I saw an analysis by a meteorologist on Twitter that used a NOAA wind model and the publicly known position of the balloon (when it was above Montana) to backtrack a likely path, which ended up with an origin in China:
The same person posted a similar analysis of an object shot down over Alaska that suggested it could have been a National Weather Service balloon: (or trying hard to pretend to be one)
>In a sign of how closely the United States had been monitoring the balloon surveillance program directed by the Chinese military recently, U.S. officials said in interviews that they began tracking the spy balloon as it lifted off from Hainan Island in southern China in late January.
This article [1] was written two years ago about the US government trying to pass off chinese spy balloons as UFOs in order to save face. It's shocking how quickly the public took up the UFO narrative, given that there were multiple confirmed spy balloons just 24 hours earlier. The same people wringing their hands over "disinformation" are the ones telling you that it's alien flying saucers and not enemy spy aircraft.
I wonder how many UFO stories are just unintended consequences of internal ass covering and procedural hacks.
Imagine there was an incident involving one or more flying objects, perfectly mundane and of terrestrial origin, being seen where they shouldn't have been, or misidentified in an embarrassing way. The kind of incident that would, normally, get some of the people involved fired. Except in this case, recorded evidence is scant and inconclusive enough that the people in question can report it upstairs as UFO sighting, and thus get to keep their jobs. Protocol having been followed, nobody bothers them about it.
Fast forward some amount of years, and the report ends up being leaked, declassified, or just read by the wrong person - either way, the public gets wind of it. What then? It would be nice for the government to tell the public what really happened, but the only people in position to do so are the ones who would get fired or imprisoned the moment they admit it might have not been an UFO after all. So of course they'll stay out of the spotlight, and hum the "X-Files" theme when asked directly.
In such cases, there would be no aliens, no secret military hardware - nothing The Government tries to keep silent about. Just ordinary people covering an ordinary fuckup with an unusual story, and sticking to it over the years.
The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien craft is slightly concerning.
But the more concerning aspect for the US government is that foreign spies see UFO believers as easily exploitable marks. Thus the justification is counterintelligence people must sometimes lie to organize the security threats in an open network. This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains 99.99% of UFO sightings.
Sure there’s something *else* going on too, evident by the elasticity of true love, psychedelics and the general mystery of life’s existence. But for now, reality seems hard coded to prevent the explanation.
Aliens originating in the solar system is pretty unlikely at this point, so we can infer that any advanced alien activity will come from outside the solar system. Aliens that can visit from other solar systems are virtually guaranteed to have a big technology advantage on us, given that we can scarcely even imagine traveling to other solar systems ourselves.
You are correct but there are other possibilities like aliens from other dimensions. That sounds like it would also require high technological ingenuity, but not necessarily. For example, maybe going from their dimension to our dimension is trivial compared to us trying go to their dimension. Perhaps when they trip on something like the dimensional equivalent of DMT they show up on our planet?
Or maybe it’s a simulation and aliens are simply users of the program.
Or it’s just more psychological warfare.
I have no idea what is going on and these are just random ideas, my point is simply that we have been seeing similar stuff for a long while now. We say it’s not us or china. If it’s not us or china, I don’t see it being another countries. If it’s private companies, what are they doing and why? Flying without transponders is highly illegal and unethical so maybe some sort of massive criminal organization that is highly technical and super secretive but that seems improbable. It’s not extraterrestrials exceeding the speed of light or extraterrestrials from the solar system because those are also improbable. So WTF is it then?
I think people make the assumption that aliens will be super advanced and super advanced means invincible. This comes from assuming that they will be advanced everywhere and that interstellar travel means magical tech. It ignores that there are physical limits to realistic travel or may be limits to magic ones. Finally, they can have blindspots like using cheap drones and assuming they can escape their attackers.
I was thinking of scenario where sailboat drone washes up on North Sentinel Island. Our civilization is much more advanced, they can't touch our airplanes or spacecraft. The drone is advanced, with solar panels, computers, and plastic, but is cheap and disposable. The islanders could row out in canoes and defeat it with stones and sticks.
> The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien craft is slightly concerning.
The same people are laughing at primitive tribes shooting arrows at planes flying above their island. Surely there's a huge technological gap between anything we have now, and alien spaceships capable of interstellar travel?
Except that are actually able to kill people who come too close. If they just orbit around from a distance I'm sure we wouldn't be able to take them down. Not so sure about it if they actually enter our atmosphere
> This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains 99.99% of UFO sightings.
