Following the national focus on the Chinese spy balloon, people have been paying special attention to UFOs in US airspace. The US Air Force shot down three unidentified objects in the sky a week ago, though it wasn’t immediately clear what these objects were.
According to a report published on Thursday by Aviation Week, the objects could have been a pico balloon from an Illinois-based hobby club that was recently declared “missing in action.”
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) reported that its silver-coated globe-trotting balloon’s last known position on February 10 was at 38,910 ft off the coast of Alaska.
The balloon is expected to be flying high over the central Yukon Territory on February 11, the same day that a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down a similarly described object at a similar altitude in the same area.
The Air Force shot down three unidentified objects that matched the description of a small pico balloon, which would cost between $12 and $180 depending on the type.
The two Sidewinder AIM-9X missiles fired at the potentially harmless floating balloons cost a total of $400,000.
Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), which manufactures pico balloons for hobbyists, educators, and scientists, suspected that the unidentified objects were such balloons and attempted to warn the United States government about the potentially embarrassing situation that would arise if they shot them down.
“I tried contacting our military and the FBI – and just got the runaround – to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are,” said Meadows. “And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down.”
“I’m guessing they were probably pico balloons,” said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer who currently has three pico balloons in flight.
However, after allowing a Chinese spy balloon to fly across the entire United States gathering data on the country’s military and missile sites, the Biden administration couldn’t risk further backlash for inaction and chose to shoot the objects down.
According to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, all three of the objects “could simply be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” and they “have no specific reason to suspect that [the objects] were conducting any kind of surveillance, [NSC] couldn’t rule that out.”
