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An unnamed congressional aide claims the object was shaped 'like an octagon.' Sounds like BS, but you'd like to think the Wall Street Journal has some capacity to to identify and filter quality sources.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/latest-flying-objects-shot-down...




Schumer came out and said each of these objects was a balloon of some sort.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/12/latest-2-objects-shot-down-by-...


This was denied as being known by the military presser, and the general involved also made the ridiculous claim that they shot it down entirely to prevent an accident to civilian air traffic.


At 20k feet, that's solidly in the middle of everyday commercial air traffic.


Understood, but is it reasonable to say that any car sized balloon floating at 20k ft is now worthy of a military response?


If it’s occupying airspace illegally, without a license to operate or a flight plan, without any means of control or contract, where it might become a deadly obstacle to legitimate air vehicles?

Who else but the military would enforce that kind of thing? The cops?


No I’m saying we seemed to live in a world where this was tolerated without incident literally until this week.


I'd like to think my congresspeople hire aides that have some capacity to identify and name shapes correctly. It's not unreasonable that something with an octagonal cross-section could also be described as cylindrical - from a distance it could be hard to tell, or one description was intentionally a bit vaguer.


I guess if you're going to suspend a solar panel / sensor array below a balloon you can do worse than an octagon...


An octagon is a standard shape for a radar reflector, which are frequently attached to balloons to make them more visible to aircraft:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-seen-using-radar...

https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...


That is an octahedron, not an octagon


Why does that sound like BS? That's a fairly standard drone shape.


Why bother with quality journalism and concrete sources when the average American can’t read a book at the 8th grade level?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...


This is being widely reported, and Rep Bergman also said this




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