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Chinese Spy Balloons—A Massive Hoax

Dr. N. C. Asthana, IPS (Retd)

Fuelled by general, collective ignorance, public excitement forces people to

believe in the impossible, especially when the matter involves some mythical,
“super-secret” technical prowess, whether of our own, or of an enemy nation—
for the simple reason that they know little about complex technical matters.
When we were kids during the 1965 War, we were told in hushed tones by
adults that our army was able to make short work of the famous Patton tanks of
Pakistan easily because our anti-tank mines had something “atomic” in them. Of
course, nobody had any idea what that “atomic” could be. The strength of the
rumour lay in leaving it unexplained so that one’s imagination could run riot.

A similar situation exists in respect of the so-called Chinese spy balloons

recently found drifting over the sky of the USA. A flurry of un-informed,
sensational articles written by journalists who have no scientific credentials or
technical knowledge has added to the confusion and misled people further. As a
scientist, I consider it my duty to dispel the myths by educating the people
properly.

Multimillion Dollar Jets Used to Shoot Hobbyists’ Toys

Since governments are no more rational than laymen, the US establishment

deputed F-22 Raptor fighter jets costing $143 million to fire AIM-9X
Sidewinder missiles costing $400,000 each to shoot down a balloon that could
have cost as low as $842! Hundreds of hobbyists use small weather balloons
and track them for fun.

The Americans shot the first balloon on January 28 off the coast of South
Carolina and the second on February 10 over the skies of Alaska. Within a few
days, they shot down three more unidentified flying objects. To add to the
mystique and to keep the American public excited, the US military wouldn’t
even say that they were balloons. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense
Command) commander, General Glen VanHerck, told reporters. “I’m not going
to categorise them as balloons. We’re calling them ‘objects’ for a reason. I’m
not able to categorise how they stay aloft.” You can see the amateurish attempt
to plant an idea in the minds of the people that the Chinese have invented
something which can fly without any apparent reason or known mechanism.
Martin McKenzie-Murray, associate editor of The Saturday Paper (Australia)
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asks, “Was the White House refusing to explain things, or just incapable
because of its own profound bafflement?”

Confirming that stupidity is both infectious and universal, by February 14 this

baffling phenomenon had spread as far as Eastern Europe. Romania scrambled
jets after spotting something mysterious on radar, although their pilots found
nothing, while Moldova temporarily shut its airspace after sightings of a balloon
near its northern border with Ukraine. Buttressing the stupidity, US officials
said that friendly countries like Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the
Philippines (another official claimed as many as 40 countries) have also been
targeted for several years by China as a “part of vast aerial surveillance
program”. Readers will be amused to note that they did not bother to explain
as to why they had kept mum all these years and not alerted friendly nations?

What Are High-Altitude Balloons

Although the history of crewed high altitude balloons goes back to the 1930s,
they are no longer used for any significant purpose. Un-crewed research
balloons are cheaper and usually carry small packages (say, 3 kg or so) of
scientific instruments for meteorological, atmospheric and climate research, etc.
to heights of 18-37 km, the record being 53 km—to understand it, compare it
with the maximum height of 13.14 km (43,000 feet) at which a modern A380
airliner can fly. The first balloon was shot down at a height of 17.7 km (58,000
feet). Larger balloons can carry much more payload but it does not mean, as we
will show shortly, that they can do something sinister.

SIGINT and the Myths Surrounding It

Interception of analogue radio communication was easy and fun in an earlier

era. Now, decrypting encrypted digital military radio communications of
strategic nature is theoretically possible but demands both time and enormous
computer power—for all practical purposes, they are considered secure. Had it
not been so, national security of great powers would have been severely
compromised, prompting an ambitious nation to launch a pre-emptive war!

SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) comprising Communications Intelligence-

COMINT; Measurement and Signature Intelligence-MASINT; and Electronic
Signals Intelligence-ELINT is an extremely difficult task demanding a large
number of highly sophisticated equipment for intercept, analysis and parametric
exploitation of the signals. The equipment used is huge even when mounted on
a satellite—the USA’s NROL-44 spy satellite launched in 2020, weighs over
five tons! Ground equipment is much heavier than that!
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During a war, by intercepting and analysing signals, for example, it is possible

to work out an electronic order of battle (EOB) by identifying SIGINT emitters
in an area of interest, determining their geographic location or range of
mobility, characterizing their signals, and, if possible, determining their role in
the broader organizational order of battle. SIGINT is a valuable tool for
combating terrorists because their field communications are often rudimentary.
However, in peacetime, a nation is simply not interested in listening to the radio
communications of a colonel or division commander.