Is this a measurement from a study you conducted?
Asking because it seems like a hand wave, and 99.999% of those kinds of hand waves fail to account for important details that don't fit the dismissal narrative...
>This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains 99.99% of UFO sightings.
Military or State psyops usually include drugs of sorts. For example, there are many sightings of Orange Orbs, these are flares being used on military training grounds which the public see and phone in or talk about on social media. Some of the Police are in on this.
UFO's and aliens are for those who dont believe in the religious psychological warfare programs using God.
Religions were invented about 6000 years ago, history tells you that shadowy people have been either using drugs typically hallucinogens or drugging people with hallucinogens in order to create something supernatural.
When watching ghost hunters or clairvoyants, with talking spirits from hundreds of years ago, what these people forget is how language has changed, some of todays vocabulary (words) simply did not exist a few hundred years ago, and yet people keep buying into it on places like Youtube and elsewhere.
Superstition & religion is a psychological coping mechanism for some and a way of psychologically harming people if someone claims to have a put a curse on someone. Some state employees play along with this, the medical profession give many people a religious or demonic like experience. Too many anti-histamines reportedly give people a hallucinogenic experience seeing a black shadow man, other types of hallucinogens give people psychedelic blocky Minecraft-like experiences, like Sativa giving people machine elf like visuals.
Humans and other animals biggest weakness from "hacking" by other humans is the use of drugs.
I think adrenaline can also cause hallucinations if the claims of people consuming large amounts of speed and tripping out is anything to go by, so its quite likely a fearful situation which spikes adrenaline is making people trip out.
Dimethyltryptamine is the main drug we make and release which gives us our dreams.
While I generally agree, this is an assumption based on aliens being extraterrestrials which would require absurd technology to transverse vast distances, perhaps they are “aliens” from much closer. Also, perhaps they wanted us to shoot it down. We do seem to be stumbling into WW3 so maybe it’s just a sign of sorts that we need to look at the bigger picture. I’m just spitballing, but my point is we far too little info to be ruling anything out or attributing motives to hypothetical creatures.
It also didn’t seem like it was that easy as it took two missiles.
I have no answers, I have no real guesses, but I am not ruling anything out.
UFOs as such are as American as Elvis. Foreign spies can waste their time figuring out how much somebody has read into The X-Files. In our society, we can openly wonder about these things with a sense of humor. Imagine flying from another dimension and hundreds of light years, only to be shot down by missile-wielding primates over a misunderstanding.
> The fact that people think we could easily shoot down alien craft is slightly concerning.
It's not obvious that aliens who reach Earth must be much more technologically advanced than we are. They could have come here in a generation ship, which probably only requires builders who are a little ahead of us, and that only in fields like bioengineering.
For most of what they'd need for a generation ship our current level of technology is fine. In particular there is no reason they would have to be better than us at aircraft or weapons technology, so whatever vehicles they bring along to use when they want to enter a planet's atmosphere might be no better than what our current air forces have.
Except we should have noticed a generation ship. Particularly if we're assuming aliens not much more advanced than we are. It would be big and it would give off a lot of heat and it would have to be in orbit. I think you're underestimating the technological complexity of building what is essentially a sealed, self-sustaining biosphere capable of running for tens of thousands if not millions of years. Maybe on a napkin we're anywhere near able to do something like that.
Plus this goes against the common narrative that these craft display propulsion capabilities that appear to defy physics, which (if we're assuming aliens) implies anti-gravity at a minimum. No one is claiming to encounter UAPs or UFOs with wings and conventional rockets. Again, that's something we only kind of know how to do on a napkin, and even then only if we fudge the numbers.
At the very least, I would want to assume any civilization capable of interstellar travel to be at least 1000 years ahead of us, technologically. Even with generation ships and no space magic. It's just a big stupid round number but I intend it to mean generally as far ahead of us now, in terms of scientific knowledge and technological progress, and assuming a few paradigm shifts ahead, as we are ahead of the Middle Ages.
> At the very least, I would want to assume any civilization capable of interstellar travel to be at least 1000 years ahead of us, technologically.
My guess is that we'll be able to develop human-level artificial intelligence a lot sooner than 1000 years from now.
At which point it would be a lot easier to send AI probes to explore the galaxy and/or make first contact with another civilization than to build a generation ship.
> It's not obvious that aliens who reach Earth must be much more technologically advanced than we are.
