The United States on Monday bluntly rejected accusations of balloon espionage launched by China, and is also trying to unravel the mystery of the three unidentified flying objects it has shot down in recent days.
“That’s not true! We don’t do that! This is absolutely not true! “, Hammered on Monday the spokesman for the National Security Council of the White House, John Kirby, interviewed by the MSNBC channel.
“Since last year alone, American balloons have flown over (the territory of) China more than ten times without any authorization”, had previously assured a spokesman for Chinese diplomacy, Wang Wenbin.
The US State Department estimated that China was trying with this accusation to “limit the damage” linked to its own “spy balloon program”, deployed according to Washington for several years above 40 countries in five continents.
The ball and the “objects”
Relations between the two superpowers have been significantly strained since the United States shot down a Chinese balloon on Saturday, February 4, which had flown over their territory, while trying, according to them, to glean information from military sites.
False, assures Beijing, which has recognized the ownership of the machine but speaks of a weather observation program and an involuntary violation of the airspace of the great American rival.
China made the same claim on February 6, this time about a balloon flying over Latin America.
The Americans, on the other hand, have not pointed to China so far about the three mysterious “objects” they shot down in three days: Friday above Alaska, Saturday above the Yukon in the north- western Canada, and Sunday over Lake Huron in the northern United States.
Of what must be called “unidentified flying objects”, Washington says he knows nothing or almost nothing: neither their origin, nor their use, nor their nature. The only assertion on the American side: none presented a direct military threat, but they potentially endangered civilian air traffic, hence President Joe Biden’s dispatch of fighter planes to eliminate them.
Extraterrestrial
In the land of “ET” and “X-Files”, this thick mystery fuels all speculation. General Glen VanHerck, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said he had “not ruled out anything at this stage” when the press asked him Sunday about a possible extraterrestrial origin, a sentence immediately went viral.
Chinese media reported on Sunday that an unidentified flying object had been spotted off China’s east coast and the military was preparing to shoot it down.
The Americans are now busy, with the Canadians, to find and analyze the debris of the objects destroyed over the past three days, some of which have fallen on frozen seas or in remote regions.
A few items have filtered out. The first two “objects” destroyed were the size of a small car – while the Chinese balloon itself was as big as three buses – and flew at 12,000 meters. The one destroyed in the Yukon was, according to Ottawa, “cylindrical” in shape.
Then the Pentagon described the aircraft destroyed on Sunday as “octagonal”, without a nacelle, moving slowly at an altitude of 6,000 meters.
“Fleet”
For the United States, it is clear that China maintains or has maintained a veritable “fleet” of spy balloons.
The Americans have also taken a volley of sanctions against companies and research structures contributing, according to them, to the military modernization of China, which has qualified these measures as “illegal”.
China has repeatedly castigated the use of force to destroy its balloon and refused a phone call after the incident between US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his counterpart Wei Fenghe.
But on Sunday, the Pentagon assured that contacts had resumed between the two countries, which compete for economic, technological and strategic domination of the world.
On the American side, the case could take a delicate turn for Joe Biden.
The Republican opposition, ironic, welcomed that the 80-year-old Democrat now has the “easy trigger”, she who accuses him of having waited too long to lower the Chinese balloon with which it all started. But the right is calling on the president, who has not yet really spoken on this subject, for more “transparency” on the objects slaughtered since Friday.