Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right), pictured here with the Republic of Korea Foreign Minister Park Jin (left) has postponed a trip to Beijing amid concerns (Picture: EPA)
China has urged ‘calm’ amid an inflating row over a giant balloon which is sailing high above the US.
The balloon’s sighting, over Montana, led to Pentagon accusations of spying on sensitive military sites.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken abruptly cancelled a high-stakes Beijing trip aimed at easing tensions with China as a result of the issue.
But China has firmly denied the claims, even stating that the balloon was simply a weather research ‘airship’ that had blown off course.
People across the states have armed themselves with binoculars to try find the ‘spy balloon’ as it travels south-east over Kansas and Missouri at 60,000 feet.
It was first spotted over Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base, defence officials said.
Later on Friday, the Pentagon acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America.
‘We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,’ said brigadier general Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web
browser that
supports HTML5
video
He declined to offer further information such as where it was spotted.
The US actually had been tracking the initial balloon since at least Tuesday, when President Joe Biden was first briefed, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
According to three US officials, the President initially was inclined to order the surveillance balloon to be blown out of the sky, and a senior defence official said the US had prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot it down if ordered.
Defence secretary Lloyd Austin and general Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly advised Mr Biden against shooting down the balloon.
The route the ‘spy balloon’ has taken (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
China has claimed it is a weather device (Picture: Getty Images)
They warned that its size – as big as three buses – and considerable weight could create a debris field large enough to endanger Americans on the ground.
The Pentagon also assessed that after unspecified US measures, the possibility of the balloon uncovering important information was not great.
It was not the first time Chinese surveillance balloons have been tracked over US territory, including at least once during former president Donald Trump’s administration, officials said.
After passing the sensitive military sites in Montana, the balloon was moving south-east over the heartland of the central United States during the day and was expected to remain in US airspace for several days, officials said.
The development dealt a new blow to already strained US-Chinese relations that have been in a downwards spiral for years over numerous issues. Still, US officials maintained that diplomatic channels remain open and Mr Blinken said he remained willing to travel to China ‘when conditions allow’.
‘We continue to believe that having open lines of communication is important,’ he said.
In a statement that approached an apology, the Chinese foreign ministry said the balloon was a civilian airship used mainly for meteorological research.
It said said the airship had limited ‘self-steering’ capabilities and had ‘deviated far from its planned course’ because of winds.
‘The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,’ the statement said, citing a legal term used to refer to events beyond one’s control.
The history of ‘spy balloons’
Spy balloons aren’t new — primitive ones date back centuries, but they came into greater use in World War II. Administration officials said Friday that there have been other similar incidents of Chinese spy balloons, with one saying it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.
At the Pentagon, Ryder confirmed there have been other incidents where balloons came close to or crossed over the U.S. border, but he and others agree that what makes this different is the length of time it’s been over U.S. territory and how far into the country it penetrated.
Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii. The high altitude inflatables, he said, serve as low-cost platforms to collect intelligence and some can reportedly be used to detect hypersonic missiles.
During World War II, Japan launched thousands of hydrogen balloons carrying bombs, and hundreds ended up in the U.S. and Canada. Most were ineffective, but one was lethal. In May 1945, six civilians died when they found one of the balloons on the ground in Oregon, and it exploded.
In the aftermath of the war, America’s own balloon effort ignited the alien stories and lore linked to Roswell, New Mexico.
According to military research documents and studies, the U.S. began using giant trains of balloons and sensors that were strung together and stretching more than 600 feet as part of an early effort to detect Soviet missile launches during the post-World War II era. They called it Project Mogul.
One of the balloon trains crash-landed at the Roswell Army Airfield in 1947, and Air Force personnel who were not aware of the program found debris. The unusual experimental equipment made it difficult to identify, leaving the airmen with unanswered questions that over time —aided by UFO enthusiasts — took on a life of their own. The simple answer, according to the military reports, was just over the Sacramento Mountains at the Project Mogul launch site in Alamogordo.
In 2015, an unmanned Army surveillance blimp broke loose from its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and floated over Pennsylvania for hours with two fighter jets on its tail, triggering blackouts as it dragged its tether across power lines. As residents gawked, the 240-foot blimp came down in pieces in the Muncy, Pennsylvania, countryside. It still had helium in its nose when it fell, and state police used shotguns — about 100 shots — to deflate it.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
The row has inflated.