According to a RAND study ‘SIGINT for Anyone’, commercially available

SIGINT equipment include maritime domain awareness; radio frequency (RF)
spectrum mapping; eavesdropping, jamming, and hijacking of satellite
communications; and cyber surveillance. They are for enthusiastic amateurs,
however, and not of any use to a superpower like China or the National Security
Agency (NSA) in the USA! To even think so is childish at best and utterly
stupid at worst.

Why the Balloons Could Not Have Been Used For Spying Through SIGINT

The general belief was that the Chinese were spying (that is, collecting Signals
Intelligence-SIGINT) over the USA through those weather balloons. Had it
really been so simple to collect meaningful intelligence from spy balloons,
what was the necessity of spending trillions of dollars/Yuan upon spy satellites
in the first place? Of late, it has become a popular pastime to attribute all sorts
of scientific impossibilities to the Chinese or the North Koreans, as if they have
discovered something beyond the science that we have studied.

A weather balloon does not ‘fly’ in a controlled manner—it just drifts. The US
has the world’s most sophisticated air defence and surveillance network. And
yet, they mean to tell the world that a huge weather balloon could leisurely drift
undetected into their air space and they got no wind of it! Outrageous! The
Americans are claiming that the balloon shot down was about 200 feet tall.
Compare this with the size of a typical ICBM warhead, which is just about four
feet. The ICBM warhead moves at a terrific speed of some 25,000 km/hour
whereas the weather balloon drifts at a leisurely speed of not more than 200
km/hour depending on wind conditions. In that case, what would they do with
the re-entry vehicles of ICBMs-Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles of Russia,
China, or North Korea?

Do they mean to tell the world that, as Frank N. von Hippel (American physicist
and Co-Director of Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton
University) has disclosed; the $280 billion the USA has spent so far on missile
defence has been a waste? If their Early Warning System Radars cannot detect
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a 200 feet balloon, how will they ever detect a four feet warhead? A plea that
they have recalibrated their radars only now is clearly untenable, being a post
facto contrived defence. In the instant case, the Chinese balloon was loitering
for about a week over the United States and Canada before President Joe Biden
ordered it shot down—a week, you must note. If a balloon that large could
loiter in their air space for a week means either the American air defence is a
farce, or they are making a fool of the whole world, including themselves—
both things cannot be true simultaneously!

Nobody asked a fundamental question; WHAT EXACTLY the Chinese could

collect by way of SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) by sending balloons over
USA, which are just being carried away by air currents in an uncontrolled
manner, and not able to fly along a prescribed path or over militarily sensitive
areas or installations? The atmosphere is flooded with a billion types of
electromagnetic signals emanating from all sorts of electronic devices ranging
from mobile phones, Internet, TV sets, laptops, and what not.

It is next to impossible to intercept and filter out anything of interest out of that
unimaginably gigantic volume of electromagnetic junk, and then transmit it to
some base station in the home country thousands of miles away—all from a
small package hung from a balloon with very little power. If that were indeed
possible, we have wasted our lives and trillions sending constellations of
satellites in orbit. In any case, remember that communications of strategic
interest are highly encrypted anyway with the state of art technology—many of
them not even in public or commercial domain and decrypting them is almost
impossible for all practical purposes.

Keep in mind that next to USA (3,433 satellites), the Chinese have the highest
number of active satellites (562) in space—more than even Russia’s (172).
Many of them are what would in common parlance be called ‘spy’ satellites.
These include series of Earth Observation (Yaogan and Gaofen) and
Reconnaissance (Fanhui Shi Weixing and Ziyuan) satellites. In April 2022,
Chinese researchers had admitted that they were using advanced AI systems
that could potentially turn commercial satellites into spy platforms.

With such sophisticated technical resources at their disposal, there is no

reason to believe that the Chinese have fallen into such bad times that they
would be obliged to use 1950s technology for spying! A contrived hypothesis
that balloons are being used because lasers or kinetic weapons could target
satellites is simply ridiculous. It is like saying that because soldiers now wear
bullet proof jackets, they should carry spears or battle axes instead of rifles!
Alexander Neill, a Singapore-based security analyst and adjunct fellow at
Hawaii’s Pacific Forum think-tank also admits that the balloon could be of little
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intelligence value given the far more effective constellation of military and spy
satellites which the People’s Liberation Army has at its disposal now.

