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.