One of the year’s most unexpected controversies involved a US fighter jet shooting down a huge Chinese balloon that drifted across the US and Canada in January and February. The incident prompted the postponement of a high-profile US diplomatic visit to China and put the North American Aerospace Defense Command on high alert.
After the wreckage was recovered from the sea, the US government described the balloon as having carried surveillance equipment – something Chinese officials denied – but also acknowledged that it didn’t seem to have collected or sent any data.
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“The balloon still posed a potential national security threat because it had the surveillance capabilities to collect information,” says Timothy Heath at the RAND Corporation, a think tank in California. “Whether China intended to use the balloon to spy on the USA is less clear now.”
US fighter jets subsequently shot down three smaller flying objects of unknown origin, some cylindrical, that were possibly airborne debris, but almost certainly not aliens. That led US President Joe Biden to say he would boost the country’s capabilities for tracking similar objects. Such measures may include increasing radar sensitivity and creating databases to catalogue unidentified flying objects, says Heath.
But “the threat posed by balloons should not be overstated” in comparison with surveillance satellites and drones, he says.
