Second device shot down by US fighter jets...

[Rickkins]

U.S. shoots down ‘high-altitude’ object over Alaska




The United States shot down a “high-altitude” object as it flew over  Alaska  near the northern Canadian border on Friday, White House officials confirmed amid ongoing concerns over Chinese surveillance balloons flying over North America.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby would not say if the object was a balloon or what entity owned it. He said the object, about the size of a “small car,” was flying at 40,000 feet and posed a “reasonable threat” to civilian aircraft.

President Joe Biden gave the order to shoot down the object “out of an abundance of caution” and at the Pentagon’s recommendation, Kirby added.

The incident came a week after U.S. and Canadian officials first confirmed a Chinese surveillance balloon had flown over Canada and across the continental U.S. over the course of several days. The balloon was ultimately shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.

Kirby said the object shot down Friday was “much, much smaller” than the Chinese balloon and was not carrying a “significant payload.” Efforts are underway to recover the object.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Friday, Defence Minister Anita Anand did not say Friday where the earlier balloon was when it first entered Canadian airspace, or what locations it passed over and for how long it was over Canada before heading south.

The U.S. navy and coast guard are working to recover pieces of the downed balloon for analysis and they’re working to determine if it collected any intelligence from either country, Anand said.

The balloon’s sighting has reignited tensions between the U.S. and China and raised renewed fears of foreign surveillance and interference by Beijing.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/unknown-object-u-s-shot-down-over-alaska-was-heading-into-canadian-airspace-sources-1.6269000


Moderator edit: insert reference link.

 

[Big Data]

This doesn't bode well for America. When our borders are not respected by anyone what do we expect? Our coast lines are open targets for any and all who wish to enter. Our southern border is absolutely non-existent by design from our own government. Our northern border is just as at risk as the southern border except Washington seems to be more afraid of Canadians and Americans crossing than the violent masses pouring in from the south.

China has no qualms about openly violating our sovereignty. Why should they? They own much of our country. Hollywood, banks & insurance and even massive tracts of our farmland in the plains and fertile valley of California. They control our consumer markets because they are the only supplier we use. We stripped our manufacturing base and sold it to China for miniscule fractions of a penny on the dollar. Now they own us and we can do nothing about it. They will take Taiwan and we can't stop them. They don't need to take America. They will continue to control us and we can't stop it because our politicians are too deep in their pockets too.

The good news is the prospect of a civilization ending event that some scientists and journalists believe likely. A bombardment from space in the form of city size meteor fragments. So it's all good. Nothing to really worry about.

In the meantime I believe we should force China's hand. Openly violate their sovereignty (as if we don't already) by flying our "Blackbirds" over china all day everyday. Let them shoot down one of our spy craft. Then see who's chicken.

I got off track just a little bit but I brought it back to course in the end.

 

[toxicweasel]

Genuine question.

Does this even counts and violations since aircrafts can't fly that high from I know? I mean, why would you even use balloons when you have satellites for spying..... and tiktok.

 

[Kath]

Genuine question.

Does this even counts and violations since aircrafts can't fly that high from I know? I mean, why would you even use balloons when you have satellites for spying..... and tiktok.

Well that's a good thought, but anything entering a foreign country's air space is considered undesirable.  It must be investigated and removed.  Satellites are able to see what's happening most of the time, but.. they only circle the globe every 90 minutes, that's a lot of gaps. 

As far as I'm concerned, any foreign object flying over another country.. should be removed quickly.

 

[Kath]

And what about the Dart project.. Something else to think about!!!

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) investigation team shows the spacecraft's kinetic impact with its target asteroid, Dimorphos, successfully altered the asteroid’s orbit. This marks humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology.

“All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it’s the only one we have,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us. NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet. This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and all of humanity, demonstrating commitment from NASA's exceptional team and partners from around the world.”

Prior to DART’s impact, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. Since DART’s intentional collision with Dimorphos on Sept. 26, astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. Now, the investigation team has confirmed the spacecraft’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, shortening the 11 hour and 55-minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes. This measurement has a margin of uncertainty of approximately plus or minus 2 minutes.

Before its encounter, NASA had defined a minimum successful orbit period change of Dimorphos as change of 73 seconds or more. This early data show DART surpassed this minimum benchmark by more than 25 times.  

