Chinese balloon censors recovered from ocean, US says
Conrad Hoyt
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The United States says it has recovered key sensors from the suspected Chinese spy balloon just over a week after the Navy sent divers down to salvage the wreckage.
Search crews found “significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified,” the U.S. Northern Command said, per BBC News.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE UPTICK IN MYSTERY OBJECTS BEING SHOT DOWN FROM US AIRSPACE
The Pentagon announced the salvage operation on Feb. 4 after the balloon was shot down. U.S. officials have been interested in recovering the wreckage in order to assess China’s spying capabilities and see if the balloon used any U.S. technology, an official familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The government expected to find advanced sensors and high-quality photographic equipment, he added.
China has denied that the balloon was for spying purposes, adamantly claiming instead that it was for monitoring the weather and just happened to drift off course. The U.S. has since shot down three more aerial objects over its own air space or Canada’s, but there have been no links to them being Chinese.
Navy sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 worked to prepare the material recovered off of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and transport it to the FBI to be investigated, per the Associated Press.
The Pentagon has revealed that several Chinese balloons have made incursions over the U.S. in the past few years. The recent uptick in aerial objects being found and shot down over the U.S. is in some part due to increased tracking ever since the suspected spy balloon was found and shot down, according to Melissa Dalton, the assistant defense secretary for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs.
President Joe Biden has faced severe scrutiny for his administration’s delay in shooting down the Chinese balloon as it traversed across the continental U.S.