Good morning. UFOs are being shot down over North America, and one of them is octagonal. OK, that’s a slightly breathless account of events since a Chinese balloon was sighted over Montana 10 days ago, and aliens probably aren’t involved – but the full story is almost as interesting.
After that first balloon was brought down and US secretary of state Anthony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing in response, three other mysterious objects have been taken out in US and Canadian airspace in the last few days – the last of them an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it. The US views them as potential surveillance tools.
China says the first one was a weather balloon, and in any case claims the US does the same thing itself. The US hotly denies it. UK defence secretary Ben Wallace says the UK will conduct a security review of its own airspace in response. Now, as debris from the first balloon is recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, a diplomatic spat that started with literal hot air is floating into the stratosphere.
What on earth is going on here? Are balloons seriously part of the cutting edge of international espionage? And what exactly was that octagon? For today’s newsletter, Dr David Jordan, co-director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute at King’s College London and a director of the RAF Centre for Air and Space Power Studies, helps us towards some answers. The truth is out there, and after the headlines.
Five big stories
Policing | Police missed clear chances to identify Wayne Couzens as a danger to women before he murdered Sarah Everard, it emerged as he pleaded guilty to three offences of indecent exposure on Monday. Witnesses recorded either full or partial registration details of vehicles Couzens used, but the cases were not linked to the then-Metropolitan police officer.
Turkey-Syria earthquake | Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a Syrian rebel leader with a $10m US government bounty on his head, has made an urgent appeal for international aid to Idlib, a province in the north-west under opposition control. Meanwhile, Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad has agreed to open two border crossing points with Turkey to allow more emergency aid to the regoin.
UK news | The family of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old from Warrington who was stabbed to death on Saturday, said her death “has left a massive hole in our family”. They described Brianna, who was transgender, as “strong, fearless and one-of-a-kind”, and thanked the public for their support.
Israel | Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem to protest against legislation introduced by the country’s hard-right government aimed at overhauling the judicial system. The changes, which give politicians greater control over the supreme court, could help prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoid conviction in his corruption trial, in which he denies all charges.
Fan safety | Uefa bears “primary responsibility” for the catastrophic failures that turned last season’s Champions League final into a horrific experience for thousands of supporters, the organisation’s own review has concluded. The report found no evidence for claims that Liverpool fans were at fault.
In depth: What’s behind the stratospheric attempts to protect US and Canadian airspace?
Shortly after he left work on 1 February, Chase Doak spotted a mysterious white orb floating far above him. He decided to film it. “I am sitting in my driveway here in Billings, Montana … and this thing is up in the sky,” he said, in a video that went viral. “And I have no idea what it is.”
Three days later, after identifying the orb as a Chinese surveillance balloon, the US shot it down. A week after that, last Friday, the US shot down another flying object off the coast of Alaska. On Saturday, a US jet acting on US and Canadian orders shot down another over Canada’s Yukon territory. On Sunday, that aforementioned octagonal thing was shot down over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border. (Leyland Cecco reports on local residents’ utter bafflement.) And overnight, the US military said it had recovered "significant debris” (pictured above) from the first incident.
Dr David Jordan, an expert in air power and defence, has not previously been asked to give an interview about balloons. “The military use of balloons hasn’t gained much attention recently,” he said. “But it’s fair to say, no pun intended, that it probably goes on under the radar.”
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Why is the US suddenly spotting so many UFOs and balloons?
While it’s quite exciting to imagine a sudden abundance of mysterious objects prowling North American skies, part of the explanation is comically prosaic: it looks like the US has just turned up the radar a bit.
Melissa Dalton, the US assistant secretary of defence, said on Sunday: “We have been more closely scrutinising our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects.”
That doesn’t really clear up whether this is a new problem or something ongoing that nobody’s been monitoring, though. “It might be a bit of both,” Jordan said. “It’s entirely understandable they haven’t been looking for them because you pick up so much other stuff like hobby drones, weather balloons – you get to a stage where it’s a bit, ‘Is it a bird, is it a plane?’ (Here’s a fascinating piece by Jonathan Yerushalmy explaining the problem of ‘sky trash’.)
