It has been discovered that the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down by a US fighter aircraft off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday was made at a facility located at a naval base on a far-flung island in the Communist country.
According to a recent Washington Post article, Beijing’s intelligence operations have long relied heavily on the airship, which sparked a dramatic and public spying scandal that deteriorated relations between China and the United States.
According to the report, the Chinese military has sent balloons into the airspace of rival geopolitical states like Japan, India, and the Philippines in the past.
Prior to this, the Pentagon reported that at least four additional balloons had been found over US airspace in Hawaii, Florida, Texas, and Guam, with three of those discoveries occurring while Donald Trump was president.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken delayed his trip to China last Friday due to the balloon hours before he was scheduled to depart. While on Tuesday, China’s military minister turned down US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s invitation to address the recent events.
Lines between our forces are crucial in situations like these, the Pentagon said in a statement. Sadly, the PRC has turned down our plea. We remain committed to maintaining open lines of communication,” according to Politico.
According to a senior official, China’s airship program marks a “huge effort” under its espionage initiatives. The program is situated in the Yulin Naval Base on the southern Chinese island of Hainan.
While a Japanese official told the newspaper that a UFO was thought to have been spotted over the nation in 2020. In retrospect, many are understanding it was a Chinese spying weapon, the official said. But at the time, nobody had ever seen this, so it was purely novel.
The number of spy balloons the Chinese military has is unknown to intelligence officials. When asked how many sightings there had been recently, an official did respond with the phrase “dozens,” according to the Post.
The publication continued by stating that a surveillance balloon crashed in Hawaii in June 2022. The US military was able to learn important details about Chinese military technologies as a consequence.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charlie “Tuna” Moore said why utilizing a balloon for espionage purposes is preferable to employing more advanced technology: “If you have a balloon that’s traveling really slowly you have persistence that you can’t get from a satellite.”
According to Moore, satellites often have only a few seconds to snap photos of their intended destinations.
Biden administration officials briefed foreign ambassadors from 40 countries about the balloon this week in Washington and Beijing.
An official stated that on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman briefed roughly 150 foreign diplomats from 40 embassies, and on Monday and Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing assembled diplomats from other countries to share American research on the balloon.
The senior administration official said, “We want to make sure that we are sharing as much as we can with nations throughout the globe that may also be vulnerable to these sorts of activities.”
According to China, the “unexpected, isolated occurrence” included a weather balloon that had veered off track and entered American airspace. It denounced the shooting down and charged an overreaction on the part of the US.
The balloon that penetrated American airspace in the last days of January and sailed above American military installations was not a weather research balloon, as Beijing claimed, but rather an airship that was employed for spying, according to diplomats in Beijing who attended the briefings.
According to the diplomats at the briefing in Beijing, they were informed that the balloon’s solar panels meant it required more energy than a weather balloon and that its flight path did not follow the direction of the wind naturally.
According to US authorities, the balloon had rudders and propellers.
We find it difficult to think it is a civilian weather balloon, said a Beijing-based Asian military official, “based on the U.S. briefing, our own knowledge of such balloons, and the fact that China has so far failed to identify the corporation or organization that owns this balloon.”
The details were consistent with what the Pentagon had previously told journalists, according to which the balloons were a component of a Chinese airborne fleet that had also infringed on the sovereignty of other nations.
Using advanced reconnaissance drones known as the Kingfish and the Swordfish to find the wreckage, Navy divers started retrieving bits of the balloon from the ocean bottom on Tuesday.
The Navy has switched to an all-underwater hunt for the giant balloon’s remains after gathering all of the white fabric and shell structure that were floating on the surface.
Divers were in the sea collecting what they could as Navy and Coast Guard troops were using underwater drones to find and map the debris field, according to authorities.
Small boats were being used to transport the debris already gathered to a few nearby locations, including a Coast Guard station south of Myrtle Beach. Depending on its size, the debris will eventually be taken to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, or other locations where experts can analyze it, according to the officials, who spoke anonymously to discuss a current military operation.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of U.S. Northern Command and the man in charge of the recovery attempt, will inform members of Congress on the balloon.
The ability of the balloon to gather information and send it back to China while traveling eastward through the United States after crossing the Canadian border into Idaho has been questioned by lawmakers on a number of occasions.
White House and Pentagon officials have mostly refrained from revealing any information about the capabilities of the balloon.
In the disputed South China Sea last week, a Chinese fighter aircraft approached within 20 feet of a U.S. air force plane, forcing it to do evasive maneuvers to prevent a deadly collision in international airspace, the US military said at the time.
The near approach came as a result of what the US has described as a recent pattern of more risky activity by Chinese military aircraft.
A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet and a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft were engaged in the incident, which happened on December 21, according to a statement from the American military.
The J-11 is shown flying almost side by side with the RC-135 in the footage. As the Chinese jet approaches, the American pilot is compelled to quickly drop away from the other aircraft.
»China’s spy balloon factory: Communists have been pumping out surveillance airships for YEARS«