The odds of bumping into an alien civ that is anywhere near technological parity with us are vanishingly small. Given that the universe has been capable of hosting habitable planets for ~10 billion years, the median age of alien civilizations could easily be billions of years old. Meanwhile our civilization is a paltry .00001 billion years old.
On the other hand, the universe appears to be a dangerous place for life. It could be that almost all civilizations suffer an extinction event before they get technologically advanced enough to prevent it or survive it.
It could be that the only ones we'd actually bump into are those who built and launched generation ships not too long after they became capable of it, which would be when they are not too far ahead of where we are now.
Right now we just don't know enough to say what it is like out there. We do know that we sure haven't been able to detect any signs of alien civilizations. But we don't know if that is because very few civilizations start, or they start but something kills them before they start doing things we could detect, or they are only at a stage where they are doing such things for a relatively short time and then they switch to technology that we can't detect.
> On the other hand, the universe appears to be a dangerous place for life.
The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. We've only been "looking" for life for ~50 years!
> It could be that almost all civilizations suffer an extinction event before they get technologically advanced enough to prevent it or survive it.
It seems to me that we've got three possible scenarios here:
Scenario A: There is NOT a Great Filter. In this scenario, we have a large number of civs with a high median age.
Scenario B: There IS a Great Filter. It catches between 0-99.99% of civs. In this scenario, we still have a large number of civs with a high median age.
Scenario C: There IS a Great Filter. It catches 100% of civs. In this scenario, we have a small number of civs with a lower median age (some ${Civ Age at which Filter Occurs} / 2)
It's hard for me to imagine that we're living in Scenario C. For a Great Filter to catch 100% of civs, it would have to be baked into the laws of physics!
Even then, the Great Filter would have to occur VERY early in technological development for the odds of technological parity to be good. And, of course, an early-acting Great Filter means fewer extant civilizations at any point in time, lowering the odds of an encounter occurring in the first place.
> the ability to get detailed photos of these objects
I imagine there could be methods of confusing cameras, especially when there are no points of reference in the sky other than the object itself. Maybe some human tech cloaking methods are sufficient to obscure an object.
As for locating the debris, you would think that would be easy... but we're still finding bits of the Columbia space shuttle here and there.
Taking high quality photos of small objects far away is pretty difficult.
See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but getting images of the equipment at the Apollo landing sites is elusive from anywhere farther away than lunar orbit.
I definitely wouldn’t assume we can immediately get detailed photos of a drone-sized object flying at high altitude.
I suppose, but it's not really that hard to resolve things at 30-60k feet.
The big Chinese balloon was ~300ft across (and the equipment ~100ft) at 60kft would be almost half the size of the moon... 0.25deg or easily visible by eye. And you can get shots of that with a hand held mobile phone at night. Any amateur astronomical camera set up is capable of 1-4 arc sec (better than 0.0001deg) and daytime exposures would be <10msec.
So it's pretty easy to get 1ft resolution at that altitude. Getting 1inch is harder, but doable especially with multiple images, which is possible now even for amateurs. If it was moving at 100mph (closer to 30-50) that's only <1ft during the exposure time (still 50x faster than the moon). The gov can do much better, but I wouldn't count on mm resolution.
I'm sure there are, but one issue the F16 pilots noted in radio transcripts from one of the recent shoot downs is that the difference in airspeed between a stationary or slow moving arial object and the speeds the F16 need to maintain to stay in the air make it surprisingly hard for pilots themselves to accurately describe the objects.
These objects are small, to get a good view requires flying a very fast jet very close to a small relatively stationary object of which you may only get a split second glance.
In the transcript I saw, the two F16 pilots can't really agree if the object they are dealing with is a balloon or not (this wasn't from the first shootdown of the Chinese balloon which was much larger and easier to identify), eventually one pilot just assumes it is as a best guess.
This could explain much what is going on. The later objects have confusing descriptions which make hard to figure out what they were. But they could easily be small to medium balloons with the payload not visible. Spherical becomes cylindrical or octagonal, balloons become floating.
This could explain why we haven’t gotten more info from government. They don’t want to admit that shot down weather or scientific balloons. Smaller balloons are likely to not be Chinese. It could also be that government is equally confused and are waiting to find the wreckage.
> I would assume our government has the ability to get detailed photos of these objects
For any territory that a camera can get detailed photos of something, there is much greater area (volume) which over which it can get poor photos. So the more cameras you have getting better photos, the (many times) more bad photos you'll have.
