The incident took place in February 2023 as Washington scrambled to tackle suspected “Chinese spy balloons”
The Biden administration ordered the downing of a Boy Scout balloon over US soil in February 2023 using a missile worth roughly $500,000 as Washington scrambled a panicked response to alleged “Chinese spy balloons,” the New York Post reported on Saturday, citing former Pentagon officials.
On February 12, 2023, the US Air Force dispatched an F-16 over Lake Huron, near the US-Canada border, to intercept what was believed to be a potential unidentified aerial threat, destroying it with an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The episode was confirmed by declassified cockpit footage released last month by the Department of War as part of its second batch of UFO-related records.
“The F-16 shot at a balloon over Lake Huron. After the [Chinese spy] balloon embarrassment, DOD was shooting at every [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] they detected”, Tim Phillips, a former interim director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told The Post.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of AARO, claimed that the balloon belonged to a Boy Scout group and had been launched on an unspecified research project. “The balloon had circumnavigated the globe eight times before we shot it down with a half-million-dollar missile,” Kirkpatrick explained, as cited by NYP. “You can imagine the response on the Hill when I briefed that.”
The “spy balloon frenzy” kicked off in early February 2023 when a Chinese high-altitude balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina by an F-22 Raptor. Beijing insisted that the craft was civilian, with Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, calling the shootdown “absurd” and in violation of international norms.
Media reports have suggested that there have been several other cases in which the US Air Force swept the skies of civilian US-originated aircraft. According to Kirkpatrick, around the same time, a US fighter pilot reported encountering a UFO with “stealth-like capabilities” and opened fire – but once it was downed, it turned out that he had destroyed a balloon from Walmart, saying “Happy Birthday.”
In February 2023, a hobby group called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade reported the loss of a $12 balloon the same day a US fighter jet downed an unidentified flying object with a missile worth over $400,000.
Following the suspected “Chinese spy balloon incident,” the US military said it had adjusted its radar detection parameters to pick up slow-moving objects it had previously filtered out – a change that inadvertently led to the shootdowns of civilian balloons. In September 2023, CNN reported, citing an intelligence assessment, that China had dialed down its balloon surveillance program after butting heads with the US over the controversy.
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