After the Pentagon dispatched fighter jets to shoot down unidentified objects on February 10, 11, and 12 utilizing heat-seeking AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles at over $400,000 a pop, President Biden belatedly admitted that they could just be harmless weather balloons
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” Biden said Thursday. But now an Illinois-based hobby group which uses $12 balloons with ham radios for a cheap high-altitude hobby says the object shot down over Yukon Territory on Feb. 11 likely belongs to them. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden also sees this as the likely scenario…
please tell me the white house did not spend the month of february scrambling jets to fire $400,000 missiles at the local hobby club's TWELVE DOLLAR BALLOON
lord have mercyt.co/4D7DaTncvT
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 16, 2023
A report in Aviation Week profiles the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) to learn that the hobby club’s silver-coated “pico balloon” was last picked up via radio signal on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and that it was projected to float over central Yukon territory the following day. It disappeared around the time and in the general location of the Feb.11 F-22 shootdown of an ‘unidentified object’ ordered by the White House, which grabbed media headlines.
The report began somewhat hilariously enough:
A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.
The Pentagon’s own briefings had described a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it” – and yet still, as the search for debris continues in inclement arctic weather, there’s been no confirmation of exactly what it was shot out of the sky.
www.zerohedge.com/military/illinois-hobby-club-believes-pentagon-shot-down-their-12-pico-balloon