Biden expected to publicly address Chinese spy balloon, unidentified objects on Thursday

Protest balloons at Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

President Biden will make public remarks as early as Thursday about the Chinese surveillance balloon and three other objects shot down over the U.S. and Canada in the past two weeks, The Washington Post reports. Biden is also expected to discuss the new guidelines on handling unmanned, unidentified airborne objects the White House is developing.

The U.S. is still examining debris recovered from what it says was a Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. F-22 shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, and U.S. and Canadian teams are still searching for the remains of three aerial objects shot down over the U.S. and Canada Feb. 10-12. U.S. officials told The New York Times on Wednesday that they now believe the three objects were benign weather or research balloons that had stopped working — floating junk — and the Chinese spy balloon blew off course from its mission to spy on U.S. military installations in Guam and Hawaii.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

U.S. officials are so far unimpressed with what they have discovered about the spy balloon, though they say China's spy balloon program is still in the testing phase, the Times reports. Some analysts speculate that the balloons are meant to supplement China's spy satellites and act as a backup if the satellites are destroyed or malfunction. "They have 260 intelligence satellites in orbit," John Culver, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on China, tells the Times. "This can augment that capability."

And China feels pressure to keep up with the U.S., which "typically flies hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, reconnaissance aircraft off their coast every year," Culver adds. "They're frustrated they can't fight back. ... This is a program that has political value to them and has wartime value."

Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.