“But if you start to think – hang on, are we in a situation where a potential adversary is using these craft to conduct surveillance based on knowing it’s written off as clutter, they will want to go back and check. If it turns out it’s been going for a while, they will leave the filters turned off.”
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Why might they be useful?
Balloons are useful tools for gathering intelligence, in part because they can stay in one place more easily than a satellite. “They help you maintain a fairly persistent surveillance capability,” Jordan said. “And you can launch them relatively covertly. A satellite launch is going to be detected – there’s not much to stop you letting a balloon off.”
While satellites will remain the dominant means of collecting intelligence on what’s going on on foreign soil, they have downsides. “The Chinese have used dazzling lasers to block them,” Jordan said. “And the Americans know when satellites are passing over sensitive locations – so you get a window when you’ll be out of sight.”
On the other hand, as James Lewis of the US thinktank the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out in this global overview of the use of the “poor man’s satellite”, balloons have issues of their own. “They go where the winds take them,” he said. “I’m surprised the Chinese would resort to it ... Why not just send a guy in a campervan to drive around?”
That might suggest a motive beyond pure intelligence. “It may be they’re sending a message – saying look, your vaunted air differences can’t stop us flying things over your territory,” Jordan said. “If it’s that sort of cunning wheeze, it has a limited lifespan, but it might still have been good while it lasted.”
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Is China the only country doing this?
It’s worth noting that only the first object has been definitively attributed to China. On Monday, Beijing accused the US of flying its own balloons over Chinese airspace more than 10 times since the beginning of last year. While the US flatly denies that claim – and it seems surprising that it would only come up now - it is certainly true that China is not alone in seeing potential in their use.
The US has significantly increased its investment in balloon projects: it went from spending $3.8m over the last two years to more than $27m in 2023, Politico reported – a marginal sum against the vast defence budget, but still a big change.
The UK is also developing its own programme. The Ministry of Defence’s 2021 tender for a £100m contract, Project Aether, said the UK was seeking to strengthen its capacity for “Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance using Stratospheric Uncrewed Air Systems.”
Even so, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Chinese claim of US operations in its airspace are true. “My gut feeling is that it’s unlikely,” said Jordan. “You can pick up an awful lot of information from international airspace.”
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What was that octagon, then?
There have been conflicting views from US officials over whether the objects sighted over Yukon and Alaska can be categorised as balloons, with little detail beyond the admirably specific line that they are about the size of “a Volkswagen Beetle”. None of that explains the “octagonal structure” shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on Saturday.
Part of the giddy fascination prompted by that incident was the result of a response from General Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), to a question about aliens: “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.”
Yikes! Other defence officials hastened to add that, er, there was no evidence of aliens. So WHAT WAS THE OCTAGON?
Part of the mystery is the result of the fact that the only sightings were from fighter jets travelling past at hundreds of miles an hour, the White House noted yesterday. Jordan doesn’t know for sure, but he has a fun speculation, drawing on the example of the Coléoptère, an ill-fated French experiment in wingless flight from the 1950s: while no propulsion system was detected, it’s not impossible this was a high-end drone.
“It would be very unconventional,” he said. “ but even without wings an octagon could have an aerodynamically viable system with an engine piloted remotely – that would be sophisticated, but not revolutionary.” Again: probably not aliens, though.
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Is North American airspace really what’s important here?
Probably not. While the subject has come to the fore because of what started in Montana, balloons may be a more pressing issue in Taiwan, as part of preparation for a possible future Chinese invasion.
On Sunday, the FT reported (£) that dozens of Chinese military balloons had been observed over Taiwan in recent years, with the most recent just a few weeks ago.
Such operations are far more militarily relevant, Jordan said. “They want to fatigue Taiwan’s response – but they don’t want to add fatigue to their own. If the Taiwanese feel they have to intercept it, you probe their defences, you inflict attrition, you work out their response times and their tactics and procedures. So that is a more significant development.”
