A mysterious balloon from China has been shot down over the United States. The Chinese insist the balloon was simply weather monitoring and strayed off course, while the US appears to believe its purpose was reconnaissance.
US intelligence officials believe the Chinese spy balloons were part of a massive surveillance program being run by the Chinese military, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.
The surveillance program, which includes a number of similar balloons, is being run in part in China's Hainan province. The US does not know the exact size of China's reconnaissance balloon fleet, but sources say the program has conducted at least two dozen missions on at least five continents in recent years.
About half a dozen of those flights entered US airspace. Then, not every balloon seen around the world is the same model as the one shot down off the coast of South Carolina. So, there are many variations of the scout balloon.
On the other hand, in a government laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, an elite FBI team will examine the recovered remains of the balloon, trying to learn everything possible about the intelligence and figure out the best way to track such surveillance balloons in the future.
Sources said officials wanted to understand as much as possible about the balloon's technical capabilities including what kind of data it could collect, what satellites it was connected to, and whether it had any vulnerabilities that the US might detect.
Investigators will be studying what signatures they emit to see if there is a better way for the US to track such balloons in the future. The commander of the US Northern Command, General Glen VanHerck, admitted to reporters on Monday that the US had in the past missed sightings allowing previous balloons to cross into US airspace undetected.
It will also be found out whether the balloon is transmitting the data it collected in real time to the Chinese military or whether the device has stored data to be retrieved once China gets it back.