Aerial Event Megathread

a reply to: steelshed

Fighter pilots are trained to shoot down aircraft. They are geared towards looking for aircraft. Balloons are technically not aircraft. They’re looking for propulsion, and not seeing any. They’re looking for lifting devices, and not seeing them. When you have pilots trained for high tech, sometimes low tech causes confusion at first.

Nena tried to warn us years ago... Just sayin.

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, sparks in the software
Flash the message "Something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
The 99 red balloons go by
99 Decision Street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by
99 knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scrambling the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
As 99 red balloons go by
99 dreams I have had
In every one, a red balloon
It's all over, and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go

The President just finished his public statement regarding the "balloons" recently shot down over the North American continent.

In his statement, he claimed that, although there was nothing to link those objects to a Chinese, or other foreign, surveillance program, and that they were likely commercial or research craft, he ordered that they be shot down due the dander they posed to aircraft.


Errr...


If those three objects were "commercial, scientific, or recreational" balloons, or similar aircraft, such things have been floating/flying at those same altitudes for decades. Now, all of a sudden, they pose a threat to the safety of the flying public, so seriously that it justifies deploying military aircraft to shoot them out of the skies?


Also mentioned was the intent to review current policy regarding such objects, and appropriate responses going forward. Perhaps changing how such objects are permitted in future.

There are a thousand balloon launches for meteorological, recreational, and scientific research purposes in the US each day. Wil some government body (presumably the FAA) now be tasked with reviewing, and approving, every proposed launch?

The backlog of, as yet unapproved, launches will undoubtedly quickly overwhelm whatever agency is tasked.


And back to that assessment of threat.


These vehicles are slow-moving, the primary reason they apparently have been heretofore ignored by defense radar. As such, the only aircraft to which they pose any collision threat to, are those aircraft under the "control" of inattentive pilots.

Who pose a far greater risk to public safety, both in the skies and on the ground.

a reply to: Mantiss2021

Actually, depending on the balloon they were probably higher, and were gradually coming back down. Balloons don’t stay up for “decades”. You might get a year or two, but probably not much longer.

As for the inattentive pilots remark, thanks for telling everyone you’ve never been on a plane. It’s hard enough to see a 747 at five miles, let alone something as small as a balloon. With no TCAS or ADS-B signal to give an idea anything is out there, the odds of seeing something that small, before it’s too late, are essentially zero.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Of course, a particular balloon might stay aloft for days, weeks, or even a few months.

My reference was to the fact that balloons of the sort mentioned in the President's statement, have been flown for decades. I'm sure you realize that a great deal of the information we receive about the speed and direcof the winds aloft is derived from data recorded by balloons sent to those altitudes.

Planes and balloons have been sharing the sky for almost as long as planes have existed.


And except during periods of actual war, the coexistence has been peaceful. Apparently planes have been able to avoid colliding with the hundreds of balloons sharing the space for all these years, regardless ofthe balloons size, or how difficult those balloons were to see.

It just seems a gross exaggeration to claim that an interaction so long established has suddenly become some kind of existential threat requiring annihilation by missile.

a reply to: Mantiss2021

Balloons are generally flown above aircraft altitudes precisely to deconflict with them. A balloon is highly unlikely to cause a catastrophic accident, but they can cause damage, or cause an upset situation if a pilot sees it at the last minute and tries to avoid it. Yes, a missile is probably the last resort, but everyone is over reacting in the other direction right now because people that didn’t understand why the Chinese balloon was allowed to continue raised such an outcry.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

www.dailymail.co.uk...

I smell a cover up. This "Bottlecap Balloon Brigade" sounds like something made up to silence people wondering what the UFOs were. It doesn't 'feel' real at all. Im more convinced it was something nefarious or alien now, more than I was before. This is the ridiculousness we are being sold in lieu of the truth. They treat us like mushrooms - feed us on s@#% and keep us in the dark.

a reply to: deepgreen

It's called a Pico balloon, and they're pretty common among hobby groups. It uses a very small instrument package to monitor the weather, and then transmit data over radio frequencies. They're solar powered so they can operate indefinitely theoretically. Ham radio operators launch them and see how far they go. One went around the world six times over 75 days.

Pico balloons.

However plausible, it is a little too convenient and innocuous

a reply to: deepgreen

You can say that about just about anything. Everything after the Chinese balloon was an over reaction to prove we’re taking airspace defense seriously. Several innocuous balloons got caught up in it because suddenly everything is a spy balloon.

a reply to: deepgreen

A couple things..

