They have admitted to tracking the balloon from the moment it left Chinas airspace… so, either they are incompetent boobs at NORAD… or… they knew exactly what this balloon was doing and where it was heading.
“SIGINT satellites have been around for decades.” First SIGINT Satellite launch was in 1960. Several shortly thereafter. Three or four years after the Sputnik scare.
With Elvis.
When I towed banners in a Stearman, later in AgCats, I use to collect stuff like that. At one time I had a box full of trophies I’d collected while I was towing. Sometimes I’d have to make a second pass but the flying wires and N struts made for great balloon nets.
The WWII bombing of an oil refinery was in a part of the coast south of Santa Barbara called The Rincon. The refinery is still there to this day.
As local lore has it, in the pre war years while we were still selling raw materials to Japan that would later be used against us, they sent over people to take notes of how we produced oil. A Japanese official was touring the Rincon facility and slipped down a stairway into some cactus. The oil fielders laughed, like oil fielders will. This was an insult to the Japanese official. Turns out the Japanese official was a submarine commander and when the war broke out, he motored his sub all the way to the Rincon to exact revenge and restore his honor.
As Paul Harvey would say, that’s the rest of the story.
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Paul’s note of caution about not getting spun up about the rash of recent accidents and incidents is good advice however, I’m going to play devils advocate on this one. Paul says, “I always urge waiting until there’s good reliable data and information before concluding anything”. The truth is that we humans see things that aren’t there and we don’t see things that are right in front of us. There is lots of cognitive science on this phenomena. That being said, some people have to be able to “see around corners”. as my former boss would tell me. This meant coming to conclusions and making decisions without sufficient data. It can be done and quite successfully I might add. Successful entrepreneurs are examples of people who make countless decisions on gut feel. Shouldn’t someone in the FAA be looking around the corners? With the increase in accidents and incidents in 2022 and 2023, something is going on. Not just in aviation but in the food and petroleum industry and train automotive transportation as well. It could be the news is just showing us more accident stories as Paul says however, have you received your automotive insurance increase yet? If not, you will and it will be a shocker. According to insurance agents I’ve spoken to, automotive accidents and deaths have increased dramatically. Something is going on and the FAA better see around the corner or there could be a major airline accident very soon.