The Balloon

[Anomalocaris]

All for an escaped weather balloon.  With this level of manufactured bullshit you'd think there weren't thousands of these released and lost every day or somethin.

It's worth noting that the China Daily newspaper (the PRC's official newspaper) says "To spy on the US with a balloon, one must both fall far behind to use a 1940s technology and be advanced enough to control its flight across the ocean. Those fabricating the lie are only exposing their ignorance."

And given that, as far as I can tell, such unmanned balloons are virtually impossible to control, the PRC actually has a point here.

That’s may seem like common sense, but it is not accurate.  Not all forms of spying requires the spying package be accurately delivered to a specific target.     Air sniffers looking for traces of nuclear tests or chemical weapon tests can do their sniffing from hundred or miles away.   Broad band signal intelligence package can also work from a wide region around the source of signal emission.

this is a high altitude balloon that rides in stratosphere jet streams.   During WWII the Japanese were able to take advantage of stratosphere jet stream to send thousands of balloon bombs to the U.S.    

The Chinese don’t lack global atmospheric and ocean weather surveillance capability with their weather satellites network, which is the second largest in the world,  they very likely can map the current global pattern of jet stream in detail in near real time.  So they no doubt can accurately predict where balloons riding on jet stream will go on any given day far more precisely than the Japanese.

unless the wreckage of this balloon is recovered, it would be difficult to conclusively prove this is a spy balloon and not a weather balloon.    But using balloon to trespass sovereign airspace for spying is not ridiculous or far fetched even for a power than can call on a large constellation of spy satellites.   Although it is brazen.    Spy satellites can not sniff the air for trace contents.    Spy satellites also can not evsdrop on those electronic signals that gets reflected by the ionosphere.