A suspected Chinese spy balloon floats off the coast of South Carolina in February 2023.
Credit: © Randall Hill, Reuters/Alamy Images

If you have seen the news recently, you have probably heard about the suspected spy balloons floating over North America. The United States has shot down four floating objects in the past two weeks. What are these mysterious balloons?

These aren’t balloons that were accidentally let go at a birthday party! The balloons in question are designed to float at high altitudes in the sky and perform a function. Some balloons track weather, and others record information from down below.

The balloon shot down on Saturday, February 4th, was a Chinese device with surveillance capabilities. One American official said it was about the size of three school buses! It was floating about 60,000 feet (18,000 meters) above the ground. The balloon had floated from Montana to South Carolina. On Friday, President Joe Biden ordered a fighter jet to shoot down the balloon. Navy officers worked to recover the debris from the Atlantic Ocean to figure out what exactly the balloon was doing. While the United States did not know much about the balloon, the discovery led Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to cancel his planned diplomatic trip to Beijing.

Starting Friday, February 10th, the United States shot down one unidentified object daily for three days. These objects were all either unlawfully in Canadian or American air space or posed a threat to flights. The object shot down on Friday was 40,000 feet (12,000 meters) over frozen waters on the northern coast of Alaska. This object was about the size of a small car. This object was smaller than the first balloon targeted a week before.

On Saturday, February 11th, the United States shot down an object around 100 miles from the United States and Canadian border in Yukon, Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed he agreed with the plan. This object was smaller than the one shot down over South Carolina eight days prior and was more cylindrical in shape.

The next day, an object soaring 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) over Lake Huron, near Michigan, was shot down on February 12th, 2023. This object was octagonal with strings hanging off of it. Officials stated it could have been a flight safety threat and a surveillance balloon.

Officials were unable to locate the objects shot down over Alaska and Lake Huron since they submerged under partially frozen water. President Biden called off the search for them. We will not know who controlled those objects or what they did over American territory. Researchers will study the object shot down over Canada to see what its purpose was. Biden announced that the last three objects were most likely tied to private companies researching weather or other scientific studies. However, the first balloon was confirmed to be controlled by China.

The recent events have complicated the relationship between the United States and China. Officials from China have stated the balloon was a civilian weather research airship and not a means to collect surveillance data from other countries. While some people think the balloons and objects are from alien lifeforms, American officials have claimed there has been no indication that the objects were extraterrestrial.

December 18, 2019

Yesterday, December 17, marked 50 years since the United States Air Force ended Project Blue Book in 1969. The project, which began in 1952, was an official research study of UFO’s (unidentified flying objects). A UFO is a light or object spotted in the air that has no obvious explanation. Some people believe UFO’s are spaceships from other planets.

Four unidentified objects appear as bright lights in the sky in this 1952 photograph taken in Salem, Massachusetts. Credit: © Popperfoto/Alamy Images

Project Blue Book began in part because of widespread public interest in UFO’s. Reports of UFO’s were increasingly occurring in the United States and around the world in the 1940′s and 1950′s. Officials in the U.S. Air Force felt obliged to investigate the phenomenon. Their reasoning was that they needed to determine where UFO’s came from and whether they posed a threat to national security. Investigators with the project collected thousands of reports and conducted many interviews with civilians and military personnel who claimed they had interactions with UFO’s in some form.

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A “flying disc” UFO was said to have crashed near Roswell, in southeastern New Mexico, in 1947. The Air Force said the mysterious craft was a weather balloon. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

Project Blue Book followed an earlier government project investigating UFO’s called Project Sign. This project began in 1947, following widespread media coverage of a UFO sighting reported by Kenneth Arnold, a civilian pilot. Arnold claimed to have seen a group of silvery, crescent-shaped craft flying at high speed near Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947. His sighting led the press to coin the term flying saucer for UFO’s. A mysterious crash of what some people believed was a UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, was also reported that same year.

Project Sign was disbanded after one year of investigations that found little of interest. However, one member of the project, Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, argued that UFO’s were real and extraterrestrial in origin. Ruppelt is credited with coining the term UFO. Project Sign was shut down and the staff were reassigned. It was later reconstituted as Project Grudge. The investigators of this project produced a report that concluded that UFO’s were not real. However, by 1952, Ruppelt was once again asked to lead Project Blue Book, the final official government investigation of UFO’s. He was joined by the noted American astronomer J. Allen Hynek. The Project Blue Book team amassed a great number of UFO reports and sightings from many witnesses.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tasked with evaluating the large volume of information collected during Project Blue Book. In 1953, the CIA organized a panel of scientific experts led by the physicist Howard Percy Robertson to review the material. The Robertson Panel concluded that most reported UFO sightings were worthless and declared that reasonable explanations could be suggested for most, if not all, sightings. Therefore, the panel said, the government should work to debunk (prove false) UFO sightings. However, critics argue that the panel obscured those reported UFO sightings that might have some validity.

In the years following the Robertson Panel, the directors of Project Blue Book were dismissive of most UFO reports and sightings. Publicly, the government saw UFO investigations as a waste of time. In the 1960’s, Congress established another committee to study the evidence for UFO’s. The physicist Edward Condon served as chairman of this committee. The Condon Committee issued a report in 1968 that concluded there was no genuine evidence for extraterrestrial UFO’s. The government used the report to justify ending Project Blue Book. The government took the position that UFO’s were misidentifications of known phenomena, hoaxes, or products of mass hysteria. The official records of Project Blue Book are kept at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The records are available to the public.