I still don't understand why people think that the level of information that the public is aware of is somehow the exact same as the USG has. Not to mention, knowledge of what truly when on is heavily compartmentalized within the USG and IC as a whole. Whatever narrative the people are being told is the same narrative that our adversaries are being fed, so a fine line needs to be tread between putting the public at ease and giving away information about our capabilities.
This obviously does leave room for speculation and thus conspiracy theorists, but what justification do conspiracy theorists need anyway? The crux of most conspiracy theories is making a mountain out of a mole hill.
> so a fine line needs to be tread between putting the public at ease
Also, there's no reason to assume that the goal of revealing all this information is to put the public at ease. Maybe the goal is to drum up public support for war, or at least, some adventure in brinksmanship. Or to make the administration look more hawkish than it is. Or there's some weird funding/ego/prestige power struggle between departments and generals. Or someone is playing a public game of cover-your-ass. Or is making his enemies in the organization look bad, by airing the dirty laundry.
Figuring out which is which when it comes to the military leaking secret information is an exercise in Kremlinology.
Speaking of conspiracy theorists and conspiracies, Edward Snowden thinks these shoot downs are an engineered distraction to stop the public from believing the story that America blew up the Nordstream Pipelines:
Snowden can pound sand for repeatedly regurgitating Kremlin propaganda that they weren't going to invade Ukraine, that it was all US government scaremongering.
He doesn't know shit because he was wrong on one prediction? The political talking heads have been repeatedly wrong on many things, and even outright deceptive, and yet they're still plastered all over the media. I think Snowden's track record is better frankly, and the OP's explanation is very plausible.
It does. It's very hard to tell from the video, but these were very high up, and must have been much larger. Looked a lot like all-white inflatable ribbed wind-surfing wings.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense began investing in the military use of balloons under its COLD STAR (Covert Long Dwell Stratospheric Architecture) program.[27]
The Pentagon began incorporating high-altitude balloons into the military kill chain with a focus on hypersonic weapons, in line with the Space Development Agency program for commercial satellite constellations.[28]
Balloons could be preferred as a platform for their low cost, lower altitude, and less predictable trajectories compared with satellites."
Since they are filled with plain air they could stay up a long time. They probably have no radar cross section, though they'd probably have a thermal signature.
70 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/162132105562836582...
The same person posted a similar analysis of an object shot down over Alaska that suggested it could have been a National Weather Service balloon: (or trying hard to pretend to be one)
https://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/162416175081471182...
>In a sign of how closely the United States had been monitoring the balloon surveillance program directed by the Chinese military recently, U.S. officials said in interviews that they began tracking the spy balloon as it lifted off from Hainan Island in southern China in late January.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/us/politics/ufo-spy-ballo...
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...
Imagine there was an incident involving one or more flying objects, perfectly mundane and of terrestrial origin, being seen where they shouldn't have been, or misidentified in an embarrassing way. The kind of incident that would, normally, get some of the people involved fired. Except in this case, recorded evidence is scant and inconclusive enough that the people in question can report it upstairs as UFO sighting, and thus get to keep their jobs. Protocol having been followed, nobody bothers them about it.
Fast forward some amount of years, and the report ends up being leaked, declassified, or just read by the wrong person - either way, the public gets wind of it. What then? It would be nice for the government to tell the public what really happened, but the only people in position to do so are the ones who would get fired or imprisoned the moment they admit it might have not been an UFO after all. So of course they'll stay out of the spotlight, and hum the "X-Files" theme when asked directly.
In such cases, there would be no aliens, no secret military hardware - nothing The Government tries to keep silent about. Just ordinary people covering an ordinary fuckup with an unusual story, and sticking to it over the years.
But the more concerning aspect for the US government is that foreign spies see UFO believers as easily exploitable marks. Thus the justification is counterintelligence people must sometimes lie to organize the security threats in an open network. This combined with an occasional Air Force psyop explains 99.99% of UFO sightings.
Sure there’s something *else* going on too, evident by the elasticity of true love, psychedelics and the general mystery of life’s existence. But for now, reality seems hard coded to prevent the explanation.
What’s wrong with that? If there were Martians, they would not have problem destroying our craft we sent on Mars so far.
As much as I want ETs to exist, I really hope we wouldn't shoot them down if they were just observing.
Or maybe it’s a simulation and aliens are simply users of the program.
Or it’s just more psychological warfare.
