On the menu today: The U.S. military is now on a surprisingly regular schedule of shooting down one unidentified flying object over North America per day. Yesterday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said that the government believes the second and third objects shot down by U.S. jets were also balloons, but smaller than the first one. A few years back, private-sector military news writers looked at open-source satellite photos and spotted a massive hangar in the western Xinjiang province of China, a site that they concluded “clearly has to do with the development of lighter-than-air craft, which could include large unmanned airship designs capable of operating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere.” No one knows exactly where these spy balloons are coming from — but there’s a good chance the trail leads back to that mysterious massive hangar and secretive research base out in the middle of the Chinese desert.
China’s Spy-Balloon Factory?
Back in July 2021, Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, the editor and deputy editor of the military-news site The War Zone, offered some little-noticed insight into a massive hangar operated by the Chinese government, and likely the country’s military, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region:
One particularly interesting facility that appears to have largely escaped public attention, features, among other things, an absolutely massive hangar — you could fit a Nimitz class supercarrier inside with 100 feet to spare on either side—and is situated near other sites associated with missile defense and anti-satellite activities. The hangar clearly has to do with the development of lighter-than-air craft, which could include large unmanned airship designs capable of operating in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. . . .
The hangar is approximately 1,150 feet long and 450 feet wide. It is also extremely tall, as is made clear in satellite images where there are ground vehicles or shadows present.
That would make the hangar 517,500 square feet — roughly the third-largest hangar in the world. Covered hangars are a good spot to assemble something that you don’t want overhead spy satellites to see. The gigantic hangar site is also not far from the People’s Liberation Army Malan Air Base, where China develops its unmanned drones.
Rogoway and Trevithick added:
A satellite image of the site from Planet Labs, dated Nov. 25, 2020, offers additional evidence of an airship connection in that it shows the hangar’s huge door open and a big rectangular cradle positioned in front of it on the “runway.” Lighter-than-air craft cannot be moved in and out of a hangar-like regular aircraft and this piece of equipment looks like what one might expect to see for use in maneuvering a very large airship around, as opposed to more typical options, such as some sort of mobile mooring mast or mooring lines lashed to ground vehicles. The rectangle shape of the cradle could point to a non-traditional airship configuration without a largely cylindrical center structure, as well. With all this in mind, it seems highly probable that the nearby tower is a mooring mast.
The satellite-photo analysis revealed “a runway-like area, which appears to be paved or otherwise partially improved, extends some 3,000 feet to the west of the hangar.” One of the reasons this is not likely to be an airplane-research-and-development facility is that most modern planes require significantly longer runways for takeoff and landing, although there are exceptions.
That enormous hangar is about 60 miles east of Korla, Xinjiang’s second-largest city. Back in 2020, Tom Patrick Jarvis examined less-detailed images of the area and found that during the previous year, Chinese atmospheric scientists had conducted detailed research into the wind patterns over Korla and concluded that, “The atmospheric wind field near the stratospheric QZWL is an important factor affecting the flight altitude and dynamic control of stratospheric airships.”
Where are all these Chinese spy balloons coming from? There’s a good chance that they were developed at that facility.
And the giant, spherical, white balloon are likely only one of several varieties of lighter-than-air craft developed by China. In December, someone in the Philippines posted pictures of a teardrop-shaped airship with four tail fins flying at a high altitude, not too far from Subic Bay, formerly the site of a major U.S. Naval base that was closed in 1992. Earlier this month, the U.S. and the Philippines announced a major upgrade to their Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, expanding the number of bases in the Philippines where U.S. military forces could train and operate.
Ride Into the Danger Zone of Alaska, Canada, and Michigan
The U.S. military is now on a surprisingly regular schedule of shooting down one unidentified flying object over North America per day. First, there was the unidentified object flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet over Alaska on Friday; then a “cylindrical object” flying at the same altitude over Canada on Saturday. And then yesterday:
President Biden ordered the downing of the object near Lake Huron Sunday, a U.S. official told CNN. The object over Michigan was removed from the skies by U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets.
Michigan lawmakers issued statements on the incident and urged Congress to conduct comprehensive fact-finding for the public.
“The object has been downed by pilots from the US Air Force and National Guard. Great work by all who carried out this mission both in the air and back at headquarters. We’re all interested in exactly what this object was and it’s purpose,” Michigan Representative Elissa Slotkin tweeted. “As long as these things keep traversing the US and Canada, I’ll continue to ask for Congress to get a full briefing based on our exploitation of the wreckage.”
An unnamed senior administration official said to CNN that the object was “flying at about 20,000 feet when it was shot down” and that it “had an octagonal shape and there were strings hanging from it, but with no discernible payload.”
Appearing on ABC News’ This Week Sunday morning, Chuck Schumer said he had been briefed by national-security adviser Jake Sullivan the previous evening and said the government believed the second and third objects were also balloons, but “much smaller”:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Were these balloons Friday and Saturday night?
SCHUMER: They believe they were, yes, but much smaller than the — than the one — the first one. Both of those, one over Canada, one over Alaska, were at 40,000 feet.
President Biden has not issued any statements or this or any subject since Saturday night. Biden did not address the flying objects in his remarks at the Governors Ball dinner Saturday evening. Earlier in the day, the White House did issue a brief “readout” or summary of his call with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, stating that “out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of their militaries,” Biden and Trudeau authorized it to be taken down.
The only thing Biden has said in the past week about the Chinese balloon shot off the coast of South Carolina was the fleeting reference in his State of the Union Address, “As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.”
You don’t have to be a right-wing Republican to find the president’s silence on this issue unhelpful at best and unnerving at worst. As former Politico and Boston Globe national-security reporter Bryan Bender put it last night, “I can’t help but ask: at this stage where is the president? This is unprecedented. Four objects in nine days shot down for violating North American airspace. We need to hear from [the president], if for nothing else to set the nation at ease and tamp down conspiracies.”
Late last night, the president tweeted congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Yesterday, on NBC’s Meet the Press — before the fourth object was shot down — Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, revealed his irritation at how little the administration is saying: “I have real concerns about why the administration is not being more forthcoming with everything that it knows. . . . You know, in an absence of information, people will fill that gap with anxiety and other stuff. So, I wish the administration was a little quicker to tell us everything that they do know.”
The American people, collectively, are not stupid. We know we are witnessing a dramatically different approach to these three recent unidentified flying objects than we did to the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S airspace January 28. Our new shoot-them-as-we-spot-them approach makes the “the Chinese spy balloon was no serious threat, and there was no negative consequence to having it float over the entire continental U.S. from Montana to South Carolina” explanation of last week difficult to believe.
Either the U.S. and Canadian governments have been seeing these things and tracking them but not confronting them for a long time, or someone is sending them our way more frequently.
For what it is worth, Schumer contends that the U.S. shooting down the spy balloon over South Carolina represented “a humiliation” of the Chinese government: “I think the Chinese were humiliated. I think the Chinese were caught lying. And I think it’s a real — it’s a real step back for them, yes. I think they’re going to have to — I think they’re probably going to have to get rid of it or do something, because they look really bad.”
Perhaps it was a humiliation for Xi Jinping and Beijing, but we shouldn’t expect the Chinese government to behave chastened or humbled. Recall that after the balloon was shot down, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a statement claiming that, “The U.S. use of force is a clear overreaction and a serious violation of international practice. China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the company concerned and reserves the right to make further responses if necessary.”
What if the Chinese government’s “further responses” are to send whatever other unmanned spy aircraft it’s got?
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I take a look at how the desire to appear toughest on China is likely to impact the 2024 Republican presidential primary.