https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64524105
The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.
The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.
China’s foreign ministry later expressed “strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US’s use of force to attack civilian unmanned aircraft”.
Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.
An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile – an AIM-9X Sidewinder – and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 2:39 EST,a defense official told reporters.
Defense officials told US media the debris landed in 47ft (14m) of water – shallower than they had expected – near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The military is now trying to recover debris which is spread over seven miles. Two naval ships, including one with a heavy crane for recovery, are in the area.
In a Pentagon statement a senior US defense official said that “while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC [China] surveillance balloon’s collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon’s overflight of US territory was of intelligence value to us.
“We were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable,” the official added.
President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot it down since defense officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.
Afterwards, Mr Biden said: “They successfully took it down, and I want to complement our aviators who did it.”
In a statement a few hours later, the Chinese foreign ministry said: “The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to unforeseeable circumstances- it was completely an accident.”
The discovery of the balloon set off a diplomatic crisis, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately calling off this weekend’s trip to China over the “irresponsible act”.
The Chinese authorities have denied it is a spying aircraft, and instead said it was a weather ship blown astray.
Defense officials revealed on Saturday the balloon had first entered US airspace on 28 January near the Aleutian Islands, before moving to Canadian airspace three days later, and re-entering the US on January 31st. The object was spotted in the US state of Montana, which is home to a number of sensitive nuclear missile sites.
Now folks, what would you think if I were to tell you that this isn’t the first time enemies of the US have sent balloons over the continental US?
Would you believe me if I told you it happened during WWII and that balloons back then carried payloads that killed American citizens un US soil?
That is exactly what happened and that is why I was so upset as our federal government let that balloon fly over our country and yes, even over our homes here at Lake of the Ozarks.
History was repeating itself and yet, our federal government failed to act, ignoring the history of this type of incident.
So how about a little history?
https://www.history.com/news/japans-killer-wwii-balloons
For Reverend Archie Mitchell, the spring of 1945 was a season of change. Not only were the minister and his wife, Elsie, expecting their first child, but he had also accepted a new post as pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in the sleepy logging town of Bly, Oregon.
Seeking to deepen their newly planted roots, the Mitchells invited five children from their Sunday school class—all between the ages of 11 and 14—on a picnic amid the bubbling brooks and ponderosa pines of nearby Gearhart Mountain on the beautiful spring day of May 5, 1945.
After lumbering up a one-lane gravel road, Mitchell parked his sedan and began to unload picnic baskets and fishing rods as Elsie, five months pregnant, and the children explored a knoll sloping down to a nearby creek.
When 13-year-old Joan Patzke spied a strange white canvas on the forest floor, the curious girl summoned the rest of the group. “Look what we found,”
Elsie called to her husband back at the car. “It looks like some kind of balloon.” The pastor glanced over at the group gathered in a tight circle around the oddity 50 yards away. As one of the children reached down to touch it, the minister began to shout a warning but never had a chance to finish.
A huge explosion rocked the placid mountainside. Elsie, the unborn baby and the five children were killed almost instantly by the blast. When a forest ranger in the vicinity came upon the scene, he found the victims radiating out like spokes around a smoldering crater and the 26-year-old minister beating his wife’s burning dress with his bare hands.
What U.S. military investigators sent to the blast scene immediately knew—but didn’t want anyone else to know—was that the strange contraption was a high-altitude balloon bomb launched by Japan to attack North America.
After American aircraft bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities during the Doolittle Raid of 1942, the Japanese military command wanted to retaliate in kind but its manned aircraft were incapable of reaching the West Coast of the United States.
Doolittle Raid: The Doolittle Raid was a U.S. air raid during World War II that targeted major cities in Japan. It occurred on April 18, 1942. The attack aimed to lift Allied spirits and incite fear in the Japanese population in retribution for the recent Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During the operation, which Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle planned and led, 16 aircraft launched from the carrier USS Hornet and bombed targets in Japan, and 13 of the aircrews reached safety in China afterward.
What the Japanese military lacked in technology, it made up for in geography.
Since the 13th century when a pair of cyclones foiled the fleets of Kublai Khan’s Mongol invaders, the Japanese had long believed that the gods had dispatched “divine winds,” called “kamikaze,” to protect them.
During World War II, the military thought the winds could save them once again since its scientists had discovered that a westerly river of air 30,000 feet high—known now as the “jet stream”—could transport hydrogen-filled balloons to North America in three to four days.
For two years the military produced thousands of balloons with skins of lightweight, but durable, paper made from mulberry wood that was stitched together by conscripted schoolgirls oblivious to their sinister purposes.
Using 40-foot-long ropes attached to the balloons, the military mounted incendiary devices and 30-pound high-explosive bombs rigged to drop over North America and spark massive forest fires that would instill panic and divert resources from the war effort.
Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Japanese military launched more than 9,000 of the pilotless weapons in an operation codenamed “Fu-Go.”
Most of the balloons fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, but more than 300 of the low-tech white orbs made the 5,000-mile crossing and were spotted fluttering in the skies over the western United States and Canada—from Holy Cross, Alaska, to Nogales, Arizona, and even as far east as Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In March 1945, one balloon even hit a high-tension power line and caused a temporary blackout at the Hanford, Washington, plant that was producing plutonium that would be used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki five months later.
None of the balloons, however, had caused any injuries—until Mitchell’s church group came across the wreckage of one on Gearhart Mountain.
