UFO’s being shot down by USA/Canada

[Sackboii]

15 minutes ago, rollover said:

tass

😄

Whilst I do not believe some of the things posted by Western media, I most certainly not believe anything posted by TASS.

[rollover]

American fighter jets shoot down three UFOs in three days

 

 

Daily Mail

 

[zugzwang]

 

[Staffsknot]

11 hours ago, zugzwang said:

 

Hate to break it to you Zug but China are now claiming it has had balloons coming over... is this Chinese paranoia now like you say its US paranoia? 

Ooops own goal

[zugzwang]

First they claimed they'd never seen one before!

Then they claimed three had overflown the US when Trumpy was on the throne.

Then they admitted they'd been tracking the thing for days after its launch from Hainan Island and it... 'may have drifted into US airspace by mistake.'

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-spy-balloon-news-shot-down-ufo-b2282756.html?src=rss

Spy balloon – live: Aircraft may have drifted into US mainland by mistake as China threatens ‘countermeasures’

US agencies tracked a Chinese surveillance balloon for several days after it launched from Hainan Island near China’s south coast, though intelligence officials are reportedly considering that strong air currents may have inadvertantly pulled the balloon off its track to send it over America’s mainland.

Officials told The Washington Post that they are considering that the balloon may have drifted into North American airspace at least partially by mistake after veering sharply from its course, though China likely seized on the opportunity to collect intelligence as the balloon hovered above the heartland.

The revelation comes as the White House announced on Tuesday that the three other objects shot down by American fighter jets in recent days were likely used for commercial or other “benign” purposes.

Chinese authorities, meanwhile, have suggested “countermeasures” after the balloon incident and accused the US of deploying high-altitude balloons above its airspace 10 times over the last year. The White House has denied the allegations.

[rollover]

Object downed by $439,000 US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon

A group of amateur balloon enthusiasts in Illinois might have solved the mystery of one of the unknown flying objects shot down by the US military last week.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory. “For now we are calling pico balloon K9YO missing in action,” the group’s website says.

If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 (£365,000) to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12 (£10).

Guardian

[Hectors House]

On 12/02/2023 at 21:32, Sackboii said:

 

Something new ? Or only hearing about it now since the first ‘Chinese Spy Balloon’ ?
 

 

Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF

Steve Trimble February 16, 2023

 

A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.

 

The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.

 

But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.

 

There are suspicions among other prominent members of the small, pico-ballooning enthusiasts’ community, which combines ham radio and high-altitude ballooning into a single, relatively affordable hobby.

 

“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” says Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a Silicon Valley company that makes purpose-built pico balloons for hobbyists, educators and scientists.

 

The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type.

 

“I’m guessing probably they were pico balloons,” said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Medlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

 

Aviation Week contacted a host of government agencies, including the FBI, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Security Council (NSC) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for comment about the possibility of pico balloons. The NSC did not respond to repeated requests. The FBI and OSD did not acknowledge that harmless pico balloons are being considered as possible identities for the mystery objects shot down by the Air Force.

 

“I have no update for you from NORAD on these objects,” a NORAD spokesman says.

 

On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects “could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.

 

Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade. Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.

 

The balloons can come in several forms. Some enthusiasts still use common, Mylar party balloons, with a set of published calculations to determine the amount of gas to inject. But the round-shaped Mylar balloons often are unable to ascend higher than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to different materials.

 

Medlin says he uses a foil balloon sold by Japanese company Yokohama for $12. The material has proven to be resilient for long periods at high altitude, he says, even if the manufacturer never intended the balloon to be used for that purpose. An alternative is Meadows’ SBS, which makes a series of balloons designed specially for circumnavigational flights.

 

The pico-ballooning community is nervous about the negative attention by some members of Congress and the White House, who have called the objects shot down at altitudes of 20,000-40,000 ft. dangerous to civil aviation.

 

“We did assess that their altitudes were considerably lower than the Chinese high-altitude balloon and did pose a threat to civilian commercial air traffic,” Kirby says. “And while we have no specific reason to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn’t rule that out.”

 

In fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries—North Korea, Yemen and the UK­—restrict transmissions from balloons in their airspace, so the community has integrated geofencing software into the tracking devices. The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace.

 

The community is also nervous that their balloons could be shot down next. Medlin says one of his balloons—call sign W5KUB-112—is projected by HYSPLIT to enter U.S. airspace on Feb. 17. It already circumnavigated the globe several times, but its trajectory last carried the object over China before it will enter either Mexican or U.S. airspace.

 

“I hope,” Medlin said, “that in the next few days when that happens we’re not real trigger-happy and start shooting down everything.”

 

No link unfortunately as this was on an email sent to me