US found critical electronics and key sensors in Chinese spy balloon wreckage

The U.S. military said Monday that had recovered critical electronic components from the Chinese spy balloon shot down by a United fighter jet off South Carolina on February 4, including key sensors presumably used for intelligence gathering.

“The teams were able to recover important remains on the site, including all identified priority electronic sensors and components, as well as large sections of the structure,” U.S. Army Northern Command said in a statement.

The Chinese balloon, which Beijing denies being a government spy device, spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before President Joe Biden ordered it to be demolished. The episode strained ties between Washington and Beijing, prompting the US secretary of state to postpone a trip to China.

Also led the US military to search the sky for other objects missed by radar, leading to an unprecedented three casualties in the three days between Friday and Sunday.

The US military and the Biden government have recognized that much is still unknown about the latest droneslike how they stay in the air, who built them, and if they may have collected any intelligence.

The military said targeting the latter objects was more difficult than shooting down the Chinese spy balloon, given the smaller size of the objects and the lack of a traditional radar signature.

As an example of the difficulty, the last downing of an unidentified object on Sunday by an F-16 fighter required two Sidewinder missiles – after one of them failed to hit the target, said a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The White House on Monday denied Beijing’s accusations that the United States sent balloons to fly over China for surveillance purposes, as tensions between the two superpowers escalated.

“Any claim that the US government uses surveillance balloons over the PRC is false.”said on her Twitter account the spokesperson for the National Security Council, Adrian Watson.

“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence gathering, which it has used to violate the sovereignty of the United States and more than 40 countries on five continents,” he said. he added in this network.

Early Monday, Beijing claimed that ‘American balloons’ have entered Chinese airspace ‘more than 10 times without any permission’ since early last year.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin did not offer details about the alleged US balloons, how the episodes were handled or whether they had military or government ties.

(With information from Reuters)

Continue reading: