CNN’s Peter Bergen: the cost of chaos: The US Air Force as a spy balloon program in the early 1950s and 1960s

Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst, New America VP, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views he expresses are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

And it reminded me that when my father, Tom Bergen, was a lieutenant in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he worked on a program to help send balloons into Soviet airspace.

He worked at Headquarters Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He was involved in the project to deploy balloons that carried cameras over the Soviet Union. Turkey launched these spy balloons.

The program that my dad was involved in has been secret since the mid-sixties, but it has since been declassified.

The Overflight by a Balloon: A Small Sample of Spy Satellite Intelligence and the Pentagon’s Anomaly Resolution Office

US officials have said that the Chinese balloon, in contrast, had a payload – or the equipment it was carrying – the size of roughly three buses and was capable of collecting signals intelligence and taking photos. The balloon flew over sensitive sites in Montana according to officials, but the administration worked to minimize its intelligence collection capabilities.

Now the United States and its rivals have these new-fangled gizmos called “spy satellites,” which can take photos! They can do full-motion video! They can take thermal images that show people moving around. When the skies are clear, they are able to spy on virtually anything with a resolution of centimeters.

You can purchase closeup images of the Russian battle group in Ukraine from a store if you want, because commercial satellite imagery is getting cheaper. A private equity firm acquired Maxar Technologies for $6 billion, and they’ve built up a profitable business on this model.

In other words, the overflight of US territory by a balloon is not a national security problem as a bunch of Republican politicians from Donald Trump on down have implied.

But it may help explain, at least in part, an element of a little-noticed report published by the US Office of Director of National Intelligence last month.

The report examined more than 500 reports of unidentified objects in the sky over the past two decades, many of them reported by US Navy and US Air Force personnel and pilots. These reports were assessed by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a fancy name for the office that tries to examine UFO sightings.

The Shootdown of the UFO Associated with the F-35 Fighter Aerial Flight: The US Department of Defense and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

China has done worse. The US blames it on benefit from work of hackers who stole design data about the F-35 Fighter aircraft, and on the personal information of more than 20 million Americans who were current or former members of the US government. China called the F-35 theft report “baseless” and denied responsibility for the OPM hacking.

An AIM-09X missile was used to shoot down the object, the same missile that was used to shoot down a Chinese balloon on February 4.

“The Administration not yet been able to definitely assess what these most recent objects are,” the White House memo said. “In each instance, we have followed the same basic course: The Administration assessed that they do not pose any direct threat to people on the ground, that they are unmanned, that they do not have maneuvering or propulsion capabilities, and that they aren’t sending communication signals.”

US government officials said at the beginning of the month that the Chinese spy balloon was roughly the size of three buses. On Friday, the US Defense Department officials said that the spaceship they shot down on Friday was probably not a balloon but a small car. The object shot down on Saturday, on orders from Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was described by Canadian officials as cylindrical and seemingly smaller than a surveillance balloon. US officials said the UFO shot down on Sunday was octagonal and didn’t seem to be carrying anything.

Two F-22 fighters were dispatched to track the mysterious object over Alaska. The Royal Canadian Air Force took part in the formation when it crossed into Canada. It quickly prompted calls between President Biden and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand.

US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau both approved the shoot down on Saturday, according to a statement from the White House.

The Story of Three Shot-Down Objects in a Superhigh-Energy Barge – Just a Moment After the Beijing Spy Balloon

While Canadian authorities conduct recovery operations, the FBI will be working closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The intelligence told CNN that some pilots said it interfered with their sensors, but other pilots said they did not experience that.

It did, however, pose a risk to people and property on the ground if it were to be shot down, as officials said it was roughly 200 feet tall and the payload weighed more than a couple of thousand pounds.

There is no part of the object that was shot down by the US Air Force jet over the Yukon territory that has been recovered. “Until that happens and that object is confirmed to be an identifiable pico balloon, any assertions or claims that our balloon was involved in that incident are not supported by facts.”

Defense officials also told lawmakers that the object shot down over Lake Huron, in Michigan on Sunday, “subsequently slowly descended” into the water after impact.

The Defense Department isn’t sending a memo to Capitol Hill, but they are still sending correspondence, an official told CNN late Monday.