“This result is one important step toward understanding the full effect of DART’s impact with its target asteroid” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As new data come in each day, astronomers will be able to better assess whether, and how, a mission like DART could be used in the future to help protect Earth from a collision with an asteroid if we ever discover one headed our way.”

The investigation team is still acquiring data with ground-based observatories around the world – as well as with radar facilities at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Goldstone planetary radar in California and the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. They are updating the period measurement with frequent observations to improve its precision.

Focus now is shifting toward measuring the efficiency of momentum transfer from DART’s roughly 14,000-mile (22,530-kilometer) per hour collision with its target. This includes further analysis of the "ejecta” – the many tons of asteroidal rock displaced and launched into space by the impact. The recoil from this blast of debris substantially enhanced DART’s push against Dimorphos – a little like a jet of air streaming out of a balloon sends the balloon in the opposite direction.

To successfully understand the effect of the recoil from the ejecta, more information on of the asteroid’s physical properties, such as the characteristics of its surface, and how strong or weak it is, is needed. These issues are still being investigated.

“DART has given us some fascinating data about both asteroid properties and the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor as a planetary defense technology,” said Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The DART team is continuing to work on this rich dataset to fully understand this first planetary defense test of asteroid deflection.”

For this analysis, astronomers will continue to study imagery of Dimorphos from DART’s terminal approach and from the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), provided by the Italian Space Agency, to approximate the asteroid’s mass and shape. Roughly four years from now, the European Space Agency’s Hera project is also planned to conduct detailed surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos, with a particular focus on the crater left by DART’s collision and a precise measurement of Dimorphos’ mass.

Johns Hopkins APL built and operated the DART spacecraft and manages the DART mission for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency's Planetary Missions Program Office. Telescopic facilities contributing to the observations used by the DART team to determine this result include: Goldstone, Green Bank Observatory, Swope Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the Danish Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network facilities in Chile and in South Africa.

Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos poses any hazard to Earth before or after DART’s controlled collision with Dimorphos.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space

 

[Merlin]

Canada and U.S. Scramble Jets to Take Down UFO, Trudeau Says

by Allison Quinn

Updated Feb. 11, 2023 5:56PM ET / Published Feb. 11, 2023 5:15PM ET

ANOTHER ONE?!

“A U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” according to the Canadian prime minister.

An American fighter jet shot down an unidentified flying object over Canada on Saturday afternoon, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced.

The news came shortly after the North American Aerospace Defense Command warned of a “high-altitude airborne object” flying over Northern Canada.

“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Trudeau said in a statement on Twitter.

“Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” he said, adding that Canadian authorities will now “analyze” the wreckage.

It’s the second object shot down over North American skies in the past two days. On Friday, the White House announced that an unidentified object posing a “reasonable threat” was shot down over Alaska. The Pentagon has largely been tight-lipped about that incident, saying only that the object was about the size of a small car and was unmanned at 40,000 feet.

Northern Command offered an update on Saturday, saying it had “no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose, or origin.”

Earlier this month, on Feb. 4, a U.S. fighter jet took down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina after it spent several days traversing across the country.

In recent weeks, a string of flying objects have been spotted over various countries in the Western Hemisphere, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and China.

China eventually acknowledged the existence of the balloon shot down last week, but claimed it was of a purely “civilian nature” and had been blown off course by unexpected weather conditions.

The fallout from the discovery led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel an upcoming trip to China intended to cool relations between the two superpowers, which have exchanged increasingly hostile rhetoric in recent months.

In the days following the sighting of the first balloon, other similar objects were reportedly spotted in the skies over Costa Rica and Colombia. China claimed these balloons also had no intelligence-gathering function.

Recent intelligence has revealed a larger Chinese airborne surveillance effort, which saw the country using the giant inflatables to snoop everywhere from Europe to Southeast Asia.

Trudeau said he has been in contact with President Joe Biden and that the U.S. is collaborating with Canada on a recovery effort.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/canada-and-us-scramble-jets-to-take-down-ufo


**************************************************************************

Have we stepped into an X-Files episode? Where are these objects appearing from? Thin air? The military must know the origin of these things or what good are any of their early warning systems? I mean for God's sake what's going on here?

Reading between the lines it seems the Chinese balloon spy object and the 2 car sized non-balloon objects may not be the first spy-in-the-sky objects the gov't has dealt with. Why are they telling us about them this time? What has changed? Are we near some trigger point with another country? Russia? China? Little green men from Orion?