As I said previously, sometimes the gov't trips over it's own feet and does something silly, like shoot down a PICO balloon, for example. Sometimes the most highly classified Top Secret things, are those things which are embarrassing. I'm not saying we know for certain yet that it was a PICO, but I am saying if it were, given this admins record and current mood, they would have strong incentive to keep it quiet. Just think of the memes..

As for interfering with sensors, well let's dive into that a bit;

Although the F-22 has a rep as "not as advanced" as the F-35 in terms of its sensor suite it is still an information clearinghouse, and almost certainly capable of receiving a wide range of radio frequencies. This opens up the possibility that a PICO balloon, or other HAM balloon such as a repeater, could transmit frequencies that the F-22 can receive. Within the HAM community there is a growing interest in transmitting more data, and basically having "HAM Internet" by implementing TCP/IP using SDR, and thus the community has quickly gravitated towards higher frequency bands to utilize the increased bandwidth for higher data transmission rates.

This has led to some interesting projects and investment by corporate entities for reasons, and inevitably has discovered some technology limitations, specifically frequency stability. This is a very big deal because if your transmitter cannot stay within it's programmed freq, you're bleeding into other bands - which could be harmless depending on location and power, or could interfere with other equipment. As freq increases into the SHF bands where fighter jet radars operate, current equipment is producing up to 2800 Mhz of cross bleed. That is huge. In other words, if some piece of equipment, like a radar, is tuned to ignore the 5.6 Ghz HAM band, it could still pick up unwanted signals from a HAM operator bleeding outside of that band. More importantly, if the HAM is using SDR which sends digital "pulses" in a repeater, which re-transmits what it receives, in the same band as a fighter jet radar because of cross bleed, it is theoretically possible that the radar set could alert the pilot that there is interference, either unintentional or perhaps intentional. Fighter radars do have multiple channels to avoid interfering with each other, and we know they alert pilots to ECM, so I have no reason to believe they don't alert pilots to interference and the need to change channels. I don't know enough yet to say any of these things are probable, but it does seem possible.

All of this adds up to real mystery, and some coincidental aspects in terms of they seem to all come from or flew through a similar direction—Alaska, Canadian, and north and mid-western US near the Canadian border.
Something really fishy seems to be going on here.


Of course, maybe not---it may just blow over as the mysterious obelisk did.


One other point, maybe someone can weigh in on this.

Maybe it’s naïve but isn’t it possible to spread a terrible chemical attack through a mechanism such as these “objects”

The chemicals they have are almost more frightening than nukes.

And to shoot one down filled with such chemicals sounds like a possibility for disaster

I hope I’m wrong.

a reply to: peaceinoutz

They fly that way because of the winds. The jet stream doesn’t move in a straight line. It looks more like a sine wave. The winds pushed them down towards Hawaii, then back up to Alaska, then curved back over Canada and the US.

a reply to: ray32245mv

That would also explain why some pilots saw interference and others didn’t. A Pico Balloon only transmits when it has enough power to do so. If they caught it when it transmitted, it could have interfered with their radar, then stopped when the power dropped.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: peaceinoutz

They fly that way because of the winds. The jet stream doesn’t move in a straight line. It looks more like a sine wave. The winds pushed them down towards Hawaii, then back up to Alaska, then curved back over Canada and the US.

But still, the jet steam just happened to have them in or near Canada.
Okay.

It begs the question few are asking about the non-Chinese “ objects.”

Were they intelligently guided in any way?

If so, then we got a real problem potentially...

a reply to: peaceinoutz

Yes, because that’s the way the jet stream moved. The jet stream comes out of Asia and drops down near Hawaii without quite getting to Hawaii, then curves up towards Alaska, before curving back over Canada into Montana and the Dakotas, where it curves back up over the Great Lakes. So anything that crossed Asia, or came from Asia would end up near Alaska and Canada.

Dont tell me our military can't tell the difference between one of these toy balloons and something that needs a $400k missile strike...and then makes the same mistake two more times.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks, I'm always glad to learn.

Great thread.

a reply to: deepgreen

It doesn't matter. It's not up to the military. It's up to the CIC - and if he gave an order to shoot down any balloon/object with electronic equipment that is not expressly ours, that's what they had to do. It appears that order was very quickly rescinded or modified, as no more have been shot down after it became clear they were attacking innocent baby PICO balloons and becoming high quality memes.. I mean honestly, if this was some kind of "hyper-advanced civ/aliens/what have you" and suddenly after decades of non-interference we're repping the block and stacking bodies, don't you think they might have something to say about that?

a reply to: deepgreen

Radar doesn't tell the difference between balloons and a flock of birds. It's up to pilots that are launched to intercept the radar target to identify what it is. As pointed out, it's not up to the military to decide to shoot it down.