Is there a plausible explanation as to why the US government has not announced objects 2 & 3 are balloons, if they are balloons? They call them "objects", yet must know what they are. They wouldn't randomly missile unknowns.
If it's for reasons of secrecy, why announce it at all? The second one was in the middle of nowhere, it could easily have been ignored, or dismissed as a military exercise if anyone had made a fuss about it.
They are now saying they don't know how it was staying airborne (no visible balloon or propulsion) and when they approached to observe it interfered with instrumentation.
The Pentagon confirmed this on Sunday, which is why they said they weren't referring to them as balloons. They did hint that it's likely that the balloon part may be within the object itself to obscure its true nature. I don't think they are saying it's aliens, just that a pass by couldn't determine the exact nature of the object.
Because at least the 2nd object wasn’t, it was described as a cylinder about the size of a car which is where all the UFO tic-tac victory mark memes came from.
> One official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion”
> The object, shot down on the order of President Joe Biden, was flying at a high altitude of about 40,000ft and was the size of a small car, the White House said.
Could be they thought it was a balloon originally hence the immediate press conference, but now they've received conflicting accounts from the pilots (some reported experiencing sensor interference for example) so they're not sure what they are anymore.
I know this is Hollywood magic thinking, but in the the spirit of no dumb questions, for an object like this, are there no capture devices besides just letting it crash?
I've had the same question, and it seems like there aren't really.
It's too high for helicopters or rotor drones so there's no kind of aircraft that can get their quickly and just hover next to it and retrieve it. (And sending an airship would be so slow and hard to control I'm not sure you could ever get it to reliably intercept in a reasonable amount of time.)
So since you've necessary got to launch something at speed, the only conceivable capture device would seem to necessarily involve 1) a missile to puncture and deflate the balloon/buoyant part, 2) a giant net to wrap the entire thing, and 3) a parachute attached to the net to let it down gently.
But I can't even begin to imagine how you'd get all three elements working together reliably, rather than interfering with each other.
Helicopters are really expensive and that's the only way I can think of getting a delta V low enough so the device, tether or aircraft doesn't shatter/snap on capture.
But more importantly, it sends a message - don't fuck with our airspace, we won't even send body bags
most plausibly it's because it's a balloon carrying something, not just a balloon, and the bit that is worth shooting down is the bit that's not a balloon.
they said the second object was freely drifting and not self-propelled or guided, so whether it's technically a balloon or just something that behaves like a balloon is kind of irrelevant to anybody who isn't working for whatever government department is tasked with analyzing it.
Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this thread. Just because we shot down a balloon recently everyone on here seems to assume the two new objects are also balloons.
Sure, but those have wings. A cylinder would have to maintain altitude with some kind of thrust. Lets imagine something like a jet engine oriented vertically. How much flight time do you think that could manage?
I don’t personally think that the 2nd object was a drone at least not a traditional aircraft UAV, I just replied to correct the assumption that drones have a relatively short range and low endurance.
Ofc how they perform in reality vs their published specs no one knows.
In the past at least likes of China and Russia tended to inflate the specs that they made public whilst the west tended to keep the real figures hidden and release far more conservative figures especially when it came to things like maximum speed, range and operational ceiling.
If it's for reasons of secrecy, why announce it at all? The second one was in the middle of nowhere, it could easily have been ignored, or dismissed as a military exercise if anyone had made a fuss about it.