I'll offer an uninformed military opinion on some of this

Feb 12, 2023, 3:29 PM

NORAD/Chinese balloon mess...

A couple of days ago I read a statement by the commander of NORAD (GEN VanHerck) where he admitted they weren't seeing these balloons on their NORAD sensors. He called it a "domain awareness gap" which is a fancy military way of saying - we didn't see any of these MF'n Chinese balloons on any of our $trillion dollar, military industrial complex provided, overpriced tax payer gouging systems... This is a really bad admission from the folks that get a shid-ton of taxpayer funding to know about everything, and I do mean "everything", that flies over our airspace (including space junk).

So... I've thought the military's public reason for letting this hunk of Chinese garbage fly over our airspace all of last week was some real weak sauce. The "we don't want to shoot it down 'cause it might land on somebody" sounded like a grade A, prime cut of BS to this old retired military dude. Instead, I've gotta feeling the folks at NORAD wanted to spend a week tweaking their overpriced sensors to learn how to detect these cheap, made in China balloons so that they can close that "domain awareness gap".

This brings me to today - maybe NORAD learned something last week (I sure as #### hope so) and can now clearly see these things. But over the last couple of days it sure has the feeling that NORAD may be finding they tweaked the sensors too much and are now tracking "ghosts" with all these new NOTAMS shutting down half of a State's airspace that are coming out...

Then again - maybe I'm making too much out what may be mere coincidence and normal activity that is now getting a lot of attention.

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If you believe what the NORAD Commander said (and I do

(?) Alleged previous other unrevealed balloon sightings?

because his admission of the "domain awareness gap" is something they would rather not admit) then they didn't know about these Chinese balloons until after the Trump regime had left office.

My understanding is that at some point in the last two years, the intel community informed NORAD that these things had flown over our airspace with some detail as to the time and place (not exactly sure how the spooks found out about it - maybe when farmer Jed looked up and saw one and reported it to the local sheriff). From there NORAD went back in time to see what they had "on file" and discovered some anomalies that at the time didn't register but now they believe to have been Chicom balloons. All of this anomaly discovery was after the fact and just happens they kept digging back in time looking for these anomalies and found some that occurred during the Trump Administration.

So, I don't think anyone was purposefully withholding information at the time - I just think they really didn't know it was happening until recently. That in itself is really bad - especially considering the amount of money we spend every day to know everything that flies over our airspace.