What else we’ve been reading
Ruth Michaelson and Lorenzo Tondo have a devastating report from north-west Syria, where the earthquake “has compounded layers upon layers of humanitarian crisis in Idlib”. They speak to Mohammed Hadi (above), whose wife died along with two of their five children after she ran back inside their home to try to save them. Archie
Jedidajah Otte spoke to the people who have gone part-time, after realising that they are better off if they cut down their working hours, and asks what the implications are for a shrinking UK economy. Nimo
Stuart Heritage compiles 27 great tricks from professional chefs to make your own dinners seem a little more restauranty. Why has nobody told me to put a teabag in my curry until now?? Archie
Interweaved with the story of her courtship with her husband, Andee Tagle’s piece in the Atlantic (£) explores the enduring magic of mixtapes. “The gift of music curation is powerful, a love language to be wielded with care,” writes Tagle. Nimo
After scenes of violent disorder outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Knowsley on Saturday, Diane Taylor writes about the problem of inflammatory rhetoric coming from the government itself: “The government needs to extinguish its anti-asylum-seeker rhetoric before the situation becomes too out of control to be reined in.” Archie
Sport
Football | Czech Republic international Jakub Jankto came out as gay in a social media video, becoming the most prominent current male footballer to come out publicly. Jankto (above) said he wanted to “live my life in freedom without fears, without prejudice, without violence, but with love,” adding: “I am homosexual, and I no longer want to hide myself.”
Cricket | England trounced Ireland at the T20 Women’s World Cup, bowling their opponents out for 105 before reaching their target for the loss of six wickets. Meanwhile, seven players picked up contracts in the inaugural Women’s Premier League in India, including a £320,000 deal for Nat Sciver-Brunt, likely making her the best-paid female team athlete in the UK this year.
Football | Liverpool triumphed in the Merseyside derby, beating Everton 2-0 thanks to goals from Mohamed Salah and Cody Gakpo. For Liverpool, writes Jonathan Liew, “the hopeful reading is that this comfortable win against their favourite opponents can restore a little of the old swagger”.
The front pages
The Guardian leads with “Police missed chances to arrest Couzens as sex offender suspect”. The Metro carries tributes to stabbing victim Brianna Ghey: “Strong, fearless, one of a kind”. The i has “Hunt urged to boost defence spending – or risk failing to deter Putin”, while the Daily Mail says “Rishi: RAF are ready to shoot down spy balloons”. More surveillance worries in the Daily Telegraph: “Police use of Chinese drones ‘risks UK security’”.
The Times has “Exposed, the secret plot to sink tougher sewage rules” while the Daily Express warns “Millions face maximum council tax hikes”. “Cost of living it up” – the Sun is angry on our behalf that an energy company sent 100 “reps” on a Maldives jaunt. The lead story in the Daily Mirror is “M25 road rage killer claims: I’m not a threat to victim’s lover”. Top story in the Financial Times today is “Overseas bets on Vodafone mount as Liberty Global takes £1.2bn stake”.
Today in Focus
Why anger is growing in Turkey a week after catastrophic earthquakes
It’s been an agonising time for survivors in Syria and Turkey – especially those whose relatives and friends are still trapped under rubble
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Suzy Morrison had been working since she was 15, but money always disappeared quickly: “I couldn’t keep hold of it,” she says. “I never learned how to save money.” Morrison developed addictions to alcohol and other substances, holding down a job and raising two children while also funding her dependency by selling drugs. In her late 30s, though, Morrison joined a 12-step recovery programme. But while her life transformed in many ways, her dysfunctional relationship with money did not change. So in 2012, after a lifetime in debt, she joined Debtors Anonymous when she was 61. Ten years later, she is debt-free and works as a counsellor, giving Addiction 101 workshops and webinars. Her life could not look more different. Morrison says she is more self-assured than ever. “I’m at ease in my own skin,” she says. “There’s none of that fraud or impostor thing. Becoming easy in my skin feels like a radical act.”
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