Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/lawmakers-praise-successful-downing-suspected-chinese-spy-balloon/story?id=96897346

A few days ago, a strange ball appeared in the sky over Alaska. A couple of days later, the ball was hovering ominously over Montana, and you might have seen ridiculous videos of people trying to shoot it down despite being explicitly told by the government not to. So, what was this thing? This simple question has generated a diplomatic crisis and raised some interesting questions regarding the motivations of the Chinese government.

According to the Chinese government, the supposed manufacturer of this device, this object was an innocent weather balloon designed to record innocent weather balloon things. However, the United States military vehemently denies this, and they claim that it is a surveillance drone that has violated our sovereign airspace.

This slight disagreement has led to a cascade of diplomatic action, the first being U.S. Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, canceling his trip to Beijing. In response, the Chinese government has pushed its side of the story harder and is attempting to stabilize the tension. The event has proved to be embarrassing for China because even if the UFO is a weather balloon as claimed, they are to blame for it drifting off course, causing panic, and shutting down airports.

So why wasn’t the balloon shot down immediately? Why did the U.S. military wait until it drifted over the Atlantic Ocean to pop it? The official answer is that there would be too much dangerous debris crashing down on American civilians if the UFO was to be destroyed over land. If this is true, the surveillance drone must not have been as deadly a threat as the U.S. government claimed.

In fact, a surveillance drone like this does not pose a serious threat to national security because China’s large reconnaissance satellite network has far greater capabilities than a single surveillance balloon. In addition, the U.S. was jamming all communications from the balloon, so anything it did record is now in the hands of the U.S. government. All in all, thanks to a precision missile strike that left the electronics intact to “gently” splash into the Atlantic instead of a field in Montana, the U.S. government may gain valuable intel from this encounter.

So why did the Chinese government allow this to occur? In the last decade, a variety of Chinese surveillance drones have been showing up in odd places, and these UFOs have been the cause of many new conspiracy theories. Perhaps one of these just got lost and drifted into American airspace. However, this would imply that the spy balloon just happened to fly over top-secret airbases on accident: a theory that the Pentagon is skeptical to believe in. The alternative is puzzling as well: the Chinese government deliberately dispatched an unnecessary spy balloon to fly a mission that would violate international law, cause significant diplomatic damage, generate more anti-Chinese propaganda, be unable to transmit any gathered intel, and result in the inevitable capture of precious surveillance technologies by a rival foreign power. If this is all true, I have no idea what the goal of this mess was.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/politics/balloon-congress-surveillance-report.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/us/politics/ufo-military-reports.html

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/02/05/moment-china-spy-balloon-shot-vo-acostanr-vpx-sot.cnn