Somebody answer me this; The Biden Administration is touting it's "surveillance improvements" that allowed it to detect this thing...and were also able to detect at least three other balloons that allegedly passed over during the Trump Administration but went undetected. Really? Just how in the hell good does your surveillance system have to be in order to detect a 200 foot balloon at 6,000 feet that can be easily seen from the ground? What am I missing here?
Good camouflage on the Chinese balloon. The Mexican spy balloon not so much but it does drop a ton of candy if you shoot it down.
Yeah, I knew that...typo. Thanks for the correction. Slightly less than double the cruising altitude of jet airliners and near the max for fighter jets. But the point is...how can you NOT detect something that large (2/3 of a football field) that can even be seen from the ground?
By the time Biden decided to give the OK the damage was done. The balloon probably transmitted updated video of all the military installations it flew over and was disposable at that point. My question is what if that balloon was spreading chemical or bio agents? Or what would we do if those were enemy aircraft, wait until they dropped their payloads and returned over the sea to shoot them down?
I assume that some of you have been to Montana and Wyoming and you know how desolate parts of those states are. I'm not buying that they didn't shoot the balloon down because they were afraid of hitting something. I'm pretty sure that the odds were just a long that that balloon could have hit a pleasure craft or fishing vessel. The only difference is that they could have easily recovered the debris on land rather than having to put divers down into the ocean. How stupid are they?
Hey, driving through Wyoming the first time, I understood why they say that the state tree is the telephone pole.
Given what's happened lately re: balloons, my unexplainable fear of heights, and the cost, I'll pass.