China Preparing To ‘Shoot That Thing Down!’

312
Credit: Ronan Furuta/Unsplash

According to Chinese official media, authorities in China are getting ready to shoot down an unidentified flying object that is now over Shandong Province. Even while it’s not immediately evident who the flying item may belong to, since the U.S. military shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon a little over a week ago, all nations are now viewing the skies with greater caution, as reported by Forbes.

A heated discussion

“Local maritime authorities in East China’s Shandong Province announced on Sunday that they had spotted an unidentified flying object in waters near the coastal city of Rizhao in the province and were preparing to shoot it down, reminding fishermen to be safe via messages,” China’s state-controlled Global Times said in a tweet Sunday morning.

A port city on the Yellow Sea, Rizhao is located in Shandong Province, nearly midway between Beijing to the northwest and Shanghai to the southeast. South Korea is direct to the east of us.

After a week of the balloon traversing the nation, the U.S. shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4. The 200-foot-tall balloon was originally observed near Alaska, then it passed through Canada and down into Montana. The U.S. military shot it down when it ultimately drifted over the Atlantic Ocean after being discovered by citizens close to Billings and spending the remainder of the week travelling the continental U.S.

The flight of the balloon sparked a heated discussion over why it wasn’t shot down sooner in the United States, with Republicans claiming President Donald Trump would never have permitted such a thing to happen. Nevertheless, it frequently did, including over delicate military installations in Virginia and California.

Shoot that thing down! 

However, our UFO explorations continued when a new object was discovered and shot down on Friday in Alaska’s far north. Then, on Saturday, another floating thing was discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory by the joint fighter jet patrols of NORAD, a cooperation between the United States and Canada. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, gave the order to shoot that thing down.

A joke that would be awful if it had the remotest chance of being true has suggested that perhaps at least some of these flying objects could be alien spacecraft from another planet.

However, it appears much more plausible that all these aircraft shooting downs are simply the norm during the New Cold War between the US, the UK, and Canada on the one hand, and China, Russia, and Iran on the other.

Sudden breaches 

And after the initial shootdown last weekend, it’s likely that both sides are now more concerned about the idea that very low-tech aircraft can breach sovereign nations’ boundaries without their knowledge.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that “the breaches in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. source said, partly resolving a crucial question of why so many objects have suddenly surfaced.”

We essentially opened the filters, the unnamed defence official told the Post. “That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary,” the newspaper continued.

 

Did you subscribe to our newsletter?

It’s free! Click here to subscribe!

Source: Forbes