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UAPs Over North America (February 2023)

Thing is, every government has it's own secret surveillance equipment floating about. There might've been an unspoken treaty which said "if you don't bring down ours, we won't bring down yours" kind of thing.
Once America broke this (hypothetical) agreement, bets are off and it's open season!
 
eburacum said:
Mexican fiesta balloons are often 20/30 feet in diameter. The radar filters have deliberately been switched off, or adjusted, in order to detect wandering balloons of this kind. I am not surprised that they are suddenly detecting balloons.
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Shoot down all the balloons, I say. Then whatever is left is...... not balloons. And therefore will probably need to be shot down as well, just in case.
 
charliebrown said:
CNN reports that NORAD reports that the shoot down debris fell on Dead Horse, Alaska, but weather conditions are not good.

CNN claims that the pilots scrambled to intercept Alaska’s UFO have given conflicting reports.

Some pilots claimed their jets were electronically interfered with, some pilots claimed they saw no propulsion system.
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UFO shot down over Dead Horse? How long before someone makes the connect to Snippy? Actually I think I just have....
 
eburacum said:
Mexican fiesta balloons are often 20/30 feet in diameter. The radar filters have deliberately been switched off, or adjusted, in order to detect wandering balloons of this kind. I am not surprised that they are suddenly detecting balloons.
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I suppose that if they start discovering the remains of mariachi bands scattered over the Yukon, that might be a clue.

maximus otter
 
charliebrown said:
The Pentagon keeps saying origin unknown which has really caught the interest of TV news stations like CNN.
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charliebrown said:
We have gone and “ pissed off “ some extraterrestrial race.

Rumors are that these are stationary cylinders at 40,000 feet.
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My money is Cromer is involved. When I said @Swifty should get a hobby, I meant Morris Dancing.....
 
How useful would a balloon be in intelligence gathering....

As opposed to sats?
Or tourists?
Or sympathetic locals??
Or any number of things that I (no espionage guru) havent dreamed up?
 
Kondoru said:
How useful would a balloon be in intelligence gathering
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Balloons have a much more usable 'linger' ability. They move very slowly over an area, and are better for observation than low-earth-orbit satellites which typically will pass over an area very quickly, taking only a minute or two to go from horizon to horizon.
Plus being lower than LEO sats, the resolution of any photographic intelligence gathered is much better.
 
Given the pattern of winds across North America, I think an errant balloon from Mexico drifting up to the Great Lakes area is rather unlikely. The Infamous Chinese Spy Balloon actually took nearly the opposite course a week or so back. Something big enough to bother with shooting down, using a million dollar missile, is well beyond the realm of party favors.

Hard to guess what the Chinese hoped to learn with their balloon, but 12 miles up is close enough to pick up a lot of operational radio traffic from all sorts of installations. Analyzing all that would be a huge task.
 
P'shaw! That won't even buy a decent house in Murrica these days. I'm happy to hear they used a cheap round, as a taxpayer! Sidewinders are often said to cost around a million apiece. People say lots of things, of course. It's interesting that they had no explosives on the one they used on the Chinese balloon. All they needed to do was puncture it. Probably a cannon would do the job, but that missile had video guidance, not the usual heat seeking type. Why screw around with an outsize gun when you can practice shooting a missile? There's a pretty interesting video by a former fighter pilot Youtuber out there. If I run across it, I'll post a link. Apparently they used it as a training mission, with four jets and taking the approach of engaging an active enemy. Fortunately, they haven't had a lot of practice on the real thing recently.
 
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I have heard many reports from US Fighter pilots of seeing round objects which are like large see-through beachballs but have a cube inside. They remain motionless at a set altitude defying winds ect but with no means of propulsion. This description seems to match the information we have been given so far.

In one interview, a pilot said that these objects only became radar-visible after a recent upgrade in radar technology. It wasn't like they were filtered out before, it's just that the upgrade has made the radar more sensitive. So they have been here/around for a while and were physically seen by pilots but not by radar.
 
Apparently there is due to be a Whitehouse press conference/announcement (or something) shortly, 6 pm-ish - according to LBC radio just now.
 
Ringo said:
In one interview, a pilot said that these objects only became radar-visible after a recent upgrade in radar technology. It wasn't like they were filtered out before, it's just that the upgrade has made the radar more sensitive. So they have been here/around for a while and were physically seen by pilots but not by radar.
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The most recent radar systems can now detect an object that is golf-ball-sized. Most of the radar systems in use by the world's military are older tech, and they are gradually upgrading to the higher-resolution systems. It may be as simple as that.
 
What could be problematic is if we end up destroying each other's spy satellites. That could leave a lot of dangerous debris in orbit, which might jeopardize future space launches.
 
I wonder if someone is sending lots of differently shaped balloons to see which ones get intercepted, as a sort of trial and error way of finding the optimal radar cross section to make an invisible stealth balloon - that would explain the variety of shapes that have been reported. This would also have the side effect of providing intelligence on the genuine US response to airspace incursions.

It also occurs to me that perhaps these sorts of incursions have been going on for ages and were largely ignored, but now that the wreckage of the original Montana balloon has been analysed what they found is so unsettling to them that the policy has been changed from ‘look the other way‘ to ‘shoot down on first contact’
 
Xanatic* said:
What could be problematic is if we end up destroying each other's spy satellites. That could leave a lot of dangerous debris in orbit, which might jeopardize future space launches.
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That ship has sailed, unfortunately:

“More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more debris -- too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions -- exists in the near-Earth space environment.

There are approximately 23,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are half a million pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger (up to 0.4 inches, or 1 centimeter) or larger, and approximately 100 million pieces of debris about .04 inches (or one millimeter) and larger. There is even more smaller micrometer-sized (0.000039 of an inch in diameter) debris.

Even tiny paint flecks can damage a spacecraft when traveling at these velocities. A number of space shuttle windows were replaced because of damage caused by material that was analyzed and shown to be paint flecks. In fact, millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low Earth orbit.”

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html

maximus otter
 

White House spokesperson: downed objects 'did not closely resemble' Chinese balloon​


White House NSC spokesperson says:

“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on"

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-objects-white-house-idAFW1N34N04D
 
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I do wonder if they are finding more things because they have been put on high alert.
 
“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on"
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That was a nothing-burger (as I believe they say nowadays).
If these objects were balloons, they may never find the debris in the wilds of Alaska and Canada, or under Lake Yukon. This event will run and run.
 
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MorningAngel said:
I do wonder if they are finding more things because they have been put on high alert.
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Yes. As I said earlier, they have adjusted their radar filters to be sensitive to smaller objects, including balloons.
Note that the BBC have made a basic error in that text you quoted; the first object (object one) was not described as 'car-shaped' but as 'car-sized'; they have arbitrarily adopted a Volkswagen car as an approximate measure of size, not shape.
 
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