Chinese balloon flying over the U.S. a ‘brazen’ act, says analyst

To me, this is new and this is brazen, what we at least saw with that first Chinese balloon. Again, I think there's still uncertainty about what those other three objects were. But hey, nation's spying on each other. Balloons have been used for years to collect weather information, to do research. What's particularly brazen about what we've seen over the last week is that first balloon, it's a pretty big balloon. 200 feet, 20 stories tall equipment underneath it that's been reported to be the size of two to three buses. That's hard not to miss.

And when it's being flown directly over the American heartland and violating sovereign airspace, that's a big deal. There's some really fascinating stories about this kind of aerial reconnaissance aspect in the Cold War when you're talking about the Soviet Union. You know, looking at the US and vice versa. The US was doing all kinds of wacky things like spoofing electronic signals to see if the Soviets would lock on to us. And if they did, what types of signals were they using? Can we intercept those signals? This is a big part I mentioned, drones in Vietnam. A big part of what drones were doing was not just taking pictures, they were doing that too. But they would fly into an enemy radar, purposely get it to lock onto them so they could see how good do we have to fly? How detectable does our aircraft have to be for the Soviet defenses to be able to see us?.

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