China claims second suspected spy balloon over Latin America was also lost
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said that the balloon was an unmanned research airship that was blown off-course by weather.
nypost.com
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Lots of lost balloons popping up here and there... Lonely and adrift...
It should be no fun to be a balloon these days...
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The latest information has only deepened the administration’s conviction that the balloon wasn’t "mainly” a weather-monitoring device as Chinese officials have claimed.
www.japantimes.co.jp
On the question of why China would commit the brazen spying that the U.S. claims, Biden said only that “they’re the Chinese government.”
VanHerck said the balloon was a “maneuverable platform,” and the administration gained a better sense of what it could do during the time it moved across the U.S.
He said China used the balloon’s “maneuverability to strategically position themselves to utilize the winds to traverse portions of countries that they want to see. But this gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed.”
The latest information only deepened the administration’s conviction that the balloon wasn’t “mainly” a weather-monitoring device as Chinese officials have claimed. In a briefing Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning repeated China’s assertion that the balloon that passed over U.S. territory last week was an “isolated incident.”
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