The new details come as lawmakers on Capitol Hill are pressing to gain a better understanding of why the Biden administration shot down three unidentified objects in three days following the take down of the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the US the previous weekend.

Lawmakers and congressional aides told CNN that the consecutive shoot-downs felt on the surface like an overcorrection to the Chinese spy balloon incident, though they cautioned that it was still too early to say definitively.

“My guess is that now we are more aware of looking for them, because we’re seeing these things happen in quick succession.” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

The recent high-altitude balloon shooting and the search for the next-to-leading order airborne debris: Sen. Joe Biden and the Senate Intelligence Committee

The students track their balloons, much like the Bottlecap Brigade club. There are at least ten to twenty more balloons floating around the world, so there is no way for us to bring them down remotely.

Questions about the balloon and other objects that were recently shot down — and the U.S. approach to the airborne objects — prompted a classified intelligence briefing for the entire Senate Tuesday morning. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a closed hearing in the afternoon.

The White House on Monday denied that President Joe Biden’s recent actions to take down high altitude objects were the result of political pressure after earlier criticisms that he waited too long to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon.

“These were decisions based purely and simply on what was in the best interest of the American people,” National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby said Monday.

A defense official said that the radar used by North American Aerospace Defense Command was adjusted after the initial high-altitude balloon sighting. “We continue to refine detection settings, and that won’t stop just because we have identified these smaller objects,” the official said.

A White House office of legislative affairs sent a memo to Capitol Hill saying that they were trying to find what was left of objects to learn more about them.

The White House, recognizing the potential for the spread of outlandish theories, has sought to tamp down on fears the objects could have originated from a hostile state or even from outer space. The White House official suggested that they were likely harmless.

“We have no further details about the object at this time, including the full scope of its capabilities, its purpose, or its origin,” the Pentagon memo states.

NORTHCOM said in a statement later in the day that it would end the search for two of the three objects shot down over North America last weekend, stating that”the US military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate the debris.”

The first missile that was launched by an F-16 fighter jet at the object near Lake Huron on Sunday did not hit the target, three people briefed on the matter told CNN.

The Pentagon and White House had not previously disclosed that the first missile did not strike the target, but NORTHCOM and NORAD Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters on Sunday that acquiring and targeting the object was difficult because of its small size.

The pilots opted to use short-range AIM-9X Sidewinders, which are capable of seeing the heat contrast between an object and the surrounding area. But even so, the first missile failed to hit its target. It is not known what did to the missile.

Joint Briefing on the Three High-Altitude Spy Balloon Debris Objects Shot Down over the U.S. and Canada

The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were balloons tied to private companies, Recreation or research institutions, according to President Joe Biden.

On Capitol Hill, senators emerging from a classified briefing on the objects said they were reassured after hearing from administration officials that the objects posed no threat to the American people.

Sen. Romney said there were many things up in the air from time to time and he was not worried about it.

The final pieces of debris will be taken to the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Virginia for counterintelligence exploitation, as has happened with the previous surface and subsurface debris recovered. U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard vessels have departed the area. Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted,” the statement added.

He said that attempts have been hampered by the geographic challenges, as well as the weather, on Lake Huron, in the Yukon wilderness and on sea ice north of Alaska.

“Pretty tough weather conditions, let alone just geographically, just tough time of year,” Kirby said, noting that the Chinese spy balloon debris recovery off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month was also hampered by high seas in the Atlantic Ocean due to the time of year.

Kirby said the government was relying instead on information and expertise from the Federal Aviation Administration and the intelligence community to glean what they could about the mysterious airborne devices.

An administration official said that the government is leaning on the US intelligence community to assess the objects. The objects that were shot down have been studied as well as the observations by military pilots.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday the search area in Yukon was a “fairly large area” in dense wilderness. Other Canadian officials were candid Monday about the difficult task of recovering debris from high-altitude objects shot down over Canada and the US.

We are working very hard to find them, but we don’t know if we will. It could pose some major challenges for us if we want to recover from the lake, because of the terrain in the Yukon, which is very difficult, and the marine conditions are not favorable at the moment.

