SPY BALLOONS HAVE A HISTORY
Spy balloons aren’t new — primitive ones date back centuries, but they came into greater use in World War II. Administration officials said Friday 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.
The Pentagon’s Ryder confirmed there have been other incidents where balloons came close to or crossed over the US border, but he and others agree that what makes this different is the length of time it’s been over US territory and how far into the country it penetrated.
Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defence 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 US 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 US 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 US began using giant trains of balloons and sensors that were strung together and stretched 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 programme found debris..