a nuclear weapon at the United States aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then America suddenly felt a threat that earlier had been hard for them to really imagine, because otherwise the thought was they would have to fly nuclear payloads over in bomber aircraft which could

be intercepted between the USSR the United States. Now there was this very real threat of things being delivered via missile. But in addition to this fun source of existential dread, there was also the concern that should you create a satellite that was capable of maintaining orbit for a while, and you outfit it with the right kinds of equipment, it would pass over the Earth in arcs that could gather information using stuff like powerful cameras, you could spy

on other countries well beyond even the stratosphere. And sure, at first we would need to be able to retrieve the payloads of these dallites. They wouldn't be designed to stay up there Perpetually, they would come down and we would have to retrieve them in order to get the information that was captured. But over time we'd be able to maintain a live connection with these satellites. So we were entering the era of satellite surveillance. However, balloons would

continue to remain useful. For one thing, you could deploy balloons pretty quickly, whereas with satellites there's a whole lot of prep work that goes into it. Even if you want to divert a satellite, that's not always possible, and when it is, it's not always easy, So sometimes you need to have an alternative that you can use quickly. Also, balloons remain useful because folks expect higher tech approaches to surveillance.

America used helium balloons carrying cameras both infrared and visible light video cameras to surveil a rock nearly twenty years ago, around two thousand and four. The US also made similar use of observation balloons over Afghanistan during that extremely long war. Okay, so we get to the point now where surveillance balloons can be more sophisticated. Right, you can have a surveillance balloon that has a perpetual radio connection back to a control point, so you can get real time data from

these surveillance balloons. It's no longer let it go hope that you can retrieve it later and then get to the data. Then now we can have a perpetual signal. When you can pair it with stuff like solar panels, then the balloons payload can continue to draw a power from solar power and be an action longer. These are things that were not possible, you know, obviously early on in the use of spy balloons. But now let's get to the Chinese balloon that got us started on this

whole topic. On January twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is a part of a US military organization, detects and begins to track a balloon that's drifting over Alaska, which is in the northwest of the United States. It borders Canada, it is not

part of the contiguous US At the time. The agency determined that there was no risk from the balloon, either from physical threats or from surveillance, so the agency decided to just continue tracking it there was Since it didn't stand as a threat, there was no reason to intervene at that moment. On January thirtieth, the balloon drifted over

into Canadian airspace. Nor Rad kept eyes on the balloon, and experts determined that, based upon the fact the balloon had solar panels to power its payload, the balloon's purpose was likely to gather intelligence. It was most likely a spy balloon. They also saw that the balloon appeared to be outfitted with propellers and motors, indicating that it could be radio controlled to direct its flight, so it could at least move in areas that we're not just determined

by air currents. On January thirty first, twenty twenty three, the balloon passed out of Canadian airspace and back over into US airspace. This time it was over Idaho, and it's at this point that the US President, Joe Biden,

ordered the military to shoot down the balloon. The military decided it was best to shoot down the balloon when it wasn't over a populated area, both to minimize the chance for damage to citizens and citizen property, as well as to increase the chances that the military would be

able to retrieve the payload. Plus, at the time, the balloon was not passing over any really secret bases or anything or military operations, so they were thinking, if it's over Idaho and it's not over something sensitive, we can let it be for now and wait for it to move over to a place where we can take it down safely. In the time, the military continued to track the progress of the balloon and started to make proactive decisions to prevent it from being able to gather any

useful intelligence. They would postpone or cancel things that would potentially get picked up by the balloon. They curtailed all unencrypted communication so that the balloon wouldn't be able to pick up on radio communications between military units that might give some sensitive information to the Chinese. They were minimizing the amount of information that this balloon could potentially snoop in on and send back to China. The next couple

of days had the US tracking the balloon. Some folks on the conservative side of the political spectrum began to criticize the Biden administration for not taking action already they didn't have all the information, though personally, I think trying to avoid having debris hit citizens as a worthwhile endeavor, but then what do I know? Anyway, By Friday, February third, China had actually owned up to having launched this balloon.

But China was claiming that it was essentially a weather balloon that just got blown off course, that this was not intended to fly into US airspace and in fact was part of a scientific operation, and the fact that it was outfitted with propellers and motors kind of contradicted that claim a bit. And the US said, we are not buying it because we use that same excuse with the Soviets back in the fifties, and we know it's a lie because we lied back then. And further, the

US said this was a violation of its sovereignty. Also interesting side note, when it comes to airspace, we actually do not have a firm international agreement on the vertical limitations of airspace, Like we know how far out it extends from a country, but we don't know how far up it extends. At least we don't agree on that.

