DXing wrote:BOOM! So much for that. The talking heads evidently missed the fact that the intelligence package broke free and dropped like a stone. Won't be much left after it hits the water.
DXing wrote:It seems as if someone is testing what our detection capability is.
DXing wrote:a test of what sort of payload they could sneak in undetected and then figure out what weapon would be the most devastating for that size payload.
DXing wrote:...there are large parts of the world that still know how to live without full time electrical power. I wonder if we are?
Raybin wrote: Here in Germany there are quite a few who even suspect the Americans are behind it.
ShyFlyer wrote: Generally speaking, an area without power for more than a few days, especially if the response to the outage seems chaotic, will start to devolve into anarchy.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., confirmed that the "U.S. military has decommissioned another ‘object’ over Lake Huron."
captoveur wrote:I wish we would stop using a $400,000 AIM-9X that we probably dont have many of in inventory on $500 balloons.
A Louisiana native, Lemoine is a graduate of the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans. After graduating college, Lemoine joined the Air Force Reserve where he flew the F-16 and accumulated one thousand hours including a combat tour in Iraq.
Lemoine later transferred to the Navy Reserve where he flew F/A-18A+ Hornets for four years. In 2018, he transferred back to the Air Force Reserve where he flew the T-38A as an Adversary Air Pilot for four years. He currently flies for a legacy U.S. airline
A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.
The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.
But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.
https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/ ... gIU8WJW0vc
The outlet noted that the shape, altitudes, and payloads of small pico balloons matched the descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down between Feb. 10 and Feb. 12.