The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over Canada

It is so hilarious how all of a sudden we're supposed to be afraid of "spy balloons," despite the fact that this is a free country and if anyone actually wanted to spy on any given place in North America, they could literally just send an actual spy, he could fly in on a commercial jet, rent a car and just drive over to the interesting place, and look around. Add in a $500 drone and your spy could get a heck of a lot closer look at most things from the comfort of a nearby parked car. This balloon stuff seems incredibly unlikely to be anything.

The opening says that the three objects have &quot;now confirmed to have been &#x27;commercial or benign&#x27;&quot;, but that isn&#x27;t true. It seems to be based on this quote from the White House: &quot;The intelligence community is considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.&quot;[1] I was surprised that a seemingly thorough article would make such a mistake, but MSNBC also headlined their own reporting of this statement as &quot;White House says 3 downed objects were commercial or benign.&quot;[2] Not great.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baltimoresun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;ct-aud-nw-lake-huron-aerial-object-20230214-5cgahyjlrjfktmjpdikmihln4e-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baltimoresun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;ct-aud-nw-lak...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N2jcm7qklWU">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N2jcm7qklWU</a>

It&#x27;s misleading to put this on US Airforce only. If it&#x27;s over Canadian airspace, they ordered it through NORAD or approved it.<p>It was also to be expected not all of these discovered objects were from foreign state or malicious actors. There&#x27;s a reason the radar filtered out so much before.

Things like these make me question how the US Air Force gets this wrong.<p>Meanwhile we have a chemical disaster in Ohio that’s killed untold amount of animals, fish, wildlife in a 10 mile + radius…

It&#x27;s obviously a spy balloon guys. It&#x27;s spying on the weather condition around Canada

As a side note, if the theory of the pico balloon is correct, then the US airforce is capable of radar-identify a 32&quot; diameter mylar balloon and shoot it with a missile from a fighter jet, which seems to me like being exceptionally accurate.

Sort of a clickbait headline. The USAF merely acted on orders from the Prime Minister of Canada.

You have the Nord Stream pipeline story which IMHO is credible and if true, has the US sabotaging its European allies with illegal unauthorized military operations; you have the story in Ohio — and the media ignores both to talk about balloons and aliens.

Wild wild west &quot;shoot first, ask questions later&quot;, helluvan attitude for the US military.

One of my first thoughts when the Chinese balloon thing happened was that there&#x27;s going to be hysteria and some high school kids science experiment is going to be taken down.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how people always reach for aliens or cloak &amp; dagger stuff when in reality the most likely explanation is that you have some Doctor Strangelove characters running around in the bureaucracy.

Do the mylar balloons noticeably expand? I thought they hold their size pretty well.<p>Also, I wonder how the heat seeking missile can track such a small and low thermal object. Must be one hell of a sensor.

It should be noted (since &quot;over Canada&quot; could give the impression of an invasive action, and the article makes no further clarification) that it was Canadian PM Trudeau who gave the order for this object to be shot down, and explicitly authorized US planes to do so if they reached it first.

How do these balloons avoid causing an hazard for an accidental collision with airplanes?

A cockpit view of the balloon just before firing the missile:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startrek.com&#x2F;database_article&#x2F;tomorrow-is-yesterday" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startrek.com&#x2F;database_article&#x2F;tomorrow-is-yester...</a>

How do you sleep at night knowing your hobby could malfunction and interfere with an aircraft’s flight path?<p>Is it just that unlikely?

Wait until North Korea realizes it can exhaust other countries by just releasing thousands of cheap balloons with fake sensor arrays.<p>When you give cops pepper-spray, suddenly half the interactions end up in pepper spray.<p>When you give them tasers, suddenly tasers constantly used.<p>When you give the military free reign to use sidewinders domestically, suddenly they are burning them up at half a million dollars a pop.<p>They even somehow &quot;missed&quot; one of the shots too, that didn&#x27;t get too much coverage.<p>Ukraine just shot down Russian balloons.