In the last Tacheles broadcast, Robert Stein and I also briefly touched on the subject of the alleged "spy balloon" from China that has been making headlines since February 1. Robert was visibly surprised that I didn't take the topic seriously at all. I still don't, and I have a few reasons for that.
Routine turned into hysteria from February 1.
For example, the fact that the U.S. has been spying on all sorts of countries around the world with satellites and spy planes for decades, which is why it is richly mendacious for the U.S. to be upset about an alleged Chinese "spy balloon" that I defiantly believe to be a simple weather balloon.
But even if it was a spy balloon, it would be a rather unsafe kind of espionage, because balloons are not steerable and therefore cannot be used to spy on a specific area, because it is not even possible to calculate exactly where the high altitude wind will take them when they fly thousands of kilometers.
In addition, such balloon sightings are routine. This, however, is not reported by the German media for all the fuss they make about the subject.
So I do: It was reported from the USA that there have been sightings of Chinese balloons even under Trump, without the US government reacting in any way because of it. The same in Japan, from where it was reported that Chinese balloons entered Japanese airspace in 2019, 2020 and 2021. China, in response to hysteria in the West, has reported that ten U.S. balloons have entered Chinese airspace since May 2022.
And even the White House indirectly admits that this is apparently normal, because when asked by a reporter why the U.S. government is now suddenly reporting so many such sightings, the National Security Council spokesman responded:
"This large number of recent incidents can be explained, at least in part, by the North American Joint Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) adjusting radar sensitivity to detect smaller objects flying slow and high".
In plain language: These things have always existed, they are just increasingly being searched for now in order to report them. The fact that these balloons have always existed is shown by the reports that they were also sighted under Trump, without anyone in the US military being interested or concerned. So the Chinese "spy balloon" that is now being made such a fuss about was nothing new or surprising to anyone at the Pentagon.
Such stray weather balloons are apparently a perfectly normal phenomenon, which begs the question of why such a fuss has been made about them since February 1.
Distraction from the Hersh article?
One could now argue that the Hersh article about the US blowing up Nord Stream was published on February 8, so the reports about the alleged Chinese "spy balloon" from February 1 cannot have anything to do with it. However, this is wrong.
Hersh, as is the duty of a diligent journalist, sent requests to the U.S. agencies involved, for example, the White House and CIA, before completing and publishing his article, informing them of the results of his research and giving them an opportunity for comment. Hersh's article states, for example:
"Adrienne Watson, a White House spokeswoman, responded to a request for comment on this in an email: "This is false and completely fabricated." Tammy Thorp, a spokeswoman for the CIA, also wrote: "This claim is completely and utterly false".
While we don't know exactly when Hersh sent out his requests, it was certainly likely more than a week before publication to give the authorities time to respond and include their responses in the article. This means that Hersh is likely to have sent out his requests before February 1 (his article was published on February 8). So in the U.S. government, they knew there was going to be a bombshell before Hersh's article was published, and they had time to come up with a red herring.
This is speculation, of course, but it would explain why the U.S. government (and the Western media loyal to it) are suddenly making such a hype about balloons that have always existed and that no one has ever been interested in before.
Suddenly even UFOs go
That it concerns a diversion maneuver, one can recognize also by the fact that even media such as the mirror, for which UFOs and extraterrestrials are normally nonsense, which only spinners spread, do not exclude suddenly in isolated articles that it could concern with the objects discovered now everywhere in the sky extraterrestrial UFOs.
Time, in an article titled "'I haven't ruled anything out' US general won't rule out aliens if UFOs show up," even quoted US General Glen VanHerck, who heads the North American Air Defense Command NORAD, as saying that he couldn't rule out aliens as an explanation:
"I'll leave it to the intelligence and counterintelligence agencies to figure that out. I haven't ruled anything out at this point".
Whether one believes in UFOs or not, it is noteworthy that the U.S. military always associates UFOs (i.e., unidentified flying objects) with possible extraterrestrials when there is something to distract from in the media. The most famous example of this was UFO reports from the Pentagon in the 1980s, which were intended to distract from the F-117, the first stealth aircraft in the USA. The aircraft, which looked very unusual at the time, entered service in 1982, but was so secret that its existence was not revealed until 1988. Sightings of the strange aircraft were therefore readily referred to by the Pentagon as possibly extraterrestrial UFOs to distract from the novel aircraft.
Therefore, it stands to reason that the hype about stray weather balloons, which have always existed, is meant to distract from something, especially since now even extraterrestrial UFOs are being brought into play by official US sources. This has led Edward Snowden to write on Twitter:
"they are not aliens
I wish they were aliens
but they are not aliens
it's just the old contrived panic where an attractive nuisance keeps national security reporters busy investigating balloon bullshit rather than budgets or bombings (à la Nordstream)
until next time"
I share the view of Edward Snwoden, because in my opinion the balloon reports are meant to distract from Hersh's article about the Nord Stream blast.
For the sake of completeness, however, I'll go into another theory that's been floating around the net.
The train disaster
On February 3, a train accident occurred near the village of East Palestine in the U.S. state of Ohio, in which 50 rail cars carrying highly toxic chemicals crashed and some caught fire. People complained of headaches and nausea, the village was evacuated, a state of emergency was declared, and there are fears of severe environmental damage, including contamination of rivers and drinking water.
The accident hardly plays a role in the national US media, and German media have also reported on it only very briefly, if at all. As a result, there are rumors on the Internet that the balloons were intended to distract attention from the accident, which is supposedly much worse than reported. Even comparisons with Chernobyl are drawn.
Of course, I don't know if there is an attempt to cover up something in this accident, but I wouldn't be surprised, after all, we experience this all the time. But I can say one thing for sure: If the balloons were supposed to distract from the train accident, then the reports about the balloons would have been around since February 3 or 4, not February 1, so I can't see any connection there.
https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2023/spionageballons-als-ablenkung-von-der-nord-stream-sprengung/?doing_wp_cron=1676422648.7800641059875488281250
(post is archived)