Observations of the Airborne Active Galactic Nuclei: Constraints on Possible Extraterrestrial Activity from a White House Press Secretary

The White House press secretary said that the US military had not shot down aliens from outer space.

There is no evidence of aliens or alien activity with the recent take- downs, she said. All of you knew that, so I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that. It was important for us to say that because we have been hearing a lot about it.

Officials have been particularly sensitive to the inherently mysterious nature of the airborne objects, and how ripe the recent series of events was for conspiracy theories.

“Everyone wants answers that no one has at the moment,” one official said, conceding there was a risk with the void of information that conspiracies could sprout.

A determination was made that even in the absence of much concrete information that could be shared with the public about the three recently downed objects, it would be prudent to publicly rule out – as quickly as possible – the possibility of extraterrestrial activity, sources said.

Administration officials still say their goal is to provide information but the circumstances are less than ideal for effective communication.

Biden himself has expressed a desire to be as transparent as possible about the devices with both Congress and the American public, according to officials, but the president has acknowledged that without a full picture of what the objects were, his ability to communicate on them is limited.

The situation was ripe for conspiracy theories and so it would be wise for Biden to speak to the public, according to a lawmaker on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Detection of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena in the U.S. After the Balloonmania

Researchers say it’s the latter, and they note that even before the balloon mania began, the US government tracked many UFOs in its airspace, including a number of balloons. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in January which was about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs. Between March 5, 2021, and August 30, 2022, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office had 247 reports of UAPs. In a wider pool of 366 UAP reports that also includes newly discovered incidents that occurred before 2021, ODNI said that 163 were balloons “or balloon-like entities,” 26 were “Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” or drones, and six were “attributed to clutter.” It’s true that not all balloons are spy balloons.

“This isn’t new; we just hadn’t been detecting them in the past,” says Brynn Tannehill, a RAND Corporation senior technical analyst and a former naval aviator. “I suspect that filters on US systems had previously been ignoring things that were too slow, high, or small to be considered threats. Now that the parameters on the filters have been adjusted, we’re seeing more of what was already there for the past few years.”

The military ended recovery operations for the Chinese balloon shot down off the coast of Carolina, as well as the search for flying objects it later downed off of the coast of Alaska and over Lake Erie, despite days of futile searches.

The recovery operation has included the use of a crane to bring up large pieces of the airship, which was kept aloft by a balloon estimated to be up to 200 feet tall.

The large amount of cargo is categorized by the commander of NORAD as a jet airliner type of size, weighing more than 2,000 pounds.

The U.S. has dismissed that explanation emphatically — most notably by blowing the balloon out of the sky on Feb. 4, after it had soared over much of the continental U.S.

The Biden administration had repeatedly pointed to the need to locate and recover the downed objects to be able to identify what they were and who launched them, but US officials had grown less optimistic about recovering debris from them.

In the U.S., the news of a Chinese balloon touched off an alert. China said that it was another balloon that was badly off-course, meaning events were beyond the country’s control, after the Pentagon said it had identified a similar balloon over Latin America.

The U.S. Missing Balloons “Flying in the Sky”: NIBBB, NoRAD, and Issuing an apology to China

The National Security Council is expected to give new guidance by the end of the week on how the US will handle cases of unidentified aerial objects.

China countered U.S. accusations with its own claims, alleging that the U.S. “flew spy balloons into Chinese airspace more than 10 times since January 2022 without Beijing’s permission,” as NPR’s Emily Feng reported.

A small balloon that was reported to be over Alaska on Saturday is missing in action, the same day the US military shot down an object in the same region.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon brigade didn’t blame the US government for taking out one of their balloons, instead noting in a post that its last transmission was near a small island off the west coast of Alaska.

The club published the coordinates of the balloon on Tuesday. Cary said the club was calling Pico Balloon K9YO missing in action.

NoRAD deferred questions to the National Security Council for identification of objects but had no additional information according to a spokeswoman.

The NIBBB website explains that a small transmitter with a gps tracking and antenna is sent to a balloon filled with hydrogen, which will travel at the speed of the Jetstream.

We found a fix for the six that ended up in trees. We believe we have a fix for the balloons not saying hello. There were balloons in the United States. We had nine balloons in the United States. Three balloons almost made it around the world. We have two balloons flying around the world,” the group said on its website.

