On Friday evening, the Pentagon confirmed that a 2nd Chinese spy balloon was “transiting Latin America.”
“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America,” said Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder to journalist Alex Ward. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon.”
It is unclear where in Latin America the balloon was spotted.
The Pentagon said it does not believe the spy balloon over Latin America will make its way to the United States.
Biden refuses to shoot down the China spy balloon making its way across the United States.
The high-altitude surveillance balloon is hovering over the US’s most sensitive military installations with Joe Biden’s approval.
US Pilots are now reporting the Chinese spy balloon is floating a few thousand feet above them.
Initially, it was suspected that the spy balloon was surveying nuclear sites in Montana. However, some are now saying that the spy balloons could be a test trial for a potential EMP attack in the future.
From the Washington Examiner:
Spy balloons, used by Japan to drop bombs during World War II, are now far more sophisticated, can fly at up to 200,000 feet, evade detection, and can carry a small nuclear bomb that, if exploded in the atmosphere, would shut down the grid and wipe out electronics in a many-state-wide area.
The threat of balloon-launched electromagnetic pulse attacks was warned about by a congressional EMP commission and inside the military several years ago.
In a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security.
“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report.
“A high altitude balloon could be designed, created, and launched in a matter of months. There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude,” he added.
On Friday, he told Secrets, “China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted.”