Most importantly, the Americans, even after being able to salvage the debris
of the first balloon they shot down, have not disclosed its contents—they
merely spoke of “significant debris”. That is obviously suspicious. If it really
had some “super-secret” spying equipment, it was all the more reason that they
should have shown it to the world so as to ‘expose’ China. After all, many of us
(including the author) have also studied electronics at a very high level and we
must know what is that the Chinese have invented in communications that we
don’t know from scientific publications in the public domain?

James Andrew Lewis of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and

International Studies draws our attention to the fact that there have been no
reports of radio transmission from the balloon. In his words, “Collecting data
but being unable to get it back is a waste of time and money. No signal, no
payload, no spying.”

There is no case that the balloon was not transmitting anything but it would
have dropped its payload by parachute over some part of USA or elsewhere in
the world, where a Chinese spy would have physically collected it—let us not
get into the world of the gossip of laymen on tea stalls or the feverish
imagination of cheap spy-thriller writers that you find on railway station
platforms.

In the light of this, you can understand why all that journalistic talk of the
balloon having been “equipped with an antenna meant to pinpoint the
locations of communications devices and capable of intercepting calls made
on those devices” is pure bunkum.

Even Reconnaissance Photography through Balloons Is Not Feasible

As for the surveillance through aerial photography, anybody who understands

the physics of it must know that you require an extremely stable platform for
reconnaissance photography of high resolution (even if it is moving at a very
high speed like a satellite—but on a rigidly fixed path with no vibration at all)
for the sophisticated cameras to take any worthwhile photos. You cannot take
any photos of value from an intelligence angle from a platform like a balloon
which is wobbling in air all the time, completely at the mercy of air currents and
atmospheric disturbances. In any case, they did not speak of any camera in the
debris of the shot down balloon. Moreover, such sophisticated reconnaissance
cameras happen to be huge. In the USA’s KH-11 optical camera satellites, the
Cassegrain reflecting telescope and the Westinghouse CCD camera were
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housed in some 19.5 meters long and 3 meters diameter body weighing some 12
tons! You cannot pack a $2000 Canon DSLR handheld camera or $300 Made-
in-China DSLR in a spy balloon—these cameras are not designed for
reconnaissance photography!

For intelligence collection, your systems must fly in a controlled manner so that
you can make them overfly locations of your choice (be they military
installations or whatever of strategic interest). You cannot collect intelligence
from a platform that is carried away by winds to anywhere on the planet!

Compounding the Mistake

The Chinese officially regretted the “unintended entry of the meteorological

research balloon into US airspace due to an unforeseen and unintended
outcome”. Still, it was called a ‘violation of American sovereignty’. Dumbness
is so universal that Rep. Jim Hines (D-Conn.) described it as a “Chinese spy
craft’ and said that the US will “learn a lot” from the debris. James Andrew
Lewis agrees, “The most likely explanation is that this is an errant weather
balloon that went astray—lost weather balloons are the basis of many UFO
sightings.”

However, the Americans are so entangled in the sheer illogicality of their claim
of those balloons being Chinese spy balloons that they and their supporters are
now forced to invent more theories, each one being more ridiculous than the
previous one. No one can deny the fact that the US air space is one of the most
closely monitored ones by a host of agencies—including the US civil aviation
authorities, the US air force, the US space force, and the weather networks. It is
therefore absolutely unrealistic to expect that it could be so easily penetrated. A
theory advanced by John Blaxland of the Australian National University is that
the Chinese were indeed expecting the balloon to be caught so as to embarrass
the USA through that. Given that the hysteria led to aggravating the tension
betweent he two countries and strengthening of the hardliners in the USA who
even got the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to China,
this hypothesis is plainly absurd.

It should be obvious that the theory of the Chinese spy balloon is nothing but
a hoax created to whip up anti-China sentiments with the ulterior motive of
justifying many of the USA’s strategic moves, whatever they be. As Dr. Paul
Craig Roberts (formerly United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy) points out, even a poor country like Colombia also, over the
skies of which a balloon had drifted, dismissed it as insignificant posing no
threat whatsoever—but the mighty US whipped up hysteria, and the dumb
world lapped it up. When knowledge punctures excitement built over ignorance,
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it always comes as a disappointing anti-climax, but I expect my readers to

become wiser instead.