Press: Not the first hostile balloons hanging overhead

No matter how powerful a country we are, we have the disadvantage of being downwind. That makes us sitting ducks for an invasion of unmanned, floating aerial objects from Asia.  

A Chinese spy balloon, first spotted 60,000 ft. over Alaska on Jan. 28, sent the entire nation into a panic — until it was shot down off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4. Five days later, in a rare show of bipartisan resolve and a vote of 419-0, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning China’s “brazen violation of United States sovereignty.” 

But that’s hardly the end of the story. Since then, at least three more unidentified flying objects have been blasted out of the sky. On Friday, Feb. 10, President Biden ordered a balloon with a car-sized payload flying at just 40,000 ft., shot down after it violated U.S. airspace over Alaska. The next day an unidentified flying object over Canada was destroyed by orders of Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And on Sunday an unidentified octagonal object hovering at 20,000 ft. was shot down over Lake Huron. 

Holy Moly! That’s three UFOs in three days, or four unidentified objects shot down in two weeks. By the time you read this, there may be still another one. Or two. And that’s on top of a recent government report that cited 144 cases of unidentified objects flying over U.S. territory between 2004 and 2021. 

As of this writing, because it’s so hard to retrieve debris from such remote locations, we don’t know whether those three most recent objects shot down were also launched by the Chinese government. Nor whether the sudden flurry of unidentified object spotting is the result of an increase in traffic or an adjustment of U.S. surveillance technology. Hopefully, the latter.  

But no matter how troubling its cause or origins, historians are quick to point out that this isn’t the first time the United States has experienced an invasion of hostile balloons from an Asian adversary. During World War II, Japan launched about 9,300 military balloons into the jet stream, of which more than 300 ended up over Canada and the United States, some as far east as Detroit. And these balloons were even more dangerous — because they carried bombs. 

The Japanese military developed their balloon strategy in retaliation for the bombing of Japan by U.S. planes in April 1942. Their goal was to freak out the American public by starting huge forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. But they failed on both goals. Damp conditions prevented any major fires from breaking out, and Americans didn’t panic over the prospect of bombs dropping from balloons because they never knew about it. The government ordered a total news blackout, warning news outlets that reporting on Japanese balloons over the United States would amount to “aiding the enemy.”  

Not until after the war did Americans learn that six civilians had been killed by a balloon bomb in May 1945, near Bly, Ore. — the only victims of World War II killed on American soil. 

In a big contrast with today’s missives from China, to this day only a few hundred of the Japanese balloon bombs were ever found. Most of them are still unaccounted for. As reported by NPR, the last known was discovered by forestry workers in British Columbia in October 2014. 

Bottom line: Balloon warfare and surveillance are nothing new. We’ve seen both before, we’re apparently seeing them now, and we’ll probably see both again. Keep your “eyes to the skies.”  

Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”