The timing is ominous in my opinion. They know a lot more than they are sharing with us. That's why the timing feels so doomy. The secrecy only increases suspicion.

 

[toxicweasel]

Simple answer probably is - they are always there and are most likely weather survey balloons.

Smells like distraction operation, same as ufo(uap) last year. Who uses balloons for spying, for real? it's not 1950.

 

[Kath]

Be careful of the 'oh this is OK because it's just a weather balloon'...but is it? Why have they never drifted over this area before or observed before?

Just check it out, it's not normal.

 

[Big Data]

The Chinese “weather ballon” was acknowledged by the People’s Republic of China government as one of theirs. It may or may not have had a covert mission. But the other “objects” dominating the news are planted distractions to steer the news away from embarrassing events and the People’s Party of America is hiding them. The latest three objects shot down were large balloons and anyone with a brain should recognize them from the cockpit photos and their lack of any equipment or devices and their behavior.

Like a magic trick. The art of distraction.

 

[toxicweasel]

Be careful of the 'oh this is OK because it's just a weather balloon'...but is it? Why have they never drifted over this area before or observed before?

Just check it out, it's not normal.

That's what you assume, do you think that they do weather surveys only above China? Do you think that states do weather survey only above the US? This distraction is needed so badly that they started talking about aliens.

 

[Kath]

Have you ever heard the saying 'beware of Greeks bearing gifts'?

Do you know where that comes from?  Probably not!  So I'll tell you, the story is in Greek Myth. the Trojan Horse.

Britannica Quote

Trojan horse, huge hollow wooden horse constructed by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy during the Trojan War. The horse was built by Epeius, a master carpenter and pugilist. The Greeks, pretending to desert the war, sailed to the nearby island of Tenedos, leaving behind Sinon, who persuaded the Trojans that the horse was an offering to Athena (goddess of war) that would make Troy impregnable. Despite the warnings of Laocoön and Cassandra, the horse was taken inside the city gates. That night Greek warriors emerged from it and opened the gates to let in the returned Greek army. The story is told at length in Book II of the Aeneid and is touched upon in the Odyssey. The term Trojan horse has come to refer to subversion introduced from the outside. Beginning in the late 20th century, the name “Trojan horse” was applied to deceptively benign computer codes that seem like legitimate applications but are written to damage or disrupt a computer’s programming or to steal personal information.

My point is..

Beware of innocent looking things, they may not be as innocent as they appear.  Just be aware and alert. *wink*

WHY DON'T THEY TEACH THIS STUFF IN SCHOOLS ANYMORE, IT'S AN OBVIOUS WARNING FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS?

 

[Gregorius]

The Latin phrase written by Virgil in the second book of the Aeneid is "timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" (beware of Greeks bearing gifts).

Excuse the Latin quote.
But after studying this ancient language fruitlessly in school for many years, I could not resist the temptation to write down the quote that an old Latin teacher of mine used to say.

 

[Kath]

Seems I am not alone in my suspicions.  Thanks Gregorius. Don't trust anything, even if it's familiar.  If it does unusual things... Look at it more closely.

 

[Gregorius]

Seems I am not alone in my suspicions.  Thanks Gregorius. Don't trust anything, even if it's familiar.  If it does unusual things... Look at it more closely.

An old Italian proverb states, " Fidarsi è bene, na non fidarsi è meglio!" (to trust is good, to not trust at all is better!)

 

[Kath]

My thought too Gregorius, question everything!... I know some of those balloons will be weather info  based, but, what if a similar 'larger' one was collecting info for a whole different reason... It would seem innocuous when we are expecting to see a weather balloon.  Be alert, think laterally, think 'what if'. Expand your mind, move away from the norm... start to think 'why' and who will gain from this?

 

[Gregorius]

My thought too Gregorius, question everything!... I know some of those balloons will be weather info  based, but, what if a similar 'larger' one was collecting info for a whole different reason... It would seem innocuous when we are expecting to see a weather balloon.  Be alert, think laterally, think 'what if'. Expand your mind, move away from the norm... start to think 'why' and who will gain from this?

I fully endorse your speech. Well said!

 

[toxicweasel]

So, is distraction operation over? Funny how these things come and go in and out of the news cycles.... now hop to the next thing.