I have no idea what is going on and these are just random ideas, my point is simply that we have been seeing similar stuff for a long while now. We say it’s not us or china. If it’s not us or china, I don’t see it being another countries. If it’s private companies, what are they doing and why? Flying without transponders is highly illegal and unethical so maybe some sort of massive criminal organization that is highly technical and super secretive but that seems improbable. It’s not extraterrestrials exceeding the speed of light or extraterrestrials from the solar system because those are also improbable. So WTF is it then?
I was thinking of scenario where sailboat drone washes up on North Sentinel Island. Our civilization is much more advanced, they can't touch our airplanes or spacecraft. The drone is advanced, with solar panels, computers, and plastic, but is cheap and disposable. The islanders could row out in canoes and defeat it with stones and sticks.
The same people are laughing at primitive tribes shooting arrows at planes flying above their island. Surely there's a huge technological gap between anything we have now, and alien spaceships capable of interstellar travel?
https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
Is this a measurement from a study you conducted?
Asking because it seems like a hand wave, and 99.999% of those kinds of hand waves fail to account for important details that don't fit the dismissal narrative...
And I mean that's five nines right there... :-)
Military or State psyops usually include drugs of sorts. For example, there are many sightings of Orange Orbs, these are flares being used on military training grounds which the public see and phone in or talk about on social media. Some of the Police are in on this.
UFO's and aliens are for those who dont believe in the religious psychological warfare programs using God.
Religions were invented about 6000 years ago, history tells you that shadowy people have been either using drugs typically hallucinogens or drugging people with hallucinogens in order to create something supernatural.
When watching ghost hunters or clairvoyants, with talking spirits from hundreds of years ago, what these people forget is how language has changed, some of todays vocabulary (words) simply did not exist a few hundred years ago, and yet people keep buying into it on places like Youtube and elsewhere.
Superstition & religion is a psychological coping mechanism for some and a way of psychologically harming people if someone claims to have a put a curse on someone. Some state employees play along with this, the medical profession give many people a religious or demonic like experience. Too many anti-histamines reportedly give people a hallucinogenic experience seeing a black shadow man, other types of hallucinogens give people psychedelic blocky Minecraft-like experiences, like Sativa giving people machine elf like visuals.
Humans and other animals biggest weakness from "hacking" by other humans is the use of drugs.
I think adrenaline can also cause hallucinations if the claims of people consuming large amounts of speed and tripping out is anything to go by, so its quite likely a fearful situation which spikes adrenaline is making people trip out.
Dimethyltryptamine is the main drug we make and release which gives us our dreams.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryza_sativa
It also didn’t seem like it was that easy as it took two missiles.
I have no answers, I have no real guesses, but I am not ruling anything out.
It's not obvious that aliens who reach Earth must be much more technologically advanced than we are. They could have come here in a generation ship, which probably only requires builders who are a little ahead of us, and that only in fields like bioengineering.
For most of what they'd need for a generation ship our current level of technology is fine. In particular there is no reason they would have to be better than us at aircraft or weapons technology, so whatever vehicles they bring along to use when they want to enter a planet's atmosphere might be no better than what our current air forces have.
Plus this goes against the common narrative that these craft display propulsion capabilities that appear to defy physics, which (if we're assuming aliens) implies anti-gravity at a minimum. No one is claiming to encounter UAPs or UFOs with wings and conventional rockets. Again, that's something we only kind of know how to do on a napkin, and even then only if we fudge the numbers.
At the very least, I would want to assume any civilization capable of interstellar travel to be at least 1000 years ahead of us, technologically. Even with generation ships and no space magic. It's just a big stupid round number but I intend it to mean generally as far ahead of us now, in terms of scientific knowledge and technological progress, and assuming a few paradigm shifts ahead, as we are ahead of the Middle Ages.
My guess is that we'll be able to develop human-level artificial intelligence a lot sooner than 1000 years from now.
At which point it would be a lot easier to send AI probes to explore the galaxy and/or make first contact with another civilization than to build a generation ship.
The odds of bumping into an alien civ that is anywhere near technological parity with us are vanishingly small. Given that the universe has been capable of hosting habitable planets for ~10 billion years, the median age of alien civilizations could easily be billions of years old. Meanwhile our civilization is a paltry .00001 billion years old.
It could be that the only ones we'd actually bump into are those who built and launched generation ships not too long after they became capable of it, which would be when they are not too far ahead of where we are now.