And this gets complicated because stuff like satellites obviously can cross the entire planet many times in a day, like some do a full orbit in like ninety minutes, so if you had to quest permission to cross over the areas that a satellite was traveling around, that would be impractical. So we're kind of in a murky area here. Well.

On Saturday, February fourth and f twenty two, Stealth Fighter, one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world, takes off from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, flies to an area off the coast of South Carolina, and it fires an AIM nine X sidewinder air to air missile at this balloon, which at that point was at an altitude of between sixty thousand and sixty five thousand feet. Needless to say, the balloon did not survive this encounter with a missile. The wreckage fell into an area that's

about six miles off the coast of South Carolina. This is well within the twelve miles of territorial waters, so this still makes it a US based operation. The US still has sovereignty over that water. The Department of Defense issues a statement that reassures US citizens that the balloon never posed any sort of physical threat, so it wasn't carrying a weapons payload, but that it did violate US sovereignty.

Further review of earlier intelligence then revealed that China had flown balloons over the US at least four times in the recent past that were not intercepted or taken down. Three of those incidents happened while Trump was president. One happened earlier in Biden's presidency. On February tenth, twenty twenty three, the US shot down a quote unquote high altitude object off the coast of Alaska. Not at the time, the US wasn't sure if it was in fact a balloon,

let alone where it came from. Further investigation indicated that this particular object was from quote commercial or research entities and therefore totally benign end quote that's according to the White House. So in other words, they shot down a balloon that was not intended to be used for surveillance, but was for some other purpose. And you might, I'd say, this whole balloon thing is kind of taken off, and that the military reaction has similarly been on an upward trajectory.

Dad jokes. The Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade a hobbyist group that sends up helium balloons with small payloads, the sort of pico balloon approach just to do stuff like gathered data, which can end up being things like to help with weather models. They can take photos, high altitude photos. It's really meant to be a science based hobby, and there are like websites out there that will sell you the kits and the and the balloons that you

can use to launch these sorts of things. Anyway, this hobbyist group reported that one of its balloons was quote unquote missing in action. Further, it reported that the last known location was over Alaska, and that on February eleventh and F twenty two jets shot down an unidentified airborne object in that ural vicinity. So the implication is that the US military and what is perhaps an overabundance of caution or you could argue paranoia, shot down a hobbyist

weather balloon. Now, according to weatherboy dot com, the balloon probably costs somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve bucks, and the payload was also probably around that same amount of money. Now, I do not know what the F twenty two used to take down this particular unidentified object, nor can I even say that the F twenty two actually shot down the hobbyist balloon. These could be two separate events that they may not be the hobbyist balloon that this F

twenty two took down. It could just be coincidence. However, what I can say is that a single sidewinder missile costs nearly four hundred thousand dollars. So it's tempting for me to joke that the United States wasted a four hundred thousand dollars weapon to take down a twelve dollar helium balloon carrying a similarly priced hobbyist payload. But we do not know that for certain. I do not know that the object that the F twenty two shot down

was this hobbyist balloon. I don't know what method the pilot used to take down the object. Maybe they didn't use a sidewinder missile at all. So I cannot really be as irresponsible as to joke about it, But boy do I really want to. So. Surveillance balloons are still very much a thing, But so our balloons meant to make scientific observations and to increase our understanding of how

the world and beyond works. This creates a complicated issue, right, how do you determine if a balloon stands as a threat to intelligence or is just there to further our knowledge. There aren't really easy answers to this. The more you know about the origins of the balloon, the more the more you can guess at the intent for that balloon. And I think that's really what you have to rely upon.

But at the same time, if you don't act well, then you get criticized, right because we saw that happen with the first balloon back earlier in February, that if you don't act, you stand at risk of being criticized by the opposition for failing to take the safety of the United States seriously. However, if you act prematurely, then you get criticized of being trigger happy and shooting down

legitimate scientific oriented equipment. It turns into a no win situation, right You act too quickly and you're seen as being irresponsible and paranoid. You don't act quickly enough, you're criticized of not taking security seriously. I don't really have an answer for how we solve this issue. It is a

really difficult one to do. It might even be one of China's objectives, right, like not just to gather surveillance but to create this kind of environment where the current administration really has a no win situation on their hands. They get criticized no matter what they do or don't do in the case of waiting. So yeah, complicated thing. I don't think we're going to see surveillance balloons go away too soon, because again, they can be effective even

if it's just a form of psychological warfare. But I thought this would be an interesting topic. Hope you agree. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future of this show, reach out to me and let me know. You can go on Twitter, tweet at me.

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