If the Chinese government was telling the truth and the balloon was nothing more than an “unmanned civilian airship” out of control due to force majeure, the result is exactly the same. It is also the same result if the Chinese lied and the balloon was a military intelligence operation.

And if American officials lied, hid what they knew about the balloon's mission, the conclusion remains the same: the balloon revealed to the enemies of the United States the fundamental weaknesses of the United States' war against Russia and China. . ; and also to American allies in the Ukrainian battlefield, Japan, Korea, Canada and Australia to see for themselves.

The public record is slow to be released on what exactly happened when the giant balloon entered the airspace between the Russian Kuril Islands and the American Aleutian Islands; then entered US territorial waters and made landfall over Alaska, then Canada, then the United States again.

Published maps available in US media have all been distorted by projections and estimates based on weather data and observations reported to the press by people on the ground.

Precise data on flight path, speed, electronic signals to and from the airship and evidence of control (or lack of control) over its operations are military secrets – American, Chinese, Russian.

However, it is not necessary to open them to draw several conclusions. For the moment, and in the absence of more evidence, the following is a handful of certainties validated by the probabilities.

This is the test that American juries do to convict in cases of fraud.

The first certainty is that the balloon was detected by US military and civilian trackers long before it reached US territorial waters off the Aleutian Islands (Alaska).

read the article