Right now we just don't know enough to say what it is like out there. We do know that we sure haven't been able to detect any signs of alien civilizations. But we don't know if that is because very few civilizations start, or they start but something kills them before they start doing things we could detect, or they are only at a stage where they are doing such things for a relatively short time and then they switch to technology that we can't detect.
The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. We've only been "looking" for life for ~50 years!
> It could be that almost all civilizations suffer an extinction event before they get technologically advanced enough to prevent it or survive it.
It seems to me that we've got three possible scenarios here:
Scenario A: There is NOT a Great Filter. In this scenario, we have a large number of civs with a high median age. Scenario B: There IS a Great Filter. It catches between 0-99.99% of civs. In this scenario, we still have a large number of civs with a high median age. Scenario C: There IS a Great Filter. It catches 100% of civs. In this scenario, we have a small number of civs with a lower median age (some ${Civ Age at which Filter Occurs} / 2)
It's hard for me to imagine that we're living in Scenario C. For a Great Filter to catch 100% of civs, it would have to be baked into the laws of physics!
Even then, the Great Filter would have to occur VERY early in technological development for the odds of technological parity to be good. And, of course, an early-acting Great Filter means fewer extant civilizations at any point in time, lowering the odds of an encounter occurring in the first place.
It seems right now the narrative is nobody knows what these were, and that the debris may never be located.
This is a conspiracy theorist's dream.
I imagine there could be methods of confusing cameras, especially when there are no points of reference in the sky other than the object itself. Maybe some human tech cloaking methods are sufficient to obscure an object.
As for locating the debris, you would think that would be easy... but we're still finding bits of the Columbia space shuttle here and there.
Huh? Cameras turn lights into rgb, you can't confuse them, if not paint your balloons blue.
See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but getting images of the equipment at the Apollo landing sites is elusive from anywhere farther away than lunar orbit.
I definitely wouldn’t assume we can immediately get detailed photos of a drone-sized object flying at high altitude.
The big Chinese balloon was ~300ft across (and the equipment ~100ft) at 60kft would be almost half the size of the moon... 0.25deg or easily visible by eye. And you can get shots of that with a hand held mobile phone at night. Any amateur astronomical camera set up is capable of 1-4 arc sec (better than 0.0001deg) and daytime exposures would be <10msec.
So it's pretty easy to get 1ft resolution at that altitude. Getting 1inch is harder, but doable especially with multiple images, which is possible now even for amateurs. If it was moving at 100mph (closer to 30-50) that's only <1ft during the exposure time (still 50x faster than the moon). The gov can do much better, but I wouldn't count on mm resolution.
These objects are small, to get a good view requires flying a very fast jet very close to a small relatively stationary object of which you may only get a split second glance.
In the transcript I saw, the two F16 pilots can't really agree if the object they are dealing with is a balloon or not (this wasn't from the first shootdown of the Chinese balloon which was much larger and easier to identify), eventually one pilot just assumes it is as a best guess.
This could explain why we haven’t gotten more info from government. They don’t want to admit that shot down weather or scientific balloons. Smaller balloons are likely to not be Chinese. It could also be that government is equally confused and are waiting to find the wreckage.
For any territory that a camera can get detailed photos of something, there is much greater area (volume) which over which it can get poor photos. So the more cameras you have getting better photos, the (many times) more bad photos you'll have.
This obviously does leave room for speculation and thus conspiracy theorists, but what justification do conspiracy theorists need anyway? The crux of most conspiracy theories is making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Also, there's no reason to assume that the goal of revealing all this information is to put the public at ease. Maybe the goal is to drum up public support for war, or at least, some adventure in brinksmanship. Or to make the administration look more hawkish than it is. Or there's some weird funding/ego/prestige power struggle between departments and generals. Or someone is playing a public game of cover-your-ass. Or is making his enemies in the organization look bad, by airing the dirty laundry.
Figuring out which is which when it comes to the military leaking secret information is an exercise in Kremlinology.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1625241477642088454
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493641714363478016
He doesn't know shit when it comes to this topic.
The Pentagon began incorporating high-altitude balloons into the military kill chain with a focus on hypersonic weapons, in line with the Space Development Agency program for commercial satellite constellations.[28]
Balloons could be preferred as a platform for their low cost, lower altitude, and less predictable trajectories compared with satellites."
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident#His...
https://hackaday.com/2017/10/30/quick-and-easy-solar-hot-air...
Since they are filled with plain air they could stay up a long time. They probably have no radar cross section, though they'd probably have a thermal signature.