Citing the need to prevent panic and avoid giving the enemy location information that could allow them to hone their targeting, the U.S. military censored reports about the Japanese balloon bombs.
(Word has now come out that the Chinese balloon we saw last week wasn’t the first to fly over the US. Yet the government has remained silent until this one was spotted by a citizen on the ground).
Defense officials recently admitted that they have an “awareness gap” when it comes to tracking these balloons.”
Although many Bly, Oregon locals knew the truth back in 1945, they reluctantly followed military directives and adopted a code of silence about the tragedy as the media reported that the victims died in “an explosion of undetermined origin.”
By the end of May 1945, however, the military decided in the interest of public safety to reveal the true cause of the explosion and warn Americans to beware of any strange white balloons they might encounter—information divulged a month too late for the victims in Oregon.
Ultimately, Fu-Go was a military failure. Few balloons reached their targets, and the jet stream winds were only powerful enough in wintertime when snowy and damp conditions in North American forests precluded the ignition of large fires. The only casualties they caused were the deaths of five innocent children and a pregnant woman, the first and only fatalities in the continental United States due to enemy action in World War II.
The balloon bombs, however, foretold the future of warfare. In his book Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America, author Ross Coen called the weapon “the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile,” and the silent delivery of death from pilotless balloons has been referred to as World War II’s version of drone warfare.
One of the best kept secrets of the war involved the Japanese balloon bomb offensive. Prompted by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the Japanese developed the balloon bombs as a means of direct reprisal against the U.S. mainland.
The first operational launches took place on Nov. 3, 1944, and two days later a U.S. Navy patrol boat spotted a balloon floating on the water off the coast of California.
….As more sightings occurred, the government, with the cooperation of the news media, adopted a policy of silence to reduce the chance of panic among U.S. residents and to deny the Japanese any information on the success of the launches. Actual damage caused by the balloon bombs was minor.
However, the incendiaries that these balloons carried did pose a serious threat to the northwestern U.S. forests during dry months. These balloons also offered a vehicle for germ warfare if the Japanese had decided to employ this weapon.
The balloon attacks began after air defense facilities in the United States had been deactivated. To counter this threat, U.S. Army Air Forces and Navy fighters flew intercept missions to shoot down balloons when sighted.
Army personnel and USAAF aircraft were also stationed at critical points to combat any forest fires that might occur. In addition, supplies of decontamination chemicals and sprays to counter any possible use of germ warfare were quietly distributed in the western United States.
……..As reports of isolated sightings (and theories on how they got there, ranging from submarines to saboteurs) made their way into a handful of news reports over the Christmas holiday, government officials stepped in to censor stories about the bombs, worrying that fear itself might soon magnify the effect of these new weapons.
The reverse principle also applied—while the American public was largely in the dark in the early months of 1945, so were those who were launching these deadly weapons.
Japanese officers later told the Associated Press that “they finally decided the weapon was worthless and the whole experiment useless, because they had repeatedly listened to [radio broadcasts] and had heard no further mention of the balloons.”
Ironically, the Japanese had ceased launching them shortly before the picnicking children had stumbled across one.
However successful censorship had been in discouraging further launches, this very censorship made it difficult to warn the people of the bomb danger. The risk seemed justified as weeks went by and no casualties were reported.
After that luck ran out with the Gearheart Mountain deaths, officials were forced to rethink their approach. On May 22, the War Department issued a statement confirming the bombs’ origin and nature “so the public may be aware of the possible danger and to reassure the nation that the attacks are so scattered and aimless that they constitute no military threat.”
Does that sound familiar to what the national news is telling us today?
The statement was measured to provide sufficient information to avoid further casualties, but without giving the enemy encouragement. But by then, Germany’s surrender dominated headlines. Word of the Bly, Oregon, deaths—and the strange mechanism that had killed them – was overshadowed by the dizzying pace of the finale in the European theater.
The silence meant that for decades, grieving families were sometimes met with skepticism or outright disbelief.
The balloon bombs have been so overlooked that during the making of the documentary On Paper Wings, several of those who lost family members told filmmaker Ilana Sol of reactions to their unusual stories. “They would be telling someone about the loss of their sibling and that person just didn’t believe them,” Sol recalls.
These loss of these six lives puts into relief the scale of loss in the enormity of a war that swallowed up entire cities. At the same time as Bly residents were absorbing the loss they had endured, over the spring and summer of 1945 more than 60 Japanese cities burned – including the infamous firebombing of Tokyo. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by another on Nagasaki. In total, an estimated 500,000 or more Japanese civilians would be killed. Sol recalls “working on these interviews and just thinking my God, this one death caused so much pain, what if it was everyone and everything? And that’s really what the Japanese people went through.”
In August of 1945, days after Japan announced its surrender, nearby Klamath Falls’ Herald and News published a retrospective, noting that “it was only by good luck that other tragedies were averted” but noted that balloon bombs still loomed in the vast West that likely remained undiscovered. “And so ends a sensational chapter of the war,” it noted. “But Klamathites were reminded that it still can have a tragic sequel.”
While the tragedy of that day in Bly has not been repeated, the sequel remains a real—if remote—possibility. In 2014, a couple of forestry workers in Canada came across one of the unexploded balloon bombs, which still posed enough of a danger that a military bomb disposal unit had to blow it up.