I don't know about that, those were spotted by the civilians using not exactly high tech gears.

That doesn't meam that the military didn't spot it first but just didn't tell anyone.

Congrats to the military then for letting the Chinese conduct surveillance in order to conceal the fact that they have employees with eyes.

While being watched by the US military, thus giving it potentially valuable information on how China conducts its surveillance. It's turtles all the way down.

For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever. I guess it feeds from the need of knowing that someone(the correct one I guess?) is watching.

> For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever

Not for me at least. I never claimed the military did anything (discovered it, surveilled it), just that it's possible that they could have done something without others knowing.

I just think it's extremely bad form to assume things that there's no evidence for - both about the balloon and the military, and about why people are commenting.

A lot of things are possible, like maybe the God really put the fossils in the soil and the world is just a few thousand years old. That said, I usually like to have at least a clue about that being the case. Also, Occam's Razor.

I don't think we need to go off-topic and discuss theology here.

Regarding Occam's Razor, it's pretty simple that the military keeps secrets.

How did all the conspiracy theorists collectively forget how many spy satellites are in orbit? Were they flashy-thingied by the spy balloon, or do chem-trails (or the belief therein) cause amnesia?

Unless it flew over a secret research base I don't know what a balloon could gather that I can't already get from google maps or public USGIS datasets.

Signals intelligence

Like what? The radio waves traveling over the US are not a secret.

Think metadata, if you will. Where signals originated, how often and what times of day, etc.

The military is more concerned with pronouns than lethality.

Those doods wearing dog masks in their uniform should face capital punishment.

It would be pretty absurd to believe the US military is not tracking every inch of its own air space.

What if its not actually feasible to do that? We have lot's of sensors and cameras everywhere, those would have been redundant if total surveillance was possible.

There are wide swaths of the US airspace that do not have strong radar coverage, certainly not at 80,000 feet.

Most of the ocean is unmonitored, too. Remember MH370? We lost it in the air and we couldn't find it in the ocean. :-)

I mean, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t, just that it was not worth revealing our ability to do so over one airliner crash where no one was likely to survive. They didn’t directly act on intelligence in enigma for the same reason either if memory serves. Tin foil hats are itchy…

If your argument is "MH370", it's a weak one. No one has radar coverage in the southern Indian Ocean because no one needs it.

There was an article about that very topic on HN just recently. It was not even remotely over US airspace, and the pilot had evidently threaded the needle through the radar coverage of several nations.

Umm, NORAD is able to track Santa - this balloon is much easier.

It’s most likely that this was observed and tracked by NORAD from the very beginning. The Pentagon had to publicly address it only when there were multiple reports by the public. There was little to be gained by publicizing it.