Kirby’s remarks on the shooting of an airborne object by a fighter jet to make a point: Implications for the FBI and the public

The public will probably never get an explanation of what the objects were that US fighters had shot down over three days.

National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby suggested as much at a White House press briefing on Friday, telling reporters, “We would like nothing better, but I can’t sit here and promise you that we’ll get to that level of fidelity of detail.”

The Canadians have decided not to look for an object that fell into Lake Ontario after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were unable to locate it.

“So pretty tough conditions, going to be very difficult to find them, let alone once you find that debris be able to do the forensics to identify it. So I can’t promise you that we’ll know definitively one way or the other,” he added.

Biden said the US would be crafting parameters on how to handle objects that could pose a risk to civilian aircraft.

Did the U.S. use a fighter jet to shoot down a research balloon in Canada to make a point? That’s the question the public — and the FBI — wants to answer, after the U.S. military shot down several unidentified airborne objects last weekend.

Federal law requires most large flying objects to be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. Pico balloons, like K9YO-15, are so small and light that they aren’t subject to those requirements. The radio transmitter is registered with the FCC.

The Biden Administration Cannot confirm any reports of a shot-down Yukon balloon or the K9YO-15 dog nihilo

The Biden administration said on Friday that it cannot confirm any reports potentially identifying the objects that were shot down, citing ongoing investigations.

Officials have not yet offered an explanation about the origin or purpose of the unidentified object. An intriguing theory emerged in the community of balloon enthusiasts that a high altitude balloon was shot out of the sky and similar to a Mylar party balloon.

“Before the Yukon balloon was shot down, us amateurs were watching [K9YO-15] go towards Alaska,” Dan Bowen, a stratospheric balloon consultant, told NPR.

While researching and designing small balloons a few years ago, he and others used a tracking website to follow the dog known as K9YO-15. The tool also gives a forecast of a wandering balloon’s likely path.

“We really hoped it wouldn’t be intercepted after the prediction showed it was heading from Alaska to the west,” he said. The intercept was reported at a moment when we knew who it was.

The FBI has spoken to the balloon club, according to a NORAD spokes person.

The FBI and NORAD told NPR on Friday that there was no new information for them to give.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1158048921/pico-balloon-k9yo

The Launch of K9YO-15: A Pixo Balloon to the Highest Latitudes in the Universe, not in the U.S.

K9YO-15 was launched last fall by members of the Bottlecap Balloon club — the group takes its name from the Pixar movie Up, which prominently features both balloons and a bottle cap.

Its journey began with a launch from Libertyville, Ill., on Oct. 10, 2022. Before it disappeared, it was one of the club’s longest-flying balloons; in its 123 days aloft, it had circumnavigated the Earth nearly seven times.

After they’re launched, the balloons expand as they climb, swelling until the Mylar envelope pressurizes. They stop at altitudes where the air density is more than the balloon’s. The balloons float the same way a fish bladder or a submarine do beneath the water.

One thing that might make a pico balloon hard to shoot down, Bowen said, is its small size. He said that the balloon lifted a circuit board and two tissue paper-thin solar cells.

“These balloons are pressurized just below the point of popping,” Bowen said. “So if you can hit them with [aircraft] turbulence, they’ll pop. If they get hit with a sonic boom from nearby, absolutely going to pop. The easiest ways to pop them are.

One explanation is that the balloon’s GPS pings require solar power. At higher latitudes in wintertime — like the recent path of K9YO-15 — the tiny solar panels can struggle to receive enough sunlight to power the balloon’s lightweight systems.

The balloon was equipped with a GPS module, a transmitter, a tiny computer and a small solar panel package. The post about the launch states that the total weight was 16.4 grams and that it was half an ounce.

People who like ballooning are happy to see so much interest. And they’re hoping to be able to keep pursuing it, even if the U.S. and other countries adopt new rules.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1158048921/pico-balloon-k9yo

“Walking with little robots” — a tale of two robots, one for a girl and a robot for the kids

“These are often launched by the students at school,” he said. The kids love seeing their little robot creature walking around the planet, and the kids who have figured this out go to schools